Northern Virginia Fine Arts Festival Preview Party- Friday May 14

Northern Virginia Fine Arts Festival Preview Party
Friday, May 14, 2010

Greater Reston Arts Center

12001 Market Street

Suite #103

Reston, VA 20190

703.471.9242

www.restonarts.org

BEAUTIFUL / Virginia Women Artists and the Body

BEAUTIFUL

Virginia Women Artists and the Body

Victoria F. Gaitán

Elissa Farrow Savos

Elizabeth Menges

Bernis von zur Muehlen

April 29 – June 11, 2010

Opening Reception: Saturday, May 1, 5 – 7 pm

Greater Reston Arts Center

12001 Market Street, #103

Reston, VA 20191

also

Women Artists and the Body: A Moderated Dialogue

with The Pink Line Project’s Philippa Hughes

Tuesday, May 25, 7:30 pm

Greater Reston Arts Center (GRACE) presents BEAUTIFUL: Virginia Women Artists and the Body, an exhibition that explores the complexity of physical beauty through the works of four Virginia based artists. Photographers Victoria F. Gaitán and Bernis von zur Muehlen, painter Elizabeth Menges, and sculptor Elissa Farrow Savos illuminate private moments, cultural expectations, disfigurement, and the transience of beauty manifested in the human form.

BEAUTIFUL is part of Virginia’s 2010 statewide event MINDS WIDE OPEN: Virginia Celebrates Women in the Arts. The celebration includes thousands of special events and programs offered between March and June of 2010. Events include plays, choreography, compositions, and exhibitions of paintings, photography or films created by women or featuring women as the primary focus. This celebration is an unprecedented collaboration of hundreds of participating artists and cultural organizations and is a demonstration of the breadth and diversity of arts and culture across the Commonwealth. It is the first of what the cultural community hopes will be an ongoing series of statewide collaborations shedding light on topics of interest to the people of Virginia.

http://www.restonarts.org 

Call for Entries / gaps

Greater Reston Arts Center, in collaboration with Initiative for Public Art Reston (IPAR) and the Washington Sculptors Group (WSG), is pleased to present a juried exhibition of three-dimensional sculpture, installation, video and new media from June 25 through August 14, 2010.

Juror Vesela Sretenovic, Curator for Modern and Contemporary Art at The Phillips Collection, will select indoor and outdoor works that explore the theme of "gaps" as in-between states, stops, or pauses.

Click here http://www.restonarts.org/Exhibitions/gaps.htm for a full prospectus. Deadline for Entries is March 31, 2010.

Focus Exhibiitons: Joseph Barbaccia / Craig Kraft / Judy Southerland

Joseph Barbaccia: Currents
Craig Kraft: Unintentional Drawings
Judy Southerland: Borderland
 

January 9 – February 20, 2010
Opening Reception, Saturday, January 9, 5:30 – 7:30 pm
Gallery talk at 6:30 pm

Greater Reston Arts Center presents three Focus Exhibitions: Currents featuring Joseph Barbaccia’s fantastical, sequined sculptures, Unintentional Drawings comprised of Craig Kraft’s experimental, neon sculptures, and Judy Southerland’s mixed media, narrative prints in Borderland.

Currents, Joseph Barbaccia’s aquarium-like installation, takes the viewer on a deep sea dive into a dazzling underworld filled with magical creatures. Six glittering, biomorphic sculptures are set in a dimly lit, dark-green gallery. Their names, Praise, Ridicule, Happiness, Suffering, Loss, and Destruction, refer to six of Buddhism’s eight worldly concerns. While traditional teaching advises one to avoid these concerns, Barbaccia’s shimmering surfaces and erotic shapes make the effort nearly impossible.

Nationally recognized neon sculptor, Craig Kraft, departs from his iconic linear forms in a bold experimental project, Unintentional Drawings. Reducing his palette to shades of blue, Kraft expands the limits of neon by transferring his seemingly random doodles into drawings made of light. "Unintentional Drawing I", a free-standing eight-foot tall sculpture, features words like a commercial neon sign but it uses them in a haphazard way, as though the drawing was first conceived on the back of a napkin. Both "Unintentional Drawings II" and "III" continue the random, scribbling theme but as smaller, wall-mounted works.

Borderland, the title of Judy Southerland’s exhibition of mixed-media prints, refers to both her intention and her process. “To make a picture, I start with the space in-between,” she reveals. Southerland’s “in-between” is often an open field, a blue sky, or an empty wall. Into these nebulous places she combines human gestures with other images estranged by time and style. Gradually, like the artist’s laborious process of developing each screen-print, a narrative emerges.

Greater Reston Arts Center
12001 Market Street Suite #103
Reston, VA 20190
Gallery Hours: Tuesday through Saturday 11am-5pm
703.471.9242

The 18th Annual Northern Virginia Fine Arts Festival

Saturday & Sunday May 16 – 17, 2009
10am – 6pm daily, rain or shine

at Reston Town Center
225 of the Nation’s Accomplished Artists,
Live Music, Cirque-tacular, Children’s Art Tent, and more!

Greater Reston Arts Center announces the 18th annual Northern Virginia Fine Arts Festival on Saturday, May 16 and Sunday, May 17 from 10 AM to 6 PM both days, in the heart of the renowned Reston Town Center. The top-rated Northern Virginia Fine Arts Festival is expanded this year with 225 fine artists from across the nation and the first-time appearance of CIRQUE-TACULAR™ ! The Northern Virginia Fine Arts Festival is the largest outdoor art festival in the Washington metropolitan region and is rated as “the top fine art festival on the East Coast” by ArtFair SourceBook.

AWARD WINNERS – 2009 Excellence in Contemporary Art, Northern Virginia Fine Arts Festival
The finest artists of this year’s festival have been selected in advance, thanks to the advantages of digital judging. The ten award winners are: Barbara Cieslicki of Plainfield, NH – Jewelry; Rob Greene of Marshfield, VT – Jewelry; Mary Lynn O'Shea of Weybridge, VT – Wearable Art; Rasa Pranckunaite of Astoria, NY – 2D: Mixed Media; Gary Stretar of Spencer, OH – Oil & Acrylic Painting; Mark Sudduth of Cleveland Heights, OH – Glass; Heinrich Toh of Kansas City, MO – Printmaking; Kurt Walrath of Beaver Dams, NY – Glass; Candone Wharton of Daytona Beach, FL – Ceramics; R. Michael Wommack of Langhorne, PA – Drawing & Pastels. The award winners will be showcased at the festival on May 16 and 17, and at the Festival Preview Party, Friday, May 15 at Midtown Terrace, Reston Town Center. For ticket reservations, $50 per person, call GRACE at 703-471-9242. Space is limited!

The Northern Virginia Fine Arts Festival is produced by and benefits Greater Reston Arts Center (GRACE), a not-for-profit visual arts organization. General festival admission is open to the public. A voluntary donation of $5 for individuals and $10 for families is requested. Plenty of free parking in six garages at Reston Town Center.

The 18th Annual Northern Virginia Fine Arts Festival is presented and sponsored by Fidelity Investments, Reston Town Center Association, Volkswagen, Reston Community Center, and Northern Virginia Magazine.

For lists of this year’s artists, entertainment, and full event details, visit www.restonarts.org, or call GRACE at 703-471-9242.

The Chittlin' Circuit Review

May 9 - June 14, 2008
Narrative Paintings on the History of the Blues
by Washington D.C. artist and muralist, Rik Freeman

Opening Reception: Friday, May 9, 6-8pm
An Evening with Rik Freeman, May 21, 7:30pm

iJam: Teen Night Friday, May 30, 6:30 - 8:30pm

Art with a Twist: A Chittlin' Circuit Juke Joint,
Thursday June 5, 7:30 - 9:30pm

Artist-Led Family Workshop Saturday, June 7, 10am

Through a sweeping series of vivid, action-packed paintings, the artist follows an imaginary character through the history of blues music and the turbulent social conditions surrounding him. Each narrative derives from the artist’s imagination but alludes to historical events beginning in the 1880’s when Jim Crow laws were enacted throughout the South. At that time, barred from whites-only venues, African-Americans developed alternative places to perform and enjoy music – a network of clubs and juke joints called the Chittlin Circuit.

Rik Freeman began his series about this famous circuit in the early 1990’s. To date he has completed twenty-five paintings ranging from intimate portraits of bluesmen to complex scenes depicting crowds of people in places as diverse as woodland clearings, juke joints, and jazz clubs. After its exhibition at GRACE the series will tour to other venues around the country, on its own Chittlin Circuit.

Freeman is a well-know muralist with large-scale projects at prominent metropolitan Washington sites including the Arlington County Courthouse and the D.C. Convention Center. In The Chittlin Circuit Review, Freeman draws on his mural painting talents, inserting characters into lively settings, rich with historical references.
As the first stop on the exhibition's two year tour, GRACE will also present a short film by Andrea Tree documenting a studio visit with the artist. An exhibition catalogue is available with an essay by Johanna Halford-MacLeod, Executive Director of the Franz and Virginia Bader Fund.

Greater Reston Arts Center
12001 Market Street, Suite 103
Reston, VA 20190
Tel: 703-471-9242
info@restonarts.org