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Morris Graves Museum Exhibitions
The Sculpture of Dan McCauley
December 1 - August 25 Artist and welder Daniel McCauley of Dan’s Custom Metals learned the art form and technique of welding as a child in his grandfather’s machine shop. “I was always up there and got interested because I could take raw materials and make something,” McCauley says. McCauley’s scrap art is created with material he nds in scrap yards. The artist’s work is nothing if not sustainable. Turning objects that would otherwise end up in a land ll into things the community can gather around and enjoy is the essence of recycling. He also mimics nature’s art, as he builds realistic and life sized mountain lions and bears. McCauley also hopes by sharing his work he can encourage other people who dream of doing art to embrace their hopes and work to see their own pieces in the public eye.
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20 Years: The Victor Thomas Jacoby
Award, December 8 - January 27 Victor Thomas Jacoby was a local artist whose medium was French tapestry. He was internationally renowned for innovation in his eld. When Jacoby passed away in 1997, he left a generous bequest to set up a fund with Humboldt Area Foundation, which would support visual artists and craftspeople, and encourage the exploration of new ideas, materials, techniques, mediums, images, and excellence. Celebrate the 20th Anniversary of the Victor Thomas Jacoby Award and view the work of over 20 artists that the award has supported. The works of these grantees will be showcased alongside Jacoby’s tapestries and sketchbooks from the HAC Permanent Collection.
Chris Motley: Feelings in Fiber
January 5 - February 17
Chris Motley’s sculptural forms use knitting in a unique way. She takes a familiar medium and expands its possibilities, using texture, color and dimension to explore universal themes.
Often her sculptures tell personal stories. “Slice of Life,” like a tree, has a ring for each year of her life. “Living Alone” is about her Mother’s rst year as a widow. “Up, Really Down and Up Again” re ects the changing moods of our daily life. Widely familiar in its usual functional form, knitting in her art brings the technique up to date. Motley has received wide recognition and critical praise for taking the craft of knitting and elevating the process into the realm of contemporary sculpture. Paul Flippen: 36days, January 5 - February 24
I lost my father to a stroke his third day in the hospital.
He didn’t die for another month.
Thirty-six drawings of pen and ink layered over eroded surfaces of paint weave in and out of thirty-six text panels that detail my relationship with my father and my reactions to his passing. Shifting from crisp scienti c renderings to the atmospherics of memory, the words and images navigate one account of modern medicine meeting family history. Humboldt Collects, February 2 - March 17
Why are we a nation of storage units, packed basements, and reality TV shows about hoarding? Humboldt Collects presents extraordinary collections from Humboldt County residents, exploring the fascinating practice of collecting. Celebrating the intrinsic beauty and insightful stories found within the collections and the people who make them, this show examines how the items we collect inform notions of who we are as individuals and a community.
Nicole Havekost: Massed
February 23 - April 21
Nicole Havekost’s exhibition includes works from her Sewing and Cooking Doll series. This body of work was begun when her son was small and she was nding her way as a new mother. Since, the sewing pattern paper of the dolls surface has inspired new works exploring the body in a group of embroidered works and stitched three-dimensional forms.
Youth Arts Festival- Celebrating Humboldt County Youth in Visual and Performing Arts
March 2 - April 14
The Morris Graves Museum of Art in partnership with the Humboldt County O ce of Education proudly presents the Youth Arts Festival; a celebration of student creativity in visual, media, and performing arts. This exhibition features various styles of visual artworks in both traditional and communication media created by Humboldt County preK-12 students in their public and charter classrooms during the 2018-19 school year. The exhibition highlights the promise of equity and access in quality arts education for all students preK-12, in every school, every day, made real by Humboldt County’s Arts Education Plan.
28th Annual Images of Water Photography Competition & Exhibition
April 3 - May 12
Celebrating years of creative visions of water, this annual competition highlights the inspiring beauty of water. From images of lakes and streams to ice-cube trays and snow, Images of Water is a fun, theme-based show to take part in or to just take a look at. Open to all photographers, this is an exciting opportunity for all to become involved in the arts on the North Coast. Pat Durbin: Picture this... April 20 - May 26
Pat Durbin is inspired by the beauty of creation. Many of the art pieces are large and most re ect the places in and around Humboldt County. The familiar medium of fabric and thread are her tools. She uses them to build works of art that bridge the gap between ne art painting and traditional quilting. Pat’s style is to complete a pictorial fabric piece by machine
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Iquilting it with many threads which add depth and texture to her work. O Divine Providence, April 27 - June 2 Divine Providence features selected photographs, works on paper, and sculptures by three artists that N each explore what it means to own and exploit a landscape. As a national debate rages over public control of land and resources, the Lee Running, S Meredith Lynn and Nicole Jean Hill are interested in fundamental questions about how a struggle for dominance has impacted the current relationship to a sense of place and environmental stewardship in the American West. The artists grapple with the physical and cultural remnants that point to the struggle for power and mythmaking that molded the national character of western expansion. The works question the impact of this violent relationship to the natural world and critique a narrative that was written by men and glori es a decidedly masculine relationship to the environment. Ian Carey: Blunder-Bus, May 18 - June 30 This current body of work is a result of my re ections on an often confusing and absurd world. A world that beyond any existential belief is created by the actions and inactions of all those involved. I believe that my use of painting and drawing strategies is akin to thinking out loud. The process of making helps me to navigate my interaction with an extraordinarily complex and con icting world. The
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visual language that exists within my work embodies my perception of human activity that mimics our current reality. If the free use of gestural marks at one time suggested an internal struggle likened to the musicality of jazz, I believe the intermingling of a painterly and aggressive visual dialogue now represents the progressive attitude of what could be called punk.
Wesley Hurd: The Odyssey of These Days
June 1 - July 7
Wesley Hurd’s painting series, The Odyssey of These Days, explores intimate depths of loss, struggle, grief and hope. The paintings present an abstract visual narrative evoking the intensity of human su ering and our journey beyond it, into hope.
According to Hurd, “This series of abstract paintings formed an unexpected narrative in three movements: shock and struggle, loss and grief, and nally memoriam and acceptance of loss. Rather than focusing on the social, political and ideological, I am interested in how we form meaning from life experiences – good and bad, pleasurable and painful.” The tragic shooting at Oregon’s Umpqua Community College in 2015 occurred in the midst of the making of this work, deeply in uencing the nal two paintings.
Miya Hannan: Layered Stories
June 8 - July 14
For the last 13 years, I have been working on installations, sculpture, and drawings that are driven by my cultural perception of death. After working for a hospital and experiencing death for seven years, I came to view the world as layers and linkages of histories. This exhibition “Layered Stories” depicts this view. Every dead person becomes a part of our land both physically and spiritually, creating rich histories around us. In my home county Japan, people inherit the histories of the land where they live. Whatever happened and whoever died underneath one’s feet become a part of one’s own story. I am interested in stories buried beneath the present layer.
Nishiki Sugawara-Beda: Spirit of the Day
July 6 - August 11
Spirit of the Day is an attempt to highlight an oftforgotten engagement in contemporary society—a deeper connection with their own spirit. The paintings present a moment of this spiritual engagement through mindfully cultivated marks on the surface. Sumi-ink brings out subtle and nuanced shifts in values and highlights a myriad of layers so that viewers may get lost in them and nd their core of shared humanity and the core of their humanity.
Laura Corsiglia: Points of View: Everything Happening All at Once
July 13 - August 25
Point of View: Everything Happening All at Once is a use of drawing to explore wildness, belonging and reciprocity – to notice our participation in a deepening network of points of view. The exhibition is made of large drawings on paper, an installation inviting viewers to enter with their faces, an immersive piece made of light and artist books.
Lida Penkova: Dreams of Far Away Places
July 20 - September 1
My show will present a selection of some of my favorite black & white and hand colored linocuts, canvases and painted driftwood sculptures created in the last 8+ years. My art works are memories of di erent cultures, their customs, ceremonies, myths, as well as honoring their artists and artisans. I lived and traveled in some of them, have studied and admired others.
My inspiration comes from self-taught artists of aboriginal Australia, Mexican and Nepalese villages, Inuit communities, from Irish and Indian festivals, etc. They all tell stories re ecting their everyday life, religious beliefs and folk celebrations. Last, but not least, Humboldt County, my home of the last 11 years, has inspired my later pieces. (Exhibition sponsored by Lucy Quinby)
Lynn Beldner & Steve Brisco: Asking the Same Question Twice
August 17 - September 29
We decided to exhibit our work together as a way of sharing with others what it means to lead a creative life together. Amidst the domestic regularity there is always the question of art and the discussion of what we are working on. Our work is always installed together in our home and is in conversation with each other across time and media. In the more formal environment of the museum we are showing works that represent the work of the past 10 years and hope that the conversations can still be heard.
Jack Sewell: Dance Like Nobody is
Watching, September 7 - October 27 “You’ve gotta dance like there’s nobody watching, Love like you’ll never be hurt, Sing like there’s nobody listening, And live like it’s heaven on earth.” — William W. Purkey
The process of creating art is di erent for every artist, but the urge to create is common to all of us who call ourselves artists. Sculpture, especially gure sculpture, is my most compelling means of artistic expression. Conditions of the human predicament are easily conveyed using the human gure. My work can show beauty, grace, movement, struggle or humor, all aspects of the human condition. I use sculpture to illustrate particular moments of life. The time that I spend creating these images is intense, stimulating, thought provoking, frustrating, and ultimately, rewarding.
This collection depicts people dancing as if they are free in the moment. I enjoy watching dancers: the focused concentration of the professional, the practiced grace of a couple moving seamlessly together, and the wildly free movement of the street dancer. My dancers are children and adults, moving to their own rhythm, as each of us must do in life.
Junque Arte: 25 Years!
October 5 - November 25
Designed to celebrate artistic creativity on the North Coast, and heighten the awareness of renewable resources in the art making process, each artwork in this juried exhibition is made from 100% recycled materials…reclaimed, reused, recovered, secondhand, salvaged, anything un-new! This year’s juror is Dan McCauley from Dan’s Custom Metals. (Exhibition sponsored by Linda Wise & Recology Humboldt County)
HAC Member Exhibition
November 2 - December 15
The Annual Humboldt Arts Council Member Show is a juried exhibition designed to highlight the fabulous art being produced by HAC Artist Members. As always, this exhibition is eclectic, surprising and enjoyable.
Through Humboldt Fog: Atmospheric Watercolors of the North Coast Landscape
November 30 - January 12, 2020
Jim McVicker, Steve Porter, Jody Bryan, Ken Jarvela and Paul Rickard, also known as the Humboldt Open Air Watercolor Painters, are inspired by direct on-location painting. From the windswept beaches to the mountaintops, the artists meet weekly to paint the mundane and the magni cent in an association of friendship and artistry.
