Humboldt State University First Street Gallery presents, Golden States of Grace: Prayers of the Disinherited, a photo documentary exhibition by Rick Nahmias.  This acclaimed traveling exhibition of black and white photography aims to give image and voice to nearly a dozen virtually invisible communities on California's religious landscape. Golden States of Grace will run from February 1st through March 3rd.  
  
California has long been sanctuary to people of myriad religious faiths - those in the mainstream as well as those existing on the fringes of society. While conventional middle class religion is widely visible, rarely seen are the sacred worlds of marginalized groups: the outcasts, the fallen, those society has labeled as "other" - those for whom religion was arguably first formed, but who now worship as a means of finding refuge or of forging community where they would otherwise have none.

Golden States of Grace, created by acclaimed photographer and writer, Rick Nahmias, documents groups ranging from a transgender gospel choir, to San Quentin inmates who have converted to Zen Buddhism, to a branch of the Mormon Church created by and catering to the Deaf, to a halfway house for recovering Jewish addicts. Each participating community in the project represents a different denomination, different part of the state's geography, and different ethnic group.

From 2003-2006, Nahmias examined the question: "How are spiritual individuals who live outside the mainstream of an increasingly fundamentally faith-based society, finding place, meaning and community in their lives?" To do this, he spent time documenting those who, because of world events, society's prejudices, or their own actions, have been all but silenced.

Merging art, humanities and theology, Golden States of Grace will bring together the personal and collective histories of spiritual groups from Santa Rosa to San Diego who, consciously or not, are reinventing time-honored modes of worship and ritual and pushing their respective traditions into the 21st century. With Golden States of Grace, Nahmias wants to provide more than a window to view diverse religions and lifestyles - he hopes to encourage his audience to "see the 'us' in 'them.'"

"Rick is extremely skilled at entering communities, winning people's trust, and capturing the spirit of a place and its people. His photographs share the triumphs, joys, and anguish of his amazingly diverse subjects, and offer us captivating images of overlooked residents of our golden state." says Lois Ann Lorentzen, Ph.D., Director of The Religion and Immigration Project at the University of San Francisco, which along with The Pew Charitable Trusts and The Kurz Family Foundation supplied seed grants to the project.

The exhibition will run from February 1st through March 3rd, 2013. HSU First Street Gallery is open Tuesday through Sunday, noon to 5:00 p.m. and is located at 422 First Street, Eureka, California. Admission is free and those planning group tours are encouraged to call ahead at (707) 443-6363 or visit ricknahmias.com

A weekend of exhibition-related events, presentations and symposia will commence on March 1st: 

KEYNOTE SPEECH - ARTIST'S TALK

Rick Nahmias will present a slide show and discuss his approach to documenting marginalized communities at prayer in their own faith traditions.

Free to the public, all participants are welcome.
Date & Time: March 1, 2013. 5 p.m.
Place: Room 102, Art Department Building, Humboldt State University Campus,
intersection of B Street and Laurel, Arcata, CA

RECEPTION FOR THE ARTIST, RICK NAHMIAS

Public Reception and Book Signing 
A closing reception and book signing for the artist will be held at HSU First Street Gallery where Rick Nahmias will be present to meet the public and to sign his book, Golden States of Grace: Prayers of the Disinherited. The book was named Best Religion Book of 2012 by the Arizona-New Mexico Book Awards.
Free to the public, all participants are welcome.
Date & Time: Saturday, March 2nd, 2013, 6 - 9 p.m.
Place: Humboldt State University First Street Gallery, 422 First Street, Eureka, CA 95501

SYMPOSIA

The public is invited to participate in a weekend of free related talks and presentations, March 2 - March 3. For additional information contact Dr. Sara Jaye Hart, 707-601-6619 or sarajaye@gmail.com 

Religion and Social Action Symposium

Following an informal, coffee and bagel reception, local community leaders, authors, activists, and HSU faculty from related fields will present talks and lead discussions on a range of issues addressing the role of both individual belief and faith communities in motivating programs of social change.
Detailed schedule: To Be Announced.

Free to the public, all participants are welcome.
Date & Time: Saturday, March 2nd, 2013, 9:30 a.m.
Place: Native American Forum, BSS Building, Humboldt State University Campus, Union Street at 16th Street, Arcata, CA.

Believing, in a Place - A Symposium

Local religious leaders, authors, and activists will join HSU faculty and students to consider how place influences faith, how a community's material environment helps to shape its worldviews. Detailed schedule: To Be Announced.

Free to the public, all participants are welcome.
Date & Time: Saturday, March 3rd, 2013, 11 a.m.
Place: Native American Forum, Behavioral & Social Sciences Building, Humboldt State University Campus, Union Street at 16th Street, Arcata, CA. 

RELATED EXHIBITIONS

Collaborate, Create, Communicate

Opening on Valentine's Day 2013, The Reese Bullen Gallery hosts Collaborate, Create Communicate, an exhibit of collaborative artworks by members of the HSU community created around the thematic elements of acceptance, diversity, tolerance and inclusion.

Free to the public, all participants are welcome.
Place: Reese Bullen Gallery, Art Department Building, Humboldt State University 
Campus, intersection of B Street and Laurel, Arcata, CA.
Dates & Times: February 14 - March 14, 2013, Monday - Wednesday, 12-5 p.m. Thursday, 12-7 p.m. Friday, 12-5 p.m. Saturday, 10 a.m.-2 p.m.
Opening Reception: Thursday, February 14, 4 - 6 p.m.  
Contact: Michele McCall-Wallace, Gallery Director, 707-826-5814,
rbg@humboldt.edu
   

Fixing the Earth: NOW!

Fixing the Earth: NOW sheds light on the traditional tribal practice of healing the earth through World Renewal Ceremonies. The exhibit highlights an on-going dialogue about World Renewal and art between the artists, cultural leaders and community members.

Free to the public, all participants are welcome.
Place: Goudi'ni Gallery, Behavioral & Social Sciences Building, Humboldt State 
University Campus, Union Street at 16th Street. Arcata, CA.
Dates & Times: February 21 - April 27, 2013, Monday - Wednesday, 12-5 p.m. 
Thursday, 12-7 p.m. Friday, 12-5 p.m.
Opening Reception: Thursday, February 21, 5 - 7 p.m.  
Contact: Michele McCall-Wallace, Gallery Director, 707-826-5814, rbg@humboldt.edu  

The Golden States of Grace exhibition and related programs are funded in part by generous support from the Humboldt State University Instructionally Related Activities Fund, the Humboldt State University Loyalty Fund, the HSU Center for Indian Community Development, an HSU Office of Diversity and Inclusion Program Grant and by generous donors in our community.

These exhibitions and programs are a collaborative project by Humboldt State's Department of Religious Studies, Art Department and HSU First Street Gallery. Special thanks are extended to Dr. Sara Jaye Hart, Professor Michele McCall-Wallace, Jack Bentley, Dean Kenneth Ayoob, Provost Robert Snyder, President Rollin Richmond and to Dr. Harry Wells.

Humboldt State University First Street Gallery is pleased to present, Forest Invisible, a solo exhibition by photographer Young Suh, on display from October 4th through November 3rd, 2013. The exhibition will feature photographs that examine the tradition of landscape as a subject in art as well as our culture’s dissociative relationship to nature.

Suh’s photographs examine forest fires as they alter the appearance of the landscape. Exploring the relationship between wilderness and human intervention, he depicts aspects of life in the midst of fires, from unconcerned civilians to working fire crews. The viewer experiences seemingly tranquil imagery that masks the underlying violent threat of fire

Suh states that, “Forest Invisible is a narrative of human emotions in nature––our desire, projections and failure. A narrative of nature is always a struggle between two sides: the one who wants to contain the other, and the one that proves the other wrong. But this struggle has been for so long that it is more like a dance than a war. It is an aesthetic experience.”  Young Suh has been making photographs on the subject of nature and human desire to control her for the last decade.

Young Suh will give an artist talk about his photography at Humboldt State University. He will talk about his latest book, Forest Invisible and the current exhibition of the same title at the HSU First Street Gallery as well as his past and current works about living in nature. The talk is free and open to the public and will take place on October 11 at 4:30 p.m. in the Great Hall, 2nd floor above the College Creek Marketplace, corner of Harpst and Roswell, Humboldt State University campus, Arcata, California. For parking information, visit www.humboldt.edu/parking

A native of South Korea, Suh attended Pratt Institute in New York where he received his BFA in Photography in 1998. Suh went on to receive a Masters of Fine Art in Studio Art at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston in 2001. His work has since been featured in galleries and museums nationwide. Suh is currently an Associate Professor of Photography at University of California, Davis. 

A reception for the artist at HSU First Street Gallery will be held Saturday, October 5th, 2013 6:00 p.m. to 9:00 p.m. during Eureka’s monthly Arts Alive event. The gallery is open Tuesday through Sunday from 12 to 5 p.m. and is located at 422 First Street Eureka, California. Admission is free. Those planning group tours are encouraged to call ahead. For more information call 707-443-6363.       

Forest Invisible

I was once invited to a controlled burn by the US Forest Service, that was being held in the area inside a prison land in Southern California where they train firefighters. Across from the highway is a Six Flags amusement park whose giant roller coaster structure was remotely visible from the top of the barren hills through the haze of the 110 degree California sun. I spent a day walking around in a heat that seemed not so much different from the fire I was supposed to be observing, no trees left to give me a shelter and one bottle of water.

I was wearing a fire retardant shirt and pants, yellow on the top and green on the bottom, shades of color that failed to resemble anything natural, let alone the environment that surrounded me. Still the suit gave me a sense of comfort. I was protected by it: a strange reminder of the official term, PPE, personal protective equipment. My newly bought pair of firefighter's boots was so stiff that my feet were already blistered everywhere a bone hit the inside of the shoe.

My walk was a physical reminder of the landscape I was in. The hard inside surface of the shoe rubbed against the peeled skin over and over. When there is not much you can do about the pain, it seems to make sense. You take it as part of your existence. The scar represents your being, but at the same time you don't want to make such a big deal out of it. It would be impossible to even consider taking the boots off and walk barefoot. The landscape was oddly familiar but utterly invisible. It is the invisibility offered by the landscape, and by fire that I am interested.

Smoke is the medium through which light is made visible and it renders everything invisible. I am irresistibly attracted to its brilliance and at the same time saddened by its disappearance and by the things that disappear with it. Perhaps it explains why I often feel exhilarated with a sense of being lost in the smoke. I think of the irony of Casper David Friedrich's Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog. We are betrayed by our desire to climb high and see everything underneath. We end up only looking at the mist, blinded by our own desire.

When you step inside smoke, it is not easy to find air. The particles get through your nostrils and fill your lungs. They seem heavy inside you and it is history that weighs down your body. It is the same weight that buoyed the minds of the 19th century men like Bierstadt and Gifford. The layers of oil paint that once built the glory of an upcoming history, and the haze in many of their paintings so thick it diminishes the sun, are both stuffed in our collective lungs and immobilize us. The smoke will scatter away, but it will leave its weight for us to carry.

I wonder if trees ever dream. We swim through the density of our desire and the debris of what we have become while nature, violated and gone wild, is fully awake and crackles her question to us, "What on earth do you see?" As if she already knew our loss in the thickness of our reverie.

Young Suh
Autumn, 2013                                                                                                 

Humboldt State University First Street Gallery is pleased to present, Glass, Color, and Light, a solo exhibition by painter Demetri Mitsanas on display through December 23rd.  Mitsanas is Professor Emeritus of Art at Humboldt State.  The exhibition features mixed media paintings of colorful still lifes. These compositions depict colored glassware and explore the relationship between light, color, and the transparent nature of glass.

Mitsanas sees light as “the representation of Spirit” and strives to capture the radiance within both the inanimate and the living. In this series of paintings, Mitsanas focuses on expressing the inner light of his compositions, producing subtle but powerful vibrations of color. He uses gold and silver leaf in his work, which reinforces the light reflected in his subjects. Mitsanas’ paintings are influenced by Gustav Klimt’s infatuation with color and texture and the symbolic iconography of the Greek Orthodox Christian painting tradition.

Mitsanas was born in Tripoli, Greece in the 1930’s where his education began. He immigrated to California in 1961 to pursue further education in the arts at San Francisco State University and UC Santa Barbara where he studied painting and art history. Mitsanas began his teaching career at Humboldt State University in 1968 where he led art history as well as studio art classes.  For a number of years Mitsanas also served as the Chair of the Art Department at Humboldt State.  Now retired, he continues to be active in his studio practice as well as directing the HSU Art Department’s Study Abroad Program in Greece.

Glass, Color, and Light, is produced by Humboldt State students. Students enrolled in the Art Museum and Gallery Practices Program participate in the daily management and planning of shows at the gallery.  The gallery provides real-life opportunities for the students to develop their gallery and museum skills, which in turn provides them with experience that will help them to enter the job market. Many students who have participated in the program have gone on to careers in museums and galleries throughout the nation.  

A reception for the artist will be held at HSU First Street Gallery on Saturday, December 7th, 2013 6:00 p.m. to 9:00 p.m. during Eureka’s monthly Arts Alive event.  Demetri Mitsanas will give a Gallery Talk at First Street Gallery on December 14th at 3 p.m.  The event is free and the public is invited to meet the artist as he guides you through his exhibition. The gallery is open Tuesday through Sunday from 12 to 5 p.m. and is located at 422 First Street Eureka, California. Will be closed on Thanksgiving Day. Admission is free. Those planning group tours are encouraged to call ahead. For more information call 707-443-6363.

Watch the Documentary

North Coast Journal review

In the similar vein these paintings of arranged bottles, glasses, vases, and other minor glass objects are filled with colored liquid producing an architectural abstraction of luminosity that evokes sound vibrations.

These intricate compositions are made of reflecting surfaces, lines, curves, circles and ellipses. Illuminated from within, they flash deep-colored highlights back at us – glowing emerald green, rose cadmium with gold background, reminiscent of the sumptuous paintings of Gustav Klimt.

Demetri Mitsanas
Fall, 2013

In celebration of Humboldt State University’s centennial year, a faculty and staff exhibition showcasing the talent of the artists who currently teach and work in Humboldt State’s Art Department will be featured at Humboldt State University First Street Gallery in Old Town, Eureka, California. The exhibition will display a wide range of themes, styles and media. The exhibit will run from August 20 through September 15.

HSU Art Department: Now  is the first in a three-part series of exhibitions to be presented by the university that will exhibit works of art by current and former professors and staff members of the Art Department. Two subsequent exhibitions will open later this year at the HSU Reese Bullen Gallery, which will examine the artists and art instruction at HSU between the years of 1914 and the early 2000s.  The exhibition series will demonstrate the depth and the evolution of the visual arts at Humboldt State University.  

“The students benefit greatly from the broad and diverse artistic backgrounds of the current staff and faculty of the H.S.U Art Department,” commented Jack Bentley, Director of the First Street Gallery. “This portion of the exhibition series demonstrates how Humboldt State’s Art Department provides students with practical, living models of individual success in the art world, while providing them with the critical abilities to understand and interpret a variety of practices in the visual arts.”

This particular exhibition will give students and the public an opportunity to see how the instructors at H.S.U. approach their own art, outside of the classroom. “We have a very talented and productive faculty who are as dedicated to their professional careers as artists as they are to teaching. They serve as an inspiration to their students as role-models of working artists who teach,” states Teresa Stanley, the HSU Art Department Chairperson.

A reception for the artists will be held on Saturday, September 7th from 6-9 p.m. during Eureka’s monthly Arts Alive event.  Celebrating its fifteenth year of service to HSU students and to the North Coast community, Humboldt State University First Street Gallery is open Tuesday through Sunday from 12 to 5 p.m. and is located at 422 First Street, Eureka, California. Admission is free. Those planning group tours are encouraged to call ahead.  For more information call 707-443-6363.

Humboldt State University First Street Gallery is pleased to present, Nature-Morphic, a solo exhibition by the artist Annabeth Rosen, on exhibit from April 6th through May 19th, 2013. The exhibition will feature recent works on paper and nine ceramic sculptures that Rosen has prepared for this exhibition. As the title of this exhibition suggests, Annabeth Rosen takes for her subject, morphologies, shapes, drawn from nature, while considered and reinterpreted under her poetic eye.   

The sculptures on exhibit are all composed of multiple, disparate, biomorphic ceramic forms.  The forms are variously bulbous, tubular, squirmy and are bound together to achieve the uncanny impression that one is looking at an unidentifiable life form. The pieces have energy and even personalities, vaguely familiar, yet they remain ineffable, too complex to fully comprehend.  

The imagination of the viewer, in coming upon these pieces, is immediately carried to a personal and emotional narrative that conjures a nature, which permits such entities to exist. Of her process, Rosen writes that, “Sometimes, seemingly disparate things, when joined, can be utterly convincing.” 

The exhibit will also feature large works on paper.  Executed primarily in a monochromatic palette, the artist depicts, through gestural and expressive handling of her materials, animated, seething masses of her forms, as if through mitosis, they are splitting dividing, replicating and growing into larger entities. 

A native of Brooklyn, New York, Rosen received her B.F.A in 1978 from the New York State College of Ceramics at Alfred University. She then earned an M.F.A. in 1981 from the Cranbrook Academy of Art in Bloomfield Hills Michigan. Since then her work has been featured all over the world, and she has received numerous awards, including the National Endowment for the Arts Craftsman Fellowship, a 1992 Pew Fellowship in the Arts and the 2011 Joan Mitchell Painters and Sculptors Award. Currently, she is a professor at the University of California, Davis where she holds the Robert Arneson Endowed Chair in Ceramic Sculpture.

Annabeth Rosen will give an artist talk and slide presentation about her work in the Humboldt State University Art Department Building, Room 102 at 5 p.m. on Friday, April 5th. For parking information, visit www.humboldt.edu/parking

A reception at HSU First Street Gallery will be held Saturday, April 6th, 2013 during Eureka’s monthly Arts Alive event. The gallery is open Tuesday through Sunday from 12 to 5 p.m. and is located at 422 First Street Eureka, California. Admission is free. Those planning group tours are encouraged to call ahead. For more information call 707-443-6363.

I've always needed to work building a momentum, day after day, creating an atmosphere in studio that allows the unexpected to happen, paying attention to the very obvious before me. Sometimes, seemingly disparate things, when joined, can be utterly convincing. In studio, there is very little randomness, and most things are set in motion from a multitude of forces. There is a conscience attempt to be aware of
unconscious choices. Sometimes, how I've piled the discarded shapes to the side of where I'm working are closer to the unpremeditated and unpredictable elements sought after, than in the piece I'm making.

Stock piling, accumulating parts and pieces, colors, collections, back ups and then back ups for the back up, safeguarding against disaster or deficiency. Making sure, making one, two, three of everything just in case, not to miss something or miss out on foretelling the next step. The extreme malleability of the material and the addictive nature of production in ceramics fuels accumulation.

All of my sources are readily available in the visual world, yet it is through the general urge to create that these sources become visible. It is for this reason that the work stands, or balances on a fine line of stability and instability. It is also the very nature of the ceramic material that allows it to become physically attached to the world of stuff, rather than a digital attachment to the world of information.
Informational bricolage as found on blogs, torrents, and Youtube, serves as a transient form of cobbling together another world, on information.

I break almost as much ceramics as I make. By being so focused on a destination for the piece, I overlook possibilities. Much of the work is made with already fired parts broken, reassembled, re‐glazed and refired with the addition of wet clay elements. I work with a hammer and chisel and I think of the fired pieces as being as fluid and malleable as wet clay. A broken shard can be a more potent idea of the object than the object itself and a reminder of how elusive it is to find and identify the elements that excite. And any one piece out of context may reveal the work in a new way.

The nature of clay changes so profoundly in the course of working with it, from this soft brown muck, to a hard and perhaps knowable and useful thing‐‐ a real thing in the real world. I want the things I make, even though invented, to be as real and as believable as any other familiar object in the everyday. 

Annabeth Rosen
Spring, 2013

Humboldt State University First Street Gallery is pleased to present The Fools of April: Paintings and Mixed Media Sculpture by David White. The exhibition will be on display from April 6th through Sunday, May 19th, 2013.

An alumnus of Humboldt State University, David White is a Northern California artist best known locally for his permanent installation in Humboldt State University’s Art Department. After graduate school, he practiced his art in New Mexico and then lived  in Japan for 15 years where he taught English and Art in Nerima, one of the many districts of Tokyo. He has exhibited his art in the Nerima Museum and several galleries around Japan, as well as the United States. His most recent show was a collaborative project with the artist Lush Newton in 2011 at HSU First Street Gallery.

At the core of this exhibition are puppet characters, which White has created, fashioning them from found materials.  Based on these small puppet characters, he has drawn and painted portraits and created sculptural busts, while loosely tying them together with an interplay of pictorial associations and internal narratives. In a sense, he has grown a community of characters who have taken over the gallery. They are wise guys, grifters, dames, poets, losers, lovers and raconteurs. White is influenced by his past experiences and surroundings, and frequently incorporates them into his work. He loves story telling and each of his pieces represents a character integrated into his community of April  Fools.

His new exhibition reflects his playful nature, but also adds a serious note into the mix through the titles of the pieces. Within the show visitors will find themselves in the company of many characters; some are puppets, some are sculptural and others are in portrait paintings: each one highly colorful and with a unique personality. These characters lead the viewer through the gallery, radiating lightheartedness and cracking jokes between each other. A majority of the pieces have titles that start with the words, “The man who..., and then White fills in the remainder of the title with a free associated  phrase inspired by the character he is depicting.

For instance one piece is titled, “The man who was tired of perpetual war.” His method of titling pieceswasinspired by titles of films and books like “The Man Who Knew Too Much” and “The Man Who Would Be King.” While the pieces themselves are completely blithe and spirited, the titles are meant to portray the uncertainty of the times and modern life.

White is known for using alternative material for his art making. He creates art out of recycled and found objects, for they are highly accessible and allow him to freely make art anywhere at anytime. This idea of accessibility crosses over from his process into his intended audience for the show, which is everyone. White designed this show for all ages. He doesn’t want to limit it to certain audiences or groups, and hopes that everyone will be able to stop by and enjoy The Fools of April. White compares his show to that of a carnival, of which he is the ringmaster, cheerfully beckoning, “Come one, come all.”

A reception for David White will be held Saturday, April 6th, 2013 during Eureka’s monthly Arts Alive event. 
White will give an artist’s talk on May 4th at 3 p.m. at HSU First Street Gallery. The public is invited to attend for free and meet the artist.
HSU First Street  gallery is open Tuesday through Sunday from 12 to 5 p.m. and is located at 422 First Street, Eureka, California. Admission is free. Those planning group tours are encouraged to call ahead. For more information call 707-443-6363.

Watch the Documentary

The Fools of April 

There are many types of fools.
Some natural and some licensed.
The jester,
the clown,
the harlequin,
and that Tarot card leaping dude
are all familiar.

My friends here are “everyday fools”
from all walks of life,
trying to figure things out on the fly
and not always being successful.
Some work as salarymen,
a few work in a muffler shop
one moves mobile homes
and many are out of work.
Some have followed foolish paths,
took crazy chances
or trusted their hearts...once again.
A few have tried starting something new,
more out of habit
than that phoenix out of the ashes thing.
For the most part,
I think they feel a bit beat down
and confused by the life’s changing rules.
Not to the point of surrender but just a bit road-weary.
Though some have issues with the “do as I say” commandment,
many have total faith in themselves.
While some worry what others think,
most couldn’t’ give a flying hoot.

You may see a few familiar faces here
but then, maybe not.

David White
Spring, 2013

Humboldt State University First Street Gallery is pleased to present, Young Alumni-2013, on exhibit from July 2nd through August 4th, 2013. This exhibition celebrates the diversity and skills acquired by Humboldt State Art majors during their enrollment at the university. Attracting art students throughout California and beyond, with over 400 Art majors, the Art Department is one of the largest departments at the university.

Annually, HSU First Street Gallery mounts an exhibition to showcase the creative culmination of these aspiring artists and their transition from their studio practices into their professional careers. The Young Alumni-2013 exhibition celebrates a selected group of graduates’ work, which has been recommended by a professor or fellow art colleague. The works on display reflects the breadth of courses offered at the university including sculpture, jewelry, painting, graphic design, mixed media, photography, printmaking, new genre and ceramics.

“I’m excited to get the opportunity to show work with so many talented alumni,” commented Natalie Schoch, a Studio Art Major graduate exhibiting work in the show. Shawn O’Connor, another participating alumni added, “After going to school with all these individuals for a couple years, it’s interesting to see how we’ve developed and grown artistically.” Erin Grady commented, “This is the first time I have shown in a professional gallery, along with most of the other artists as well, so it’s an exciting opportunity to get our art out there and seen by the public.” Aaron Morris poetically remarks, “Make with the fireworks! Each diploma's a lit match. And each of us a fuse.”

“The alumni participating in this show have all developed to a point where they are working at a professional level as artists,” states First Street Gallery Director Jack Bentley.  “All 29 participants demonstrate real evidence of artistic success.  Crucial to their success, however, are the less tangible qualities they all share—a dedication and commitment to making art as a way of life and a deep engagement with their work on poetic and intellectual levels.”

Participating artists are:  Jeremy Farrell, Keith Fleury, Rhianna Gallagher, Erin Grady, Kelsey Hardwick, Nurelle Harrigan, Nicholas Hunt, Nickolas C. Hurlbut, Hannah Jacobs, Kasey Jorgensen, Bobby Latona, Greg Lysander, Jamari Montgomery, Aaron Morris, Shawn O’Connor, Amelia O’Dell, Clárissa Pezone, Hannah Pierce, Anna Schneider, Natalie Schoch, Maccabee Shelley, Justin Skillstad, Ryan Spaulding, Michael Sutter, Sean Sutter, Rosalie Thomson, Kiersten Travis-McKittrick, Sara Jo Wolf, Sarah Woodard.

There will be a public reception for the young alumni artists on Saturday, July 6th, from 6:00 to 9:00 p.m., during Eureka Main Street’s Arts Alive program.  HSU First Street Gallery is open Tuesday through Sunday from noon to 5:00 p.m. The gallery will be closed on July 4th.  HSU First Street Gallery is located at 422 First Street in Eureka, California and admission is free to all. Groups are encouraged to call ahead to arrange tours. For more information call 707-826-3424.

Humboldt State University First Street Gallery is pleased to present A Holiday Exhibition, which will open on November 25 and will continue through December 23.  Featured in the show will be artwork by fifteen artists who work in diverse styles and mediums.
  
The participating artists will display ceramics, sculpture, and paintings.  “We're very excited to bring together these artists, many of them HSU alumni, during this holiday season," says First Street Gallery Director Jack Bentley. "This exhibition will remind those of us who live here, how fortunate we are to live in a community that is also the home of so many wonderful artists."

The exhibition will feature a number of talented artists in the ceramic medium. These prominent ceramics artists continue to place California’s North Coast as a center of innovation in ceramic art. Beautiful and unique works will include artists such as Nancy Frazier and Ted Okell, Kit Davenport, Peggy Loudon, Scott North, Clarissa Pezone, David Jordan and Mike Pearce.

Additional artists participating this winter will contribute a wide range of artistic styles that create an overall lighthearted tenor to this holiday exhibition. Many of the works freely use colorful color with abandon and employ unique approaches to their subjects. These include works by Cija Bellis, Lush Newton, Malia Penhall, Clark Donovan, Jeremy Hara, Mimi LaPlant, Rachel Schlueter and Gwen Thoele.

There will be a gallery reception for the artists, whichwill take place at HSU First Street Gallery on December 6 from 6-9 p.m. during Eureka’s Arts Alive program. The gallery is open Tuesday through Sunday from 12 to 5 p.m. and is located at 422 First Street, Eureka, California. Admission is free. Those planning group tours are encouraged to call ahead. For more information call (707)-443-6363.

Humboldt State University First Street Gallery presents, A Negotiable Utopia: The Humboldt Bay Project.  The exhibition features six observational documentary videos and accompanying essays by interdisciplinary artist Cynthia Hooper and a monumental, to-scale, sculptural, Humboldt Bay model by ceramic artist Mary Mallahan. This multimedia exhibition explores the physical and cultural geography of Humboldt Bay—California’s second largest estuary. The exhibition will be on display starting September 30, running through November 2.

Artist Cynthia Hooper interprets varied water, waste, energy, agricultural and urban landscapes.  Her videos and essays examine how regional and national political policies reorder these environments. Her project examines Humboldt Bay’s natural resource economy, including the timber, fishing, and mariculture industries, as well as its transportation and power infrastructure. Her project also documents the bay’s natural and human-made watersheds, as well as its varied conservation zones and shoreline.

Focusing her creative lens, each video features visually poetic, unusual, and graceful views of the bay while accompanying essays include narratives that honor the diversity of perspectives and experiences of the bay’s many stakeholders. Hooper hopes that her audience will gain a greater understanding of how overarching global forces are tied to economic and environmental impacts on Humboldt Bay.

Hooper states that, “Our bay’s diverse geographical terrain includes many sites for community interaction and dialogue and some of these landscapes can trigger earnest public debate.”  She also states that her project “seeks to encourage participatory evaluation of the bay’s complex issues by its many engaged local residents, with the intention of bridging the diverse communities of the Humboldt Bay landscape.”
 
Cynthia Hooper has worked with the complex urban environment of Tijuana, Mexico and has examined contested and politicized water issues along the U.S./Mexico border. She has also produced other projects about water and land use issues in California and Ohio. Hooper’s work has been exhibited widely, including exhibitions at the Center for Land Use Interpretation in Los Angeles, Intersection for the Arts in San Francisco, the Museum of Modern Art in Mexico City, El Centro Cultural Tijuana, and MASS MoCA.  Hooper has also been awarded residencies at the Headlands Center for the Arts and the Djerassi Resident Artists Program. She earned her BA from the University of California at Berkeley, and her MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute. Cynthia Hooper has been a Professor of Art at College of the Redwoods since 1991.
                                                                                                                                               
Mary Mallahan interprets natural and anthropogenic processes with large-scale ceramic and sculptural media. Having lived on California’s North Coast for twenty years, Mallahan has developed a connection with Humboldt Bay after experiencing it recreationally and later found it to be a source of inspiration. Mallahan’s model describes the unseen geology of Humboldt Bay and examines the bay’s varied surface features including its unique undulating, subterranean morphology. She states that, “This model demonstrates my longstanding interest in interpreting local scientific inquiry through the lens of personal aesthetic expression”.

Using clay to merge and reconstruct her own observational information with satellite images and topographical maps, Mallahan creates an immersive, research-based representation of Humboldt Bay that is also theoretical, speculative and visually dynamic. Her sculpture represents continual tectonic change, the same process that makes Humboldt Bay and the surrounding region geologically unstable.
 
Mallahan uses scale and dynamism in topography to illustrate the relation between the timescales of human life and that of ever-present geologic and biological processes. Mallahan seeks to not portray the bay as we know it, but instead in a way that represents the various geologic, biological and human interactions with the bay. Through the use of texture and color, Mallahan employs various materials, such as the use of ceramic shards to simulate shells and wood textures for nearby industrial sites. The subtle and unexpected nature of her work, Mallahan hopes, will open discussion about the issues surrounding the bay.
 
Mary Mallahan has collaborated with Seattle’s architectural firm McVey-Petterson to design and construct a ceramic installation that incorporates illumination for the lobby of Youth Theatre Northwest, and her monumental outdoor figurative work enhances the campus of Western Washington University.  She has also created models of the subsurface stratigraphy of local brownfields and landfills, describing these sites’ complex contaminants with a polychrome precision. Mallahan has thirty years of experience in ceramic media. She is an adjunct professor at College of the Redwoods, and holds a BFA in Studio Art from Western Washington University and an MFA in Ceramics from the University of Mississippi.

The work by these artists in this exhibition has been made possible by a grant to Hooper from the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts and by a grant to Mallahan, who is the 2013 recipient of the Humboldt Area Foundation’s Victor Thomas Jacoby Award. Additional support comes from Humboldt Sate University, generous community donors and from the HSU Associated Students Instructionally Related Activities Fund.

A Negotiable Utopia: The Humboldt Bay Project is produced by students enrolled in the Humboldt State University Art Museum and Gallery Practices Program. A public reception for the artists will be held on Saturday, October 4 during Eureka Main Street’s monthly Arts Alive event. 
  
On October 18 at 11 a.m. the artists will host a free tour of the Humboldt Bay on the historic Madaket Ferry, featuring interpretive guides who will discuss the geology, history and environ­ment of Humboldt Bay. Those who wish to attend the tour should sign up in advance and in person at HSU First Street Gallery. Seating is limited.

On Saturday, November 1, the artists will give a gallery talk and tour at 3 p.m. at HSU First Street Gallery. The talk is free and the public is invited to come meet the artists as they guide attendees through exhibition. The gallery is open Tuesday through Sunday from 12 to 5 p.m. and is located at 422 First Street in Eureka, California. Admission is free. Those planning group tours are encouraged to call ahead. For more information call (707) 443-6363.

My videos and essays interpret varied water, waste, energy, agricultural and urban landscape scenarios, and examine how regional and national political policies relentlessly reorder these types of environments. My work is generously observational, analytically engaged, and proposes a nuanced, reflective, and often sympathetic reception for the sites I examine. A Negotiable Utopia: The Humboldt Bay Project features six short observational documentary videos and accompanying essays that explore and interpret the built environment of our bay—California’s second largest estuary. This project examines the bay’s natural resource economy and infrastructure (including timber, fishing, and mariculture), its transportation (including our roads, rails, and ships), as well as the bay’s power infrastructure—including fossil fuel and renewable energy. The project also documents Humboldt Bay’s natural and human-made watersheds, as well as its varied conservation zones and complicated shoreline. Each video features visually poetic, atypical, and unexpectedly graceful views of the bay that are patiently and often incidentally captured. Each accompanying essay includes evidence-based narratives that honor the diversity of perspectives and experiences that index these compelling environments.

Our bay’s diverse geographical terrain includes many sites for community interaction and dialog, and some of these landscapes can trigger earnest and even adversarial public debate. My project clearly advocates for some of our bay’s more culturally potent places, but it also carefully navigates the conflicts these sites can attract. This project also honors the many stakeholders and everyday place makers (including seafood, timber, and dock workers, recreationalists, activists, and researchers) that spend a great deal of time on Humboldt Bay, and understand it deeply and experientially. With inclusive analysis and steady observational strategies, my project presents a both comforting and counterintuitive picture of our bay, and both celebrates and complicates our shared and intimate experience of it.

Cynthia Hooper
Autumn, 2014

Cynthia Hooper’s six non-narrative observational documentary videos examine and interpret the built environment of Humboldt Bay. Her video Water documents the bay region's water infrastructure, and indexes water quality issues unique to an agricultural, postindustrial, and natural resource-based economy.  Her video Conservation inventories the many extensively mediated conservation zones that encircle Humboldt Bay, and meditates on the varied strategies deployed to restore lost wetlands and watersheds, battle invasive biomass, and remediate toxic industrial legacies. Her video Power examines the energy infrastructure of Humboldt Bay, including its recently upgraded and formerly nuclear power plant, its electrical grid and natural gas infrastructure, as well as this region's principal renewable energy resources. Natural Resourcesdocuments how specific populations of laborers and their infrastructure—including timber workers, dock workers, fishermen and oystermen—configure this region's built environment, and how this type of work gracefully and often informally shapes architectural space. Her Shoreline video inventories the more than one hundred miles of shoreline that encircles Humboldt Bay, and her video Transportation describes the region’s roads, rails, and shipping, as well as some of the complex components of the bay’s unexpectedly globally-networked terrain.

Cynthia Hooper has worked with the complex urban environment of Tijuana, Mexico and has examined contested and politicized water issues along the U.S./Mexico border. She has also produced other projects about water and land use issues in California and Ohio. Hooper’s work has been exhibited widely, including exhibitions at the Center for Land Use Interpretation in Los Angeles, Intersection for the Arts in San Francisco, the Museum of Modern Art in Mexico City, El Centro Cultural Tijuana, and MASS MoCA, and recent publications include Arid: A journal of Desert Art, Design and Ecology. Hooper has also been awarded residencies at the Headlands Center for the Arts and the Djerassi Resident Artists Program, as well as grants from the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts and the Gunk Foundation. She earned her BA from the University of California at Berkeley, and her MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute. Cynthia Hooper has been a Professor of Art at College of the Redwoods since 1991.

My functional and sculptural ceramic work interprets dynamic natural processes such as deposition, lithification, deformation, and erosion. Using clay, I merge and reconstruct observational information to create a sculptural substitute of these systems, fashioning a visual depiction that is as much conjectural as it is empirical.  The monumental ceramic sculptural interpretation of Humboldt Bay that I’ve created for this exhibition transfers the geographic features of the bay’s surrounding landscape onto the tidal footprint we are typically more familiar with. This reimagining of our bay is dynamic, speculative, and certainly unexpected. In my interpretation, the water of Humboldt Bay has been transformed into the land that currently encircles it. The notion of Humboldt Bay itself as a level, largely horizontal space is reconsidered—instead I reveal its subterranean, “rumpled carpet-like” tectonic landscape. The result is a monumental and undulating sculptural form that conveys the morphology of regional uplifts and subsidence—the very same tectonic processes that make our local landscape (and the bay itself) so geologically mutable and even unpredictable. The visual effect of my work is a representation of change: the form of a wave, dynamic and yet frozen in time, as well as the transformation of water and sediment (like clay) into an alternate description of time.

This model demonstrates my longstanding interest in interpreting local scientific inquiry and discourse through the lens of personal aesthetic expression.  My formal choices, including shape and color, were influenced by the empirical information I found in regional maps and reports, as well as my own field observations. The edges of individual pieces of this model, for example, align to suggest the tidal channels found in Arcata Bay, and the model’s surface treatments imply fragments of shell or jettisoned wood—hinting of layers of anthropogenic origin. In my model, Humboldt Bay becomes a massive, swelling sculptural form: a vast lithic remnant of a varied, diverse past, or—equally intriguing—a reimagining of our bay’s possible future. 

Mary Mallahan
Autumn, 2013

Humboldt State University First Street Gallery presents, Humboldt Bay Landscape Painters: Paintings by Andrew Daniel, Mimi LaPlant, Kathy O’Leary and Stock Schlueter. This exhibition of Humboldt County, California artists will open on September 30 and runs until November 2.

As part of First Street Gallery’s series addressing the subject of the Humboldt Bay, these four artists have focused their attention to the regional estuary and its environs at the center of the place they call home. They depict its beauty and unique features in a variety of oil and acrylic paintings. The Humboldt Bay, the second largest enclosed bay in California, is an intersectional landscape where industry, recreation and wildlife meet on the shore and in the water. In light of this dynamic setting, the artists of Humboldt Bay Landscape Painters offer viewers a refreshing and intimate perspective.

The paintings of the Humboldt Bay Landscape Painters invite contemplation and consideration of the environment. Relying on direct observation, these four artists use the immediacy of their surroundings to inspire their paintings, which are often painted on location. Each painting exemplifies a process of settling the mind and connecting with the natural world—becoming sensitive to the moment, the light and the subtle movements of a landscape. Their intention is to depict something transitory, sublime or momentous and beautiful for the viewer.

As Humboldt County residents, these artists have found inspiration through personal connections with the bay and its surrounding environment and express it through their individual painting styles. Andrew Daniel relocated to Arcata from Maine in the 1990’s to finish his degree at Humboldt State University and has since established himself as a fine arts painter in the area. Daniel enjoys observing Humboldt’s scenery, plants, animals and people and uses them as a source of inspiration and as a way to remain connected to the simplicity of nature. “I have to remind myself to slow down and take in our lovely natural environment, to quiet my mind enough to be receptive to the constant flow of silent stimuli, the beauty of our surroundings. Painting provides me with a vital tool for slowing down.”

Mimi LaPlant, a Marin County, California native, received her MFA in Painting at the University of California, Santa Barbara and was a long time instructor in Art at Humboldt State University.  Known primarily as an abstract painter who works in an improvisational, bright and colorful palette, LaPlant’s landscapes disclose many of her observational sources of color. In this show, LaPlant presents a body of acrylic landscape paintings that showcase her stylistic impulse and her strong connection with the natural world.

Kathy O’Leary moved to the area from the San Francisco Bay Area in 1969 and was immediately struck with the natural beauty of Humboldt County. The constantly changing atmosphere, light, and colors of Humboldt Bay create a “visual feast” for O’Leary who states that, “Humboldt Bay enriches our lives every day. Where else in this country does so much beauty, richness of culture and nature exist in one place?”

Born and raised in the area, Stock Schlueter has long been familiar with the attraction of Humboldt County. “I always loved the adventure of discovery and finding new places. Plein air (outdoor) painting involves all of these things I loved so much as a youth.” Beginning his career as a watercolor painter, Schlueter began showing in local galleries in the early 1970s. He started working with oil paints in 1985 and since then his work has been featured nationally in galleries in Washington D.C., Indiana, Ohio, Washington, Oregon and California.

Humboldt Bay Landscape Painters is produced by students enrolled in the Humboldt State University Art Museum and Gallery Practices Program. A public reception for the artists will be held on Saturday, October 4 during Eureka Main Street’s monthly Arts Alive event. The gallery is open Tuesday through Sunday, noon-5 p.m. and is located at 422 First Street, Eureka, California. Admission is always free. Those planning group tours are encouraged to call ahead at (707)-443-6363.