Humboldt State University’s First Street Gallery presents, All or Nothing, an exhibition of paintings, mixed media works and videos by artist Ana Teresa Fernández on display April 1 to May 17. The gallery will present a selection of performance-based paintings and videos including two new works made for this exhibition. Currently residing in San Francisco, Fernández’s work has earned her national and international recognition in solo and group exhibitions. Sponsored by a grant from the Diversity Program Funding Committee at Humboldt State, Fernández will be a visiting artist at the university and will give a public lecture about her work on April 3.

Fernández’s art explores the politics of intersectionality and the ways it shapes personal identity, culture, and social rhetoric through performance, painting, and video. Her work illuminates current socio-political conditions, which reify the psychological and physical barriers that define and often divide gender, race, and class in Western society and in the global south. In addition to highlighting ongoing socio-political conflicts, the works also underscore the intersection of everyday tasks and fantasy from both sides of the political/gender divide, illuminating the psychological walls that confine and divide genders in a domestic space.

Fernández challenges various commonly held perceptions of conditions on the socio-economic-political spectrum. In her performances Fernández adopts the persona of an anonymous woman garbed in Tango attire. This persona challenges the viewer’s concepts about the agency of women, their choices, their actions.   By using her own body in site-specific situations, she redefines the political context of the site. In one such performance, Borrando la Frontera, dressed in Tango attire, she scales the border fence between Tijuana and San Diego, erasing a physical obstacle that gets in the way of opportunity or the prospect of families to be united. “I bring the sky back over the fence that divides the US and Mexico by painting it sky blue as a peaceful protest or offering”, she explains.

Her large paintings are often documents of performance pieces that she has staged. A new painting and a new performance video, both entitled, Erasure, come at a time when her native Mexico is undergoing the aftermath of a searing experience with the disappearance of 43 young college students who were kidnapped and murdered by government officials in collusion with drug cartels. 
  
Of the new works, she states that, “In Erasure I push my body into the darkness by painting it out entirely with black paint unto a black background. This is an action of luto (mourning) and it acts as a metaphor for how 43 students/protestors in Ayotzinapa were erased in Mexico for posing a threat to the government. Problems in Mexico are deleted, people’s identity are worth nothing if they get in the way.”

Fernández has exhibited at the Tijuana Biennial in Mexico, the Snite Museum at Notre Dame University, the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco, and the Oakland Art Museum. Her large-scale “5W” public art project in San Francisco was awarded Best of the Bay by 7x7 Magazine in 2013.

Fernández's numerous residencies include La Fragua in Cordoba, Spain; Greatmore Art Center Residency in Capetown, South Africa; Fanal Otantik Sant D'A Jakmel in Haiti, and the Headlands Center for the Arts, where she was a Tournesol Award recipient. Her films have been screened at the Woodstock Film Festival, the Female Eye Film Festival in Toronto, and the Honolulu International Film Festival where she was awarded the Gold Kahuna Award for Best Experimental Short.

Later this spring, HSU First Street Gallery will publish a catalogue for the exhibition, featuring an essay about Ana Teresa Fernández by the author Rebecca Solnit.

Ana Teresa Fernández will present a lecture and slide show about her work at Humboldt State University on Friday, April 3 at 5:30 p.m. The lecture will be held in Room 102 in the Art Department building on the Humboldt State University campus.  This event is free to the public.  A reception for the artist will be held at HSU First Street Gallery on Saturday, April 4 from 6:00 p.m. to 9:00 p.m. during Eureka’s monthly Arts Alive program.  The event is free and open to the public and is sponsored by a grant from the Diversity Program Funding Committee at Humboldt State University.  HSU First Street 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.

Humboldt State University First Street Gallery presents, Chicanitas: Small Paintings from the Cheech Marin Collection. Chicanitas, is a traveling exhibition of small to medium-sized paintings selected from the acclaimed, private art collection of actor-entertainer, Cheech Marin. The collection is a vibrant, compelling selection of art offering a window into contemporary Chicano culture. The exhibition opens Tuesday, January 27 and runs through Sunday, March 8.

Mr. Marin, who became famous as a member of the 1960s-70s counter-culture comedy duo, Cheech and Chong, has had a long and successful career as an actor in films, television and on the stage.  In the visual arts world, Marin is widely recognized as a tireless champion, promoter and collector of Chicano art. ‘It’s something very immediate and visceral when I choose artwork…when you see it, you know it,” says Marin of his passion for art collecting.

In this particular collection of emerging and established Chicano and Chicana artists, Mr. Marin has turned his affections toward paintings 16 inches square and smaller. Of his interest in small paintings Mr. Marin remarks, “I saw how the people were intrigued by them because they were such wonderful little works of art, self contained…they drew you in. You become more intimate with these small paintings…it has its own idiosyncratic take on what Chicano painting is ”

Whether on canvas, wood, copper, or paper, each painting’s intimate size reflects an internal, personal portrayal of the artist’s life and community. As each complete piece conveys its own story, themes and forms of expression familiar to the Latino community and the broader American culture begin to emerge. Mr. Marin sees something different in these small paintings from those in his collection of Chicano Art from the mid-60s and 70s. “I saw in them something special,” says Marin. “How they kind of represent the new breed of Chicano painters.”

Established figures such as John Valadez and Leo Limón will be featured alongside the works of younger emerging artists such as Ana Teresa Fernández and Carlos Donjuán.  These paintings present intimate, personal scenes of familiar landscapes, social communities, familial relationships, and cultural heritage. Ranging in style from photo-realism to abstract, landscape and portraiture, the variety of styles and themes come together to form an expressive collection that represents the complexity of the Chicano experience.

Chicanitas, is partially funded by a grant from the College of Arts and Humanities at Humboldt State University and by the Associated Student’s Instructionally Related Activities Fund as well as by numerous donors from the community.

The exhibition will run from January 27 through March 8. A public reception for the exhibition will be held during Eureka Main Street’s Arts Alive on Saturday, February 7 from 6 to 9 p.m. First Street Gallery is open to the public Tuesday through Sunday, from noon to 5 p.m. The gallery is located at 422 First Street, Eureka, California.  Admission is always free.  School groups are encouraged to call ahead for tours.  For more information, please call (707) 443-6363.

Humboldt State University First Street Gallery presents, I was Born, But…, a solo exhibition featuring 500 small paintings by Tsuya Sarashina-Pratt. The exhibitionruns through New Year’s Eve, Tuesday, December 31.

Pratt  is a native of  the island of Hokkaido in the north of Japan who has made her home with her family on California’s North Coast for several decades. She comes from a long line of Shinto priests on her father’s side and from poets on her mother’s side, the influence of which the viewers may discern in her paintings. Her communion with nature in which everything is sacred, the stars, the rivers, ancestors– is present in her paintings.

The gallery will present hundreds of Pratt's miniature paintings, which measure only eight inches high by six inches wide. Their precious size belie expectations, as within each piece the viewer will find tremendous energy, motion and surprise. The exhibition will feature two distinct bodies of work by the artist. The first comprises portraits of people and the second is filled with abstractions.  The viewer of her work will take special delight in her paintings’ titles, which are often poetic and will guide the viewer in the interpretation of the paintings.

The first series is called, My Neighbors and Your Neighbors, about which she declares that:

I have always been interested in observing people.  In Japan I watched the Japanese people. In America I enjoy watching the American people, especially their faces.  I like drawing people's face, showing their emotions and personal struggles.  I am very interested in line, movement, color and texture.  I paint them l like abstractions because I have more freedom to use different techniques.  I like to have a lot of freedom in my art.

The second body of work is called, Human Mosaic, Including Mother Nature.  She describes the series like this:

Nowadays, the human species is living as an invasive virus in this world, bringing ruin down on the body of Nature.

I hope we can find some solution for humanity in the natural world; that is why I slipped into the abstract theme a lot of nature pictures.

Before its too late, and this Nature wipes out completely the human 'virus' from her body, we have to do something very quickly; I really hope we do before it's already too late.  Really, we don't have any time to waste with things such as war.

I was Born, But…,  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.

Exhibition Schedule 
The exhibition will run through December 31. The gallery is open daily from noon to 5 p.m.   A reception for the artist will be held at HSU First Street Gallery Saturday, December 5, 2015, from 6:00 p.m. to 9:00 p.m. during Eureka's monthly Arts Alive event. The gallery will be closed on Christmas Day and is located at 422 First Street Eureka, California. For more information, call (707) 443-6363.

Humboldt State University First Street Gallery presents, Intime.  The exhibition features small and miniature drawings and paintings by eight California artists who work in diverse styles with a focused approach on exquisite, intricate, intimate works of art on a small scale and who incorporate either realism or representational imagery. The exhibition will run from September 29 through November 9.

The gallery will display pieces, which will draw the viewers close in and allow them to linger over the subject and detail. Large paintings and drawings have the ability to draw the audience into their pictorial spaces. But with a small piece, often the reverse happens and the viewer ends up absorbing it into themselves, which can affect the way one reacts to such pieces.  The artists chosen to be in this show all work in a manner that touches on the psychological register of intimacy. Thus the exhibition is titled Intime, which in French denotes an inward, interior, intimate state

The art on display runs the gamut from photo-realist drawings to surreal subjects, to calligraphic, brushy miniature portraits to still life. The exhibition’s broad spectrum of expression demonstrates the infinite choices of subjects and methods available to the contemporary artist and how big ideas can fit into small packages. Participating artists include Megan Atherton, Chuck Bowden, Brandice Guerra, Jacob Mondragon, James Moore, Tsuya Pratt, Jeanne Vadeboncoeur and Erin Whitman.

Intime  is produced by Humboldt State University students enrolled in the Art Museum and Gallery Practices Program who 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. 

The exhibition will run from September 29 through November 9.  A reception for the artists will be held at HSU First Street Gallery on Saturday, October 3 from 6:00 p.m. to 9:00 p.m. during Eureka’s monthly Arts Alive program.  The event is free and open to the public HSU First Street 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 or visit the gallery’s website at www.humboldt.edu/first

Humboldt State University (HSU) First Street Gallery presents, Labeled: Uprooting Social Identities, on exhibit in the gallery’s South Room from April 1 through May 17, 2015. This exhibition features 20 art students and alumni from Humboldt State’s Art Department.

In recent years, the student population at HSU has become much more diverse and is moving in the direction of reflecting the actual demographic balance of the state of California, at large.  Among the university’s Art students, themes relating to their identity have emerged. HSU students today are concerned with social issues as fervently as their predecessors were in the 1960s. Such issues as social justice, racism, bi-cultural identity, immigration, sexual and gender identity, feminism and environmental activism are at the forefront of their art. 

Working in sculpture, photography, painting, printmaking, ceramics and mixed media, the exhibition focuses on political and social themes that are important to these young artists. This exhibition comes on the heels of a year in the United States, in which the police killings of African-American men, the migration controversies swirling around  the refugee status of young children from Central America and the ascendency of gay marriage are but a few of the issues that inspire these young artists. At the crux of this collection of young artists, there is a desire to make a difference in their world through their art.

HSU students who are enrolled in Humboldt State’s Museum and Gallery Practices Program curated the exhibition and are responsible for every phase of its production.

This exhibition will run in the gallery’s South Room along side visiting artist Ana Teresa Fernández’s  solo exhibition, which will be held in the Projects Room at the gallery. Participating artists are: Nadia A. Bueno Torres, Andrea Castillo, Jasmine A. Cooper,  Ashley English, Francisco Gonzalez Huerta, Elisa N. Griego, Lauren M. Gunn, Melissa Hinkle Christine J. Hipolito,  Julie H. Lovich, Lora Martin, Megan J. May, Humberto Montaño, Bethany Montgomery, Christian Mora , Jeremy D. Owen, Felix Quintana, Marval A. Rex, Megan Sandstrom and Stephanie Swinger

There will be a public reception for the artists on Saturday, April 4, 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. 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 707-443-6363.

Humboldt State University First Street Gallery presents, Status Update, an exhibition featuring mixed-media works by Ricardo Febré and Michele McCall-Wallace, on display September 29 to November 8. 

The exhibition explores personal interactions and the broad use and complexities of social media.  With their art, they bring attention to our society’s use of technologies to communicate, the connections made through social media, the residue such interactions create, and the void left behind when the exchange has ended.

The artists examine changes in language, culture, and the media platforms on which the public holds debate and discussion, often without filter, inflected by a belief in relative anonymity or blatant indifference.  Febré and McCall-Wallace look at how we have woven social media into our daily activities and how we use it to communally share the human experience. They examine how social media-based interactions continue to define who we are.  Through their work, they draw correlations with the near and far past while inviting us to better see our collective present.

Ricardo Febré focuses on a variety of contemporary social issues in the United States that have generated controversy across social media.  He states that:

I am aware of how the medium can easily be used to spread nonsense. A few years backs, I came across hundreds of messages that were tweeted following the release of the war movie Red Dawn, which depicts the fictional conflict between an Asian nation and the United States. These 140-character tweets were tremendously racist.

The second instance when I saw the power of the medium was during the trial of George Zimmerman, the man who followed and killed teenager, Trayvon Martin. Through social media, there were debates about gun violence, racial profiling, and unfortunately— there were the people who just wanted to be hateful.

My typographic and graphic works for this show are not a critique of the medium, but rather an exploration of our culture through social media: How we— as a society— interact through posts and threads; its effect on our psyche; and how culture acts and reacts online and in the real world.

Febré and McCall-Wallace, who both teach in the Art Department at Humboldt State University, will exhibit an array of large-scale graphics-based panels, videos, sculptural installations, sound pieces and expressive typographic works.  Some pieces are interactive, meant to engage the public in the design and the evolution actual pieces, and to encourage the public to share their creations on social media. For instance, in her piece, Old School Selfie, McCall-Wallace invites participants to draw their face on  chalkboard panels, then take a selfie with their hand-drawn self-portrait (old-school selfie), attach the panel to the wall and post their picture on the gallery's Instagram or Facebook account by identifying it with a hashtag.

A reception for the artists will be held at HSU First Street Gallery on Saturday, October 3 from 6:00 p.m. to 9:00 p.m. during Eureka’s monthly Arts Alive program.  The event is free and open to the public HSU First Street 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. 

Humboldt State University First Street Gallery presents a selection of prints and posters from the 1970s and 1980s by the Royal Chicano Air Force (RCAF).  The RCAF is a Sacramento, California based artist collective founded in 1970 by José Montoya and Esteban Villa. The art within this collection encapsulates the early, heady days of activism by the United Farm Workers movement in California. In viewing these prints, the audience will come away with a nuanced appreciation for the cultural and political aspirations of the Chicano community during that period. The art featured in this exhibition will be on loan from the permanent collection of California State University, Sacramento, curated by Phil Hitchcock, director of the university’s Library Gallery. 
 
The RCAF is best known for its mural paintings, poster art production, and individual artistic contributions. The artists of the RCAF have produced murals and exhibitions ranging from San Diego, California to Seattle, Washington. The RCAF is significant as a collective that has maintained a forty-five year history of engaging communities to express their Chicano culture, history and struggle for civil and labor rights. Many of the artists involved with the RCAF have also worked as educators in schools, community colleges and universities. Some members have taught in prisons, youth correctional facilities and neighborhood community centers.

Some of the work in the collection consists of posters that were created in order to promote community events such as dances, performances and other fundraisers which helped gain financial support for their activities as a collective. These community fundraising events were held at theatres and parks in Sacramento and helped support farm workers struggling against the exploitative work policies of large agricultural companies. These promotional posters are functional works of art. RCAF artists such as Louie “The Foot” Gonzalez, José Montoya and Rodolfo “Rudy” Cuellar, among others, created posters with a colorful and creative sense of design that also serve primarily as a method of spreading information to the community.

In addition to promotional posters, the collection also has political posters that bring attention to the issues surrounding Chicano and Latino culture both in the United States and abroad. Notable examples include a poster in support of The Salvadoran People’s Committee during the civil war in El Salvador from 1979 to 1992. Similarly, there are posters that support the socio-political advancement of Chicano culture. For example, RCAF artists created posters in support of community programs like bilingual education and creative Chicano Medicine at the University of California, Davis.

The exhibition will run from January 27 through March 8. A public reception for the exhibition will be held during Eureka Main Street’s Arts Alive on Saturday, February 7 from 6 to 9 p.m. First Street Gallery is open to the public Tuesday through Sunday, from noon to 5 p.m. The gallery is located at 422 First Street, Eureka, California. Admission is always free. School groups are encouraged to call ahead for tours. For more information, please call (707) 443-6363.

Humboldt State University (HSU) First Street Gallery presents,Young Alumni 2015, on exhibit from Tuesday, June 30 through Sunday, September 6. The exhibition features works by recent graduates from HSU’s Art Department.

Annually, HSU First Street Gallery mounts an exhibition to showcase the creative culmination of these aspiring artists and their transition from their art studies into their professional careers. The Young Alumni 2015 exhibition presents the work of 40 graduates whose art includes a wide variety of media. The works on display reflect the breadth of courses offered at the university including sculpture, jewelry, painting, graphic design, mixed media, photography, printmaking, new genre and ceramics.

“The alumni participating in this show have all developed to a point where their craft is at a professional level,” states First Street Gallery Director Jack Bentley.  “These 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.”

Upon entering the gallery, visitors will encounter a piece of interactive art, which immediately signals the ambition of these artists. Installation artist and Arcata Scrap and Salvage Award winner, Renée Calway, provokes her viewers to respond to societal issues that are occurring nation-wide while engaging them with her piece, Bored of Education. Calway invites gallery guests to interact with her large-scale map of the United States by using chalk provided to the audience to draw or write on her map.  She states that, “This piece encourages community members to express their frustrations with the education system in the United States”.

The gallery will be closed for the holiday on July 4th.  The gallery will schedule a closing reception on September 5 from 6 to 9 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. 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 707-443-6363.

Humboldt State University Third Street Gallery is pleased to present A Holiday Exhibition, Affordable Art for the Season, which will open on November 25 and will continue through December 31.  Featured in the show will be artwork by nineteen artists who work in diverse styles and mediums.
  
The participating artists will display prints, ceramics, sculpture, and paintings.  “We're very excited to bring together these artists, many of them HSU alumni, during this holiday season," says Third 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 features artworks that are affordable and are suitable for the gift-giving season.

Participating artists include Conrad Calimpong, Kit Davenport, Trent Franks, Nancy Frazier, Amy Granfield, David Jordan, Peggy Loudon,
Malia Matsumoto, Laurel McKay, Demetri Mitsanas, Lush Newton, Kelsey Owens, Michael Pearce, Keith Schneider, Meredith Smith, Gina Tuzzi, Sarah Whorf, Mark Young and Dave Zdrazil.

A Holiday  Exhibition is produced by Humboldt State students. Students enrolled in the Art Museum and Gallery Practices Program participate in the daily management and planning of exhibitions 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.  

Exhibition Schedule 

The exhibition will run from November 25 through December 31.  A reception for the artists will be held Saturday, December 3, from 6:00 p.m. to 9:00 p.m. during Eureka’s monthly Arts Alive event. The gallery is open Tuesday through Sunday from noon to 5 p.m. and is located at 416 Third Street Eureka, California. The gallery will be closed on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day. Admission is free. Those planning group tours are encouraged to call ahead. Humboldt State University Third Street Gallery is located at 416 Third Street Eureka, California.  The gallery was recently relocated and renamed after 19 years in its former location on First Street in Eureka. For more information call 707-443-6363.

Humboldt State University First Street Gallery presents, Chronic Fatigue, a two-person exhibition of sculpture and photographs by the artists Walter Early and Benjamin Funke, running February 2 through March 6. Hailing from Lexington, Kentucky where he keeps his studio, Walter Early will be a visiting artist on the Humboldt State campus during late January and the first week of February. Benjamin Funke resides on the California North Coast and lectures at Humboldt State University.  

Chronic Fatigue is an exhibition that takes on the commonly held position that our culture is overloaded with information, sensation and endless waste.  Moving from that premise, the two artists challenge the gallery visitor to experience art whose materials and subjects are drawn from the information overload and cast away resources.  Using selected bits and pieces of cultural artifacts and repurposed materials extracted from the waste stream, Early and Funke create meditative, elegant pieces of art, which defy their mundane origins.

Walter Early’s brightly colored steel sculptures originate as discarded scraps.  Early sifts through the rubble of the places where he lives, discovering salvageable and reusable pieces, often repurposing discarded pieces of prefab office furniture as pedestals. Bright, monochrome pigments play with perceptions of mass, weight and volume—individualizing the pieces and distancing them from their scrap origins.  Early pairs bright colors with dilapidated finishes, creating unexpected pairings of objects from urban and rural settings. He juxtaposes objects from our culture’s highs and lows.

Early’s work tests the justifications for preserving objects in domestic collections.  Specifically he investigates the ability of objects of seemingly little significance to act as a memory aid and surrogate for the corporeal.  Similar to still-life painting and photography, his found objects are often utilized or referenced as a metaphor for lifecycles.  Formally the work draws from the language of fragments, using incomplete forms to allude to a larger whole. His manipulation of these recycled materials embodies the adage that one man’s trash is another man’s treasure.

Benjamin Funke’s work in photography and sculpture investigates the collective experience shared by members of male-oriented subcultures organized around pursuits like hardcore music and professional sports.  In his photographic series, TWA599, large, highly detailed color prints depict nameless objects, painted cloth fragments and tattered pieces of scrap wood.  At a distance, the imagery is nearly abstract. Up close, in high resolution, the scarred, twisted and scorched surfaces indicate a devastating event of extreme force and violence. 

These are relics salvaged from the crash of TWA flight 599, which killed Hall of Fame football coach Knute Rockne in 1931. The aviation disaster occurred as Rockne was en route to Hollywood to discuss the movie rights to his life story. In photographing these charred fragments, which have been preserved in the archives of the University of Notre Dame, Funke confers upon them the status of gridiron, sports-lore relics, worthy of the adoration of football fans across generations. 

These scrap objects are among the tiny minority of broken pieces from our culture that are accorded reverence, while billions of others are destined for the landfill.  Funke reinforces the reverence for the scrap relic with enameled, bronze sculptural pieces that echo the shape and feel of his photograph’s shard subjects. The bronze pieces are installed in close proximity to the photographs and of course, the heroic, memorializing material of bronze elevates the significance of the material remains of Knute Rockne’s final journey.     

In one of his new works, narrow color fields are assembled from thousands of bookended sports trading cards.  This presentation strips away the factual information that the cards were originally intended to communicate. Statistics, players’ identities, card provenance and collectible value are rendered null as each card’s signifying potential is restrained to a millimeter of color. Known quantities become ciphers; value becomes a matter of speculation rather than a predictable factor that is indexed to the outcome of crunched numbers.  Funke pushes viewers to reevaluate what they see.

Benjamin Funke rounds out his contribution to the exhibition with his Swish series.  These are sculptural, mixed media pieces that playfully capture the distorted shape of basketball nets right after the ball has passed through the net.

Walter Early will present a lecture and slide show about his work at Humboldt State University on Friday, February 5 at 5:30 p.m. The lecture will be held in Room 102 in the Art Department building on the Humboldt State University campus.  This event is free to the public and is sponsored by grants from First Street Gallery, the College of Arts Humanities and Social Sciences and the Art Department at Humboldt State University. 

A reception for the artists will be held at HSU First Street Gallery on Saturday, February 6 from 6:00 p.m. to 9:00 p.m. during Eureka’s monthly Arts Alive program.  HSU First Street 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.