Humboldt State University First Street Gallery presents, Laughter in Darkness, a group exhibition featuring paintings by Seana Burden, Jeff Jordan and Jesse Wiedel. All three artists currently reside on California’s North Coast.

Each artist uses contrasting elements of familiarity and imagination in order to create thought-provoking, humorous experiences for the viewer. A common thread tying their work together is the mash-up approach of blending imagery drawn from direct observation, contemporary media, traditional landscape and fictional spaces. The artists often combine realistic approaches with dream-like passages that yield images that are at once familiar yet unsettling.

Seana Burden’s paintings address two subjects, sometimes blending the two: romance as portrayed in Pop Culture and the dichotomous role of women and how they are portrayed in contemporary and traditional society. Her romantic and socially conscious paintings have a folk-art quality that is enthusiastically detailed.  With the use of glitter in her paint, storybook references exemplifying our culture’s attachment to stereotypical female ideals and consumer culture, she makes paintings that project trenchant, yet whimsical social commentary. 
Jeff Jordan is widely known for his charged imagery on the album covers of numerous bands, such as Mars Volta, Protest The Hero, and Leprous. His surrealist style humorously celebrates the human condition within a broad context of politics, history and technology.  He blends everyday subject matter and absurd imagery, realistically rendered, to create a thought-provoking dialogue between the work and the viewer. Jordan’s craft incorporates a sophisticated, complex use of color and his allusions to Art History emphatically underscore his life-long devotion to painting.       
Jesse Wiedel’s paintings expose the unsettling, stranger-than-fiction feeling that can be evoked by the mundane. In using quotidian settings from California and the American West and populating them with vividly rendered depictions of people at the margins of society, living in the streets, meth addicts and the lumpenproletariat, his works arouse shock but also laughter in the viewer. Within his narrative scenes, a grotesque, often humorous, yet uncannily familiar rendition of street life resides.

Laughter in Darkness is produced by Humboldt State University students enrolled in the Museum and Gallery Practices Program. HSU First Street Gallery provides real-life opportunities for the students to develop their gallery and museum skills, which in turn provides them with the experience that will help them enter the job market. Many students who have participated in the program have gone on to pursue careers in museums and galleries throughout the nation.

Exhibition Schedule
Laughter in Darkness will run from April 1 through May 18. The opening reception for the artists coincides with Eureka’s Arts Alive program on Saturday April 5 from 6-9 p.m. An open house will be held on May 3 for the closing of the show, from 6-9 p.m. First Street Gallery is open Tuesday through Sunday from 12-5pm and is located at 422 First Street in Old Town Eureka. For more information please call (707) 443-6363.

Humboldt State University’s First Street Gallery presents, Nightwatch, a collection of mixed media works and photographs by Seattle artist Ellen Garvens on display January 31 through March 2. Currently a professor of art at the University of Washington in Seattle, Garvens’ work has earned her national and international acclaim in solo and group exhibitions.

Currently, Garvens uses photography, drawing and mixed media to depict various domestic settings in her immediate environment.  She manipulates her images using digital techniques and drawing techniques to arrange the imagery so as to reflect her internal, poetic experience, rather than producing a rote, documentary recording of the photographic moment.

Inspired by sleepless wanderings around her home at night and the altered perspective of objects illuminated by filtered streetlight, her Nightwatch series developed into an internal investigation about perceptual shifts and uncertainty. The works describe ambiguous, nocturnal spaces in which the somnambulist encounters reassuring, domestic passages of imagery that emerge slowly while feeling her way through darkened spaces, yielding small visual hints of familiar images and clarity along the way.

Viewers of this exhibition can shamble through the inner workings of the artist's poetic imagination, just as Garvens wanders through her house at night.

The exhibition also features selected works from some of Garvens’ past series. One of which, is her Ambivalence Series, whichled her to larger, complex political and ethical conclusions about landmines and the effects of war.
 
After discovering a closetful of long-abandoned human prostheses, Garvens was drawn to the anthropomorphic shapes and smooth edges of the artificial limbs and body parts. As she further immersed herself in the subject, the project developed to an international level where Garvens undertook the photo-documentation of clinics in Southeast Asia, which treated landmine victims. Her well-known photographic series, Ambivalence , chronicles her investigation of prostheses and the loss of human limbs and body parts.  The series focuses on clinics in Cambodia, Laos, and other landmine and poverty-stricken Asian countries.  Nearly forty years after official cessation of hostilities in Viet Nam, Cambodia and Laos the people of Southeast Asia still suffer from landmines that were left behind by the combatants.

Ellen Garvens will present a lecture and slide show about her work at Humboldt State University on Friday, January 31.  The lecture will be held in Room 102 in the Art Department Building on the Humboldt State campus.  The lecture is free to the public. A reception for the artist will be held at HSU First Street Gallery on Saturday, February 1 from 6:00 p.m. to 9:00 p.m. during Eureka’s monthly Arts Alive event. The event is free and open to the public. 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. 

Conceptually hovering between different materials and methods has been an inspiration and driving force in my projects. My earlier work has been both 2D and 3D, the most recent work (the Valence Series) is drawing and photographic collage.  The subjects are from my surroundings, i.e., cups, food scraps, surfaces or spaces that form my immediate environment. Things are often recognizable but are also ungrounded, hidden or veiled.  It is about flux and uncertainty, and looking for things that might be revealed in the gaps and perceptual shifts. All of the work favors the unknown.    

The Nightwatch Series started when sleeplessly wandering around the house one night. The streetlight seeped in through the windows illuminating surfaces and objects. My perspective shifted radically under this light and connected events and thoughts differently.

Everybody knows what a house does, how it encloses space and makes connections between one enclosed space and another and presents what is outside in a new way.  This is the nearest I can come to explaining what a story does for me, and what I want my stories to do for other people.
Alice Munroe

In this quote Alice Munroe illuminates my own process of making work: quite literally using a house as a frame of reference but also metaphorically in the virtual space of the computer. I digitally connect and arrange images to both hide and reveal new viewpoints.  The shape of the final image encourages scrolling horizontally across the picture plane, peering through imaginary windows and noticing objects as if walking through a new uncertain place.

Similar themes are found in all the work selected for the show, which includes examples from my drawings and photography over the last 10 years.

Ellen Garvens
Winter 2014

Artist statements are as varied as the artists themselves. And they change, as they should, as the artist matures. Like many young painters I was more interested in having something to say and trying to make a difference than in the work itself. I have found through time that the body of work and the life of observation have become the most important thing. The journey is the destination. The act of painting is the message. All I want to say is, “Look around and see the world we live in.”

Stock Schlueter
Autumn, 2014

Humboldt State University First Street Gallery presents, Being Here, a solo exhibition of landscape paintings by Stock Schlueter. Being Here opens Tuesday, November 25 and runs through Tuesday, December 23. Stock Schlueter has been painting the landscape, primarily focusing on Northern California as his subject, for over 45 years. In his studio in downtown Eureka and on location, Schlueter works only under natural light. With a deep understanding of color and light, while employing a contemporary edge in his composition, Schlueter expertly portrays Northern California’s natural beauty.

The connection between artist Stock Schlueter and his subject matter has had a profound impact on his success. As a youth, raised in remote Willow Creek, California, surrounded by vast forests, mountains and rivers, Schlueter spent his free time exploring uncharted territory. His initial appreciation for the natural world paved the way to his future success as an artist. Schlueter states, “I crawled around in the mountains all my life. The landscape is a big part of my own upbringing and of my soul. I spent so much time in it. I don’t have to imagine what a madrone tree looks like. I know exactly what it looks like.”

Schlueter’s early years in Northern California led him to College of the Redwoods in Eureka, California where he was an athlete, focusing primarily in football, wrestling and track. He earned a full-ride athletic scholarship to the University of Northern Colorado. Majoring in art, he took every art class available, but describes his greatest training as “just being a painter”. Upon graduation from the University of Northern Colorado, he moved back to California’s North Coast and began working with his father in the forest as a timber faller. Soon realizing that working full-time compromised his real passion to make art, he traded it all in to paint full-time. In fact, he spent about five years living out of his truck and camper, painting outside, and coming to nearby Arcata, California, to occasionally exhibit his works. It took about five years of this before Schlueter decided to settle down and get a studio.

Schlueter’s appreciation for the simple life is reflected in the world in which he surrounds himself. Nestled away in his cozy studio in Old Town, Eureka, he places his easel directly under a skylight, refusing to paint under anything but natural light. “I really don’t like artificial light. It changes the colors… I’m really tuned into the natural light process.”

Stock Schlueter’s paintings, which depict the landscape of Northern California, offer a subtle array of qualities concerned with both subject matter and a pure love of design. Initially, these scenes strike the viewer as beautiful, realistic renditions of the countryside replete with intriguing trees, attractive skyscapes, bodies of water and country roads. The eye is then drawn toward the depth of the spaces created here and the liveliness they lend to the interplay of those compositional elements. This magnetic quality of his work owes to the fact that underlying his subjects is a masterful, modern approach to composition and design.

Stock Schlueter: Being Here, is partially funded by a grant from the Humboldt Art Council Beverly Faben Artist Fund and by generous community donors.

The exhibition will run from November 25 through December 23. A public reception for the artist will be held during Eureka Main Street’s Arts Alive on Saturday, December 6th from 6 to 9 p.m. First Street Gallery is open to the public Tuesday through Sunday, from noon to 5 p.m. HSU First Street Gallery will be closed on Thanksgiving Day and on November 28. 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.

Watch the Documentary

Humboldt State University’s First Street Gallery presents, The Spider and the Fly, a collection of prints and mixed media drawings by artist Gail Wight on display April 1 to May 18.  Currently a Professor of Art at Stanford University, Wight’s work has earned her national and international recognition in solo and group exhibitions.

Wight is inspired by the natural world and the way that it is perceived by humanity. She depicts human, animal, plant and other species in order to reveal the patterns and effects of biological convergence. Sculpture, video, interactive media and print are Wight’s primary mediums, which she liberally uses to explore themes of evolution, art, biology, cognition and animal sentience. Recently her work has focused on the concept of time, unlocking the desire for a better understanding of the unknowable past.

The combination of scientific and philosophical approaches in her mixed-media work connects ideas about so-called reality and the subconscious.  Her art explores the dynamism between nature and human innovation, using new technology and unique methods that reinvent traditional approaches in making visual art.

Wight’s work re-examines human perceptions, concepts of science and nature through the creation of a variety of experiments, physical objects, and performances. The current exhibition at HSU First Street Gallery includes, Solar Burn, aseries inspired by scientific experiments done in the 1940s in which spiders were given a variety of drugs and then released to spin their drug-influenced webs. In an uncanny fashion, the spiders, through their spider web designs, expressed the unique effects of the drugs they were a given.  Using a magnifying glass and light, Gail Wight burns the line of their intricately woven patterns (made under the influence of such drugs as caffeine, marijuana and LSD) into translucent paper. In some places along the line of the drawings, a small hole may randomly burn through the paper, which allows a refraction of light to pass through. When hung before a light source, the pieces achieve high visual interest as they spectrally divide the light passing through the drawings.  The resulting pieces describe, in a mimetic fashion, the altered state that the respective drugs may induce.  The drawings alternatively remind us of how science is often manipulated in service of ideology.

In the artist’s most recent digital prints, which are presented in this exhibition, she creates intricate, floral-like images using composite scans of fly wings and insect parts, resulting in playful, intricate depictions of complex of organic phenomena.

Gail Wight will present a lecture and slide show about her work at Humboldt State University on Friday, April 4 at 5 p.m. The lecture will be held in Room 102 in the Art Department building on the Humboldt State Campus.  This event is free to the public.  A reception for the artist will be held at HSU First Street Gallery on Saturday, April 5 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.  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.

Working primarily in sculpture, video, interactive media and print, I attempt to construct biological allegories that tease out the impacts of life sciences on the living: human, animal, and other. The interplay between  art and biology, theories of evolution, cognition and the animal state-of-being are themes that have, over the last two decades, become central to my art. Recently, my imagination has fixed on the topic of deep time. I find myself craving a better understanding of the unknowable past. What were the sounds and smells of the Mesozoic? What was it like to rock back and forth in a Cambrian sea? I look at the ground differently as I walk, feeling time receding miles below its surface. I try to imagine ancient shorelines in desert patches and swamps covering barren plateaus. It seems so relevant, speeding along a freeway constructed of pulverized river beds and seashells. I’m looking for prolonged chords, where the deep past resonates in the present.

The fossil record for insects dates back approximately 400 million years. Often, when I find an expired fly on my studio windowsill, I’m comforted by the knowledge that these small creatures will most likely be glancing their way around spider webs long after the human-centric environment outside my window has disappeared. There’s a lovely concept in biology called “convergence”, which attempts to explain the emergence of similar characteristics among vastly different plants and animals. In The Spider and the Fly, I toy with the visual manifestations of convergence, and hint at potential psychological similarities.

BIO 
Gail Wight holds an MFA in New Genres from the San Francisco Art Institute where she was a Javits Fellow, and a BFA from the Studio for Interrelated Media at Massachusetts College of Art. Her exhibition record includes over a dozen solo exhibits throughout North America and Great Britain, and her work has been collected by numerous institutions including the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Yale University, and Centro Andaluz de Art Contemporaneo, Spain. Among her many artist residencies are western Australia’s Symbiotica, Art & Archaeology at Stonehenge, the Rockefeller Foundation in Bellagio, and San Francisco’s Exploratorium. Wight is an Associate Professor in Stanford University’s Department of Art & Art History, where she directs Experimental Media Arts in the Art Practice program. Her work is represented by Patricia Sweetow Gallery in San Francisco.

Humboldt State University First Street Gallery presents, "The Universe Unfolded", an exhibition of art featuring a variety of mixed media works by Ananda Oliveri. The exhibition will run from January 31st through March 2, 2014.

In his most ambitious exhibition to date, "The Universe Unfolded" presents an array of new and recent acrylic pieces as well as mixed-media interactive installations. Oliveri paints on uncommon surfaces such as Plexiglas, mirrors, and the walls themselves. The artist also uses optical effects to literally immerse the viewer into the work. This combination of installation and select works interact with the physical gallery space to encompass the viewer within his art.

The implicit narrative of "The Universe Unfolded" is largely based on the theory of technological singularity, or the Post-Artificial Intelligence world.  This narrative is created artistically through diverse materials and recurrent motifs. Repetition is used in many aspects of this exhibition to create an intersection of random determination and systematic order showing in recurring motifs such as triangles or infinite reflections of mirrors facing one another. 

Ananda Oliveri’s work blends highly conceptual approaches with an urban aesthetic. Using spray paint and large-scale origami, the artist draws from many cultural influences to accompany his narratives of transformation, fate and chaos in our current, and future, globalized world.

Currently working and living on California’s North Coast, Ananda Oliveri has shown in many of Eureka, California’s gallery spaces. He has also shown his works throughout California and nationally. A resourceful artist, gallery owner and curator, he partially funded this collection of work successfully using the fund raising platform, Kickstarter.

There will be a gallery reception for the artist, whichwill take place at HSU First Street Gallery on February 1st from 6-9pm 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.

The artist’s goal often is to create not only a language with which to express one's self but also a realm, which is negotiated by said language. Over the course of creating the work in my current exhibition, The Universe Unfolded, I discovered that my influences and interests, no matter how disparate, had converged to do just that. The further I dove into the narrative I was creating the more I realized that there was nothing that couldn’t be utilized in rounding out my language, my realm.

Sequential art, architecture, cartography, science fiction, origami all had a role to play in the universe I was creating–a role that was cast long before the universe came to be. It is with this realization that I saw the endless possibility of expanding on what started out as a handful of unrelated paintings into a cohesive body each providing a glimmer of the whole.

This understanding echoed the major theme of the work itself–transformation, change, evolution. I have, in a way, been transformed by this realization. I am excited to continue to build upon this, to make my universe more and more complete. New characters, new locales, new narratives spring to mind continuously, begging to be cast as a new painting or sculpture or collage. For the time being the stage is set with this permutation of my realm, my universe. Enjoy.

Ananda Oliveri, 
February, 2014

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.