DownStreet Art is a program of
MCLA's Berkshire Cultural Resource Center
Bank Galleries
Mountain One Bank Gallery, 93 Main Street
Jarred Clapp, What is Happy?
In this series of images, Jarred Clapp explores the idea of happiness. Focusing his lens at the natural beauty that surrounds us, the photos in this set were taken over the course of the past few years across Massachusetts. As Jarred says, “everybody sees the world a little differently, the aim of my photography is to give an insight on what it is that I see."
Adams Community Bank Gallery, 31 Eagle Street
Michelle Daly, Silverpoint Drawings
5 - 6 PM
Adams Community Bank Gallery will feature the work of Michelle Daly with an opening reception from 5 to 6 p.m. These silverpoint drawings consist of clusters of oval shapes which reference fingerprints, tree rings, and cells. These shapes are grouped in clusters that are inspired by organizations found in natural systems, infographics and venn diagrams. They serve as a reminder that we are all both unique and constructed of the same base materials.
Julian Grey, Persona Persona combines images from two recent series of self-portraits “Voyeurisme” and “Curb Appeal.” In Voyeurisme, Grey utilizes black and white photography and film noir lighting to express themes of gender and sensuality from a non-binary subject. In “Curb Appeal,” Grey’s richly colored self-portraits use the City of North Adams as a backdrop. Bringing her expressions of non-binary gender from the more intimate interior settings of Voyerisme to the streets so to speak.
Chung Chak, the boxes
Chung Chak’s photomontages connect unrelated persons, events, and environments. Exploring how different levels of meanings can be expressed through complex image layers is an important aspect of the work. Photographic metaphors carry hidden meanings.
Zac Pritchard, Oddities
Zac Pritchard's sculptural works explore humor, loss, death, loneliness and attraction with paper mache, plaster, paints and metals to create human size forms reminiscent of bodies and appendages.
Retrospective
PRESS: Letterpress as a public art project
49 Main Street For more information
PRESS will be highlighting some of our favorite pieces created over the course of our five-years on Main Street. Our final exhibit before we transition to our new location in the recently renovated Bowman Hall is curated and coordinated by 2014 BHIP intern Nicole LeClair. Stay tuned for our closing Waygoozey—a traditional printer celebration.
PLUS at 7:30 we'll have a special announcement!
eat me alive so I may see you from the inside
MCLA Gallery 51
51 Main Street For more information
The exhibition will focus on ideas of consumption and toxicity, both internally and externally.
Maggie Nowinski, primarily working in installation and drawing mediums, will be showing drawings from her ongoing project Antipyretic Abductions. Sculpture and installation artist Alicia Renadette describes herself as “an uneasy interloper exploring middle-class America”. Torsten Zenas Burns will be showing photography and video pieces exploring the development of his characters’ mythologies.
Coded Images: Imagined Codes
Neck of the Woods Gallery
87 Main Street For more information
20th century linguist Kenneth Burke, who identified the two parts of any depiction as the depicted and the depiction. Burke identifies four main tropes – Metaphor, Synecdoche, Metonymy and Irony.
The exhibition includes the work of four ceramic artists - Alex Kraft, Sara McNutt, Carly Costello and Anthony Merino - all of whom align with one of these tropes.
Community HeARTS - Home is where the HeArt is, Common Place Gallery
87 Main Street For more information
Come celebrate and get creative with us! This month we will be featuring projects from groups that we collaborated with:
"NAMAzing People of North Adams, "The NAMAzing Initiative
"Exploring the ArtDoors," UNiTY Youth Development
"Story Dragon," MASS MoCA's Teen Art Summit
Two new Group Shows, Berkshire Artist Museum
159 East Main St.
Summer Hours: Wed-Sun 12PM-5PM
(413) 664-9550 For more information
"Fresh Paint Gallery", recent work by Berkshire artists, "Berkshire Classics", older work by Berkshire artists. The Museum Annex is currently exhibiting "A Chapel for Humanity" and "W.C. Drawings".
Ghetto Garniture: Wu Tang Worcester
1354 MASS MoCA Way
6 - 8 PM For more information
From 6-7pm Roberto will give a multi-media artist talk.
In this solo installation, Roberto Lugo explores eclecticism and culture by juxtaposing street graffiti, European decorative patterning, and rich symbolism drawn from his Puerto Rican heritage. He creates a hybrid of visual art traditions and stimulates new conversations around cultural tolerance. The show features Lugo’s work created during his artist residency at Project Art in Cummington, Massachusetts.
Gudren Mertes-Frady
Cynthia-Reeves
1354 MASS MoCA Way
6 - 8 PM For more information
In this solo painting exhibition of Mertes-Frady work, the grid has become her muse, sending it into a series of haphazard webs that zigzag energetically across the canvasses. By bringing the bold matrix and subtle background together, Mertes-Frady succeeds in creating a new dimension that makes each work ebb and flow.
The Woodlands Collection, Open Studio
Martha Flood Design Studio and Fabric Gallery For more information
Working space and gallery by local artist, Martha Flood who designs and produces The Woodlands Collection, custom manufactured fabrics inspired by natural textures and patterns we encounter in the New England landscape. The nontraditional images are examples of cutting edge pattern design and advanced digital fabric printing technologies. 2013 Yankee Magazine Best of New England, Editor’s Choice Winner.
Installations
Day & Night, Jade Hoyer & Meg Erlewine
Temporary Mural, Main Street Alley For more information
Day and Night, a temporary public art piece, aims to visually and physically re-activate North Adams’ vacant spaces. Imagery depicting active urban spaces features glow-in-the-dark inks and is attached with wheat paste onto empty buildings. Day and Night will invigorate North Adam’s empty spaces at all hours. Jade Hoyer a printmaking artist and Meg Erlewine a graphic designer are both current Tennessee residents. Day and Night is a collaborative project that speaks to the activating potential of art and the resiliency of the North Adams community.
Wall Drawings, Jarvis Rockwell
Gallery 107, 107 Main Street
Rockwell will once again be on hand to show his works-in-progress. “Wall Drawings” include miniature toy figures as well as hand drawn illustrations. Rockwell uses miniature figurines as “smaller distortions” of human beings. He juxtaposes three-dimensional sculptures with two-dimensional drawings to create a realm that is in-between reality and fantasy – his interpretation of a transitional between life and death. He explains that “death is the sloughing off of the three dimensional.” Rockwell hopes to provoke his viewers to question the place where our souls go after death.
Freeman's Grove Benevolent Society
Downtown Edition
109 Main Street For more information
The second installment of Freeman’s Grove Benevolent Society (FGBS) by Michael Chapman. As Chapman describes “A vignette wherein Taxidermy the Taxidermist has been spending countless hours at the Freeman’s Grove Benevolent Society, slaving away on his greatest masterpiece — Cari Boo! With only his rug Bear Fleur as a companion, Taxidermy may be going insane. He is preparing for his biggest reveal yet… as the masses descend upon North Adams from far and wide, they will remember nothing other than the majesty of Cari Boo”.
Participatory Art Projects
ReVision
34-36 Eagle Street
ReVision, a participatory Chalkboard Art Project, continues to elicit responses from the North Adams community. Encouraging participants to share their vision for a future North Adams through four written prompts on each of the four chalkboards installed on Eagle Street. Responses are documented and shared via Facebook, and a blog created for this project at www.revisionnorthadams.tumblr.com.
Francesca Shanks, solo-ukulele wielding-singer/songwriter, likes things direct and straightforward but is also fond of peppering her lyrics with the details of nature—birds swoop through songs about love and divination, fires burn around lost innocence and the claws of a cat are ridden into the night sky.
A prolific songwriter and Berkshire resident, Jeb Barry has written over 4000 songs that roam through all styles of music. Jeb recently released a new lp Milltown in July 2015 featuring the songs “Milltown #2” and “Drag The River."
Last year’s ep, Bury Me In A Lonely Place, featuring the songs “Body In The River” made many top lists for the year, including No Depression’s Readers’ Poll.
Physical Poetry
The Magic is in the Mechanism
Performance Project
8:00PM
Behind 103 Main Street For more information
Gather under the Mohawk Marquee for an introduction.
Creatures of Habitat is a physical poetry performing project based in Western Massachusetts directed and conceived by dance and performance artist Stefanie Lynx Weber.
After Party
Common Jam
Common Folk Artist Collective
9-11PM
87 Main Street For more information
Come jam with us! Got an instrument - bring it. Don't got one...come anyway, we've got tasty treats with jam to snack on!
Tabling
Stop by to see our friends at:
IS183
Clark Art Institute
MASS MoCA
Art About Town
MCLA
Northern Berkshire Community Coalition
Each month, DownStreet Art invites our neighbors to share information about their programs and events.
If you would like to contribute information on this article, contact us at info@iberkshires.com.
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BAAMS' Monthly Studio 9 Series Features Mino Cinelu
NORTH ADAMS, Mass. — On April 20, Berkshires' Academy of Advanced Musical Studies (BAAMS) will host its fourth in a series of live music concerts at Studio 9.
Saturday's performance will feature drummer, guitarist, keyboardist and singer Mino Cinelu.
Cinelu has worked with Miles Davis, Sting, Weather Report, Herbie Hancock, Tracy Chapman, Peter Gabriel, Stevie Wonder, Lou Reed, Kate Bush, Tori Amos, Vicente Amigo, Dizzy Gillespie, Pat Metheny, Branford Marsalis, Pino Daniele, Earth, Wind & Fire, and Salif Keita.
Cinelu will be joined by Richard Boulger on trumpet and flugelhorn, Dario Boente on piano and keyboards, and Tony Lewis on drums and percussion.
Doors open: 6:30pm. Tickets can be purchased here.
All proceeds will help support music education at BAAMS, which provides after-school and Saturday music study, as well as a summer jazz-band day camp for students ages 10-18, of all experience levels.
Also Saturday, the BAAMS faculty presents master-class workshops for all ages, featuring Cinelu, Boulger, Boente, Lewis and bassist Nathan Peck.
More than 300 students from area high schools entered their work in 12th annual Teen Invitational at Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art. click for more
Backed by a $750,000 federal grant for a planning study, North Adams and Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art are looking to undo some of that damage.
click for more
"It wasn't 100 percent consistent but I was afforded the opportunity to get to know other people with different religion, beliefs, backgrounds and culture and to be able to embrace that." click for more
With the area warming up, events are blooming in the Berkshires this weekend, including an egg hunt, live music, fitness events, and more.
click for more
