The fourth annual Vashon Summer Arts Fest opens with a reception at 5 p.m. Friday, July 2, at Vashon Center for the Arts — the start of a rolling series of exhibitions by local artists that will continue until Aug. 26.
Also starting on July 1, VCA will have expanded gallery hours, from 12 p.m. to 5 p.m. Wednesday through Sunday. The gallery will be open during Strawberry Festival weekend.
Throughout the summer, there will be three more receptions for artists with new work rotating into the Fest, all from 5 to 8 p.m. on Fridays, July 23, Aug. 6 and Aug. 13.
For Lynann Politte, gallery director of VCA, the Summer Arts Fest has become a joyous tradition of welcoming approximately 100 local artists to exhibit their work at the arts center.
“What makes the Summer Arts Fest so unique is that it is inviting to new artists who want to show art, but may not have enough work to fill a full show,” Politte said. “It is also welcoming to established artists who want to show a new body of work to their Vashon community.”
During the Arts Fest, each participating artist will be given a designated wall or floor space to place their art. This year, the fest will add a new exhibition space, for a group of installation artists showing in VCA’s Heron Meadow, behind the arts center.
In all, there will be 38 solo and collaborative exhibitions at this year’s Summer Arts Fest, all created by islanders who range in age and experience, and work in media including fiber arts, oil, watercolor, mixed media, prints, pastels, pottery, and wood.
“You’ll see a first-time emerging artist, as young as 18, showcased alongside an experienced artist in their 60s,” Politte said. “As you move through the gallery and atrium, each wall presents you something new and different.”
Caffe Vino Olio
Photographer David Lynch will exhibit his work, documenting his time spent in Guatemala. The photographer captures the raw essence of the traumatic effects he witnessed in this city of civil war and often dire living conditions, bringing warmth and tenderness to the people captured in his lens.
Puget Sound Cooperative Credit Union
The credit union will open a show of work by Kenny Alton, who creates personal spiritual altars as gifts and artworks as a way, he said, to “help keep the practice of gratitude and heartfelt consciousness consistent in one’s life.” He uses recycled materials and keeps the images archetypal so that viewers and others can bring their own personal beliefs to the alters. For more information, visit altonaltars.blogspot.com.
VALISE
With an artists’ reception that opens at 6 p.m. Friday, July 2, VALISE Gallery will open “Baggage,” a group show of its members’ work that echoes the earliest days of the artist collective when it opened in 2009 in the midst of the Great Recession with a show called “Carry On.”
Now, 12 years later, the artist collective’s name and role as artists in a time of crisis is being explored again in a wide range of styles and media. Participating artists are Gregory Burnham; Dot Cherch; Bill Jarcho; Jesse Johnson; Pascale Judet; Corinne Lightweaver; Rachel Lordkenaga; Robert Passig; Jiji Saunders; Sharon Shaver; Hita von Mende; George Wright and Lenard Yen.
VALISE’s regular hours are 1 to 5 p.m. on Fridays and Saturdays, with masks still required in the gallery.
Also, while walking between VALISE and Gravy restaurant, don’t walk too fast. You might miss a new gallery, that is only 25 inches tall, 20 inches wide and 10 inches deep. It’s the Free Mini-Gallery, the first of its kind on Vashon, and the ongoing show belongs to everyone. It will be open 24/7, year-round. The idea is simple: feel free to take home a piece of art and replace it with one of your own creations.
It’s a continuously rotating exhibition, sponsored by VALISE and constructed by local artist Trish Howard, that invites the community to take a peek, create and participate.
Vashon Senior Center
“Chasing Imperfections: The Wabi-Sabi of Photography” will open at 6 p.m. Friday, July 2, and also have a reception at 6 p.m. Friday, Aug. 6. The show runs through August.
The group show is centered on the aesthetics of appreciating images natural or cultured, simple or complex, mundane or sublime, when they are reflecting either rustic beauty, authenticity, or the passage of time — echoing the sentiment that things and events are imperfect, impermanent, and incomplete, said the show’s organizer and a member of the Senior Center’s Photo Club.
The Photo Club welcomes members of all ages and skill levels. For information, visit photoclubvsc.blogspot.com or email photoclubvsc@gmail.com. Call the Center at 206-463-5173 for additional information on the best time to view the show, outside of the receptions.
Rachel LordKenaga’s painting, “Burdened , Encumbered , Laden , and Weighted” is part of the most recent group exhibition at VALISE Gallery (Courtesy Photo).
