• If you’re tired of work made by people with MFAs being billed as folk art, go to the current exhibit at the Asheville Area Arts Council’s Front Gallery. The show comes from The Open Hearts Art Center, pieces done by local adults with mental, physical, developmental and emotional disabilities. They show joyful self-portraits, colorful abstractions, innovative sculpture and collage—including one collage, by artist Merlin, that uses Japanese cartoons as a departure point.
• Lauren Gibbes’ first New York exhibit will put her in the room with some art-world heavy-hitters: She’ll be showing at the Cynthia Broan Gallery with Janet Biggs, Beverly McIver, Suzanne McClelland, Dr. Lowery Stokes Sims and the late Mae Wilson, among others.
• Bernie Hauserman may be best known for his innovative directing at Asheville Community Theatre, but he wears his painter hat in his work about dreams in the back part of the Arts Council’s Front Gallery. The theater is clearly an important part of his subconscious, evinced in wonderful masks and two lively circus paintings. The whole installation speaks of adventure and discovery.
• The Scholastic Art Show in Pack Place Gallery boasts the commitment of area junior-high and high-school teachers, as well as the work of their students. Mary Alice Ramsey’s 10th-grader Cecily Anderson shows a rhythmic little mixed-media work called “Dancers,” and eighth-grader Charles Payton exhibits a toothy D-Form sculpture; his teacher is Cathy Mills. Freedom High School’s John Hilston has a 12th-grade student with two outstanding works: Katie Kath’s “Cow” is a mixed-media piece, and her “Coming Apart at the Seams” is sculpture. All this aside, there’s still the question of the appropriateness of art being about competition.
• Urban artists sometimes consider a subway train a blank canvas. Satellite Gallery has given 20 or so local participants the opportunity to decorate or otherwise alter 18-inch subway-car models. It may be our last chance to see work by Dustin Spagnola—he’s moving to Japan on Feb. 25.
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