Hoss Haley's new fountain at Pack Square Park is pretty fan-damn-tastic, and Asheville's latest art and craft fair will be staged around it and the recently completed Vance Monument area of the park.
While one might think Asheville's reached a critical mass of such fairs, it seems our town has a deep love of all things handmade. We love our indie craft fairs and our grand traditions like the biannual Guild fair, but it seems new shows are evolving all the time.
So begins Art in the Park, a three-Saturday series of October events. The idea was to get Asheville's professional artists out of their studios and bring 'em downtown, says co-organizer Jason Probstein, whose been working on putting the show together for more than a year. Art in the Park will feature Pottery, jewelry, sculpture, glass, ceramics, woodworking, metal-smithing, the fabric arts and two-dimensional media of all sorts.
Plus, ten percent of sales will go to a different nonprofit each week. The first show, on Saturday, Oct. 3, will be dedicated to Mountain BizWorks. Probstein cites the group's Mountain Made gallery in the Grove Arcade as an important resource for local artists, along with the big boost they've given to those starting out, including his own Probstein Studios.
The shows will run from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. on October 3, 10 and 17. Info at www.artintheparkasheville.com.
And speaking of rad art events, local art/craft/kitsch heroine Suzie Millions has a rare art show of new work going up this month. Millions is constantly inventing, reinventing and creating new projects from found materials, making them as zesty and crisp as a crinoline. She's got a particular spark. The opening is Friday, Oct. 2, from 6 to 8 p.m. at Eclipse Salon on Wall Street. The show will be up all month.
One more show to note: Here's a dispatch from arts writer Ursula Gullow about the current show at Flood Gallery. "The works in Karen Havens' solo show are untitled, but their intent is obvious. The exhibit of sculptural installations and 2D works entitled USED, brilliantly reveals the complicated relationship between the emotional being and the physical body. …
The work is decidedly female (not to be confused with feminine). While there are some applications of pink here and there, the way Haven interprets the female body goes far beyond traditional depictions of the soft and submissive forms we've become accustomed to in classical Western Art. …
Much of the work evokes a female psyche that struggles to make sense of pornographic imagery, memories and the objectification of the female sex. 'I didn't know you had a sister' is scrawled out on one photocopied piece. In others, photocopied erotic imagery is repeated and layered upon itself just enough that that it becomes an abstraction without obscuring the original image.
Havens' show USED will be on display through Oct. 6 at the Flood Gallery in the Phil Mechanic building."
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