This Friday is our last day of camp! It’s been a wonderful session brimming with creativity, and we will surely miss this flock of young artists! To celebrate the amazing work that your children have put into the last four weeks, we’ll be having an exhibition and party on Friday, July 10 in our community gallery and ceramics studio.
Morning session 12:15 – 1 pm
Afternoon session: 3:45 – 4:30 pm
Parents, friends and family are all welcome. We’ll have light refreshments; feel free to bring a snack or fingerfood to share. Also don’t forget to bring a box and/or bag to collect all your child’s work at the end of the exhibition!
Thanks to your votes, we were named “Best Community Arts Center” in the East Bay Express’ 2014 Best of the East Bay readers’ poll. This year, help us bring home the prize in the “Best Art Gallery” category by filling out an online survey here.
Our Art in the Community program has begun its summer schedule! Thanks to the EdFund, the summer camps held at Richmond community centers have grown to four sites this year. Artists Marie Kamali and Chris Castle will be teaching at Booker T. Anderson, Parchester, Nevin and Shields-Reid community centers.
Thank you to all of our volunteers for helping us out with Upcycle, our opening and closing receptions and for helping out with gallery installations! We would like to give a special thanks to Mary Gillis who is an extraordinary force transitioning our galleries from start to finish! Thank you Mary! You ROCK!
Thank you to all of our volunteers who were able to attend the Tea with Volunteers meeting on April 30th. It was a hot Spring day, but was nice underneath the shady trees in the Courtyard. Our open discussion was really helpful and allowed the volunteers to speak freely about their ideas and suggestions. We will definitely implement some of those ideas and keep an open door policy with our volunteers because you matter in a major way!
Art in the Community Director Rebeca Garcia-Gonzalez shares an update on the conclusion of the Annual Student Show and the beginning of the program’s popular STEAM Camps:
About the Art in the Community Show:
Our Art in the Community student show concluded this Saturday, May 30. The work will be returned to students this week, before public school ends. The work made by Washington Elementary will go on tour, thanks to Point Richmond artist Virginia Rigney. The pieces will be shown at Jubilee and Interactive Resources over the next weeks.
At no cost to you, your online purchases can help support the Art Center!
We all buy stuff on-line. It’s easy and convenient. With a tiny bit of advance planning, you can designate the Richmond Art Center as the recipient of a donation each time you buy. Your purchase price will not be increased; the donation comes from the company from which you are buying. Here are two ways to make this happen:
As we enter into the final week of Mildred Howard: Spirit and Matter, the Huffington Post’s Jane Vandenburgh has published a lively and thought-provoking piece on the exhibit. Vandenburgh concludes, “If you haven’t seen this show, don’t miss the chance. If you have had the pleasure, you may well want to go again, as as with all great things there’s really so much more to see.” Mildred Howard: Spirit and Matter closes on Sunday, May 24 with a reception from 3:00 to 5:00pm. Read the full Huffington Post piece here:
Our Cinco de Mayo parade will never be the same again! Not only was the Richmond Art Center one of the parade’s official sponsors for the first time ever, the partnership between our Art in the Community programs and the Peace and Unity Cinco de Mayo Parade Committee resulted in two colorful floats and lots of community participation.
The floats were designed and built by Latino families from San Pablo and Richmond who attended a free, eight week float design class taught by teaching artists Neil Rivas and Patricia Rodríguez. The idea behind this class was to get teens involved in a civic effort that would encourage them to learn about the parade’s history, submit a proposal for a public art piece, and take an idea through the entire design process. The classes were possible thanks to the generosity of the San Pablo Koshland Fellows and the parade’s steering committee.
The art of more than a thousand students is on display during the Center’s 3rd Annual Art in the Community Student Show, running through Friday, May 29. To celebrate the exhibition’s opening, a free, public opening reception was held on Sat., May 9, from 3:00 to 5:00 p.m.
This year the show doubled in size, featuring the ceramics, digital prints, metal works, prints, screen prints, murals, super hero costumes, floats, paintings, zines, collages, stop motion animation and mosaics of our after school and residency programs. More than 18 Richmond, San Pablo and El Sobrante sites were represented.
Mildred Howard’s quasi-retrospective installation of assemblages, mixed media prints, collages, and sculptures at the Richmond Art Center is elegantly spare and richly reverberant. If you stand at the entrance and squint the show falls softly into place. We intuit this to be an organic whole, an assemblage of assemblages. While the gallery space is not very big, its reputation as a decades-long outpost for noteworthy Northern California art precedes it, adding a buzz to the atmosphere. A few well-positioned red walls incite a modernist semaphore, signaling the era from which Howard’s works emerge. She is a modern artist, of course, but from its wing of conceptual collage, which draws mostly upon photo-and-other-graphic impressions from the not-so-distant past, her family’s. She also draws upon a kind of thrift, hand-me-down, or secondhand material culture for the assembling of her sculptures.
