ARTtrek is set to show paintings, sculptures and other works made by artists local to the region.
It will also be at the parking lot outside Shepherd University’s football stadium April 15 to 16, alongside other student visual art projects.
Senior Abby Bowman came up with the idea of showcasing different kinds of art in a mobile box trailer, dubbed ARTtrek, after talking to one of her professors. ARTtrek is set to show paintings, sculptures and other works made by her and other artists local to the region.
“It’s just all about connecting communities and connecting with our culture overall,” Bowman said. “The box trailer itself will trek through the mountains and connect Appalachian artists together.”
Bowman said she hopes to promote the state’s cultural heritage by introducing more contemporary artists to a wider audience.
“I think our region and our landscapes play a part in that as well, that we’re sheltered in a way from the outside world, which has kept it so rich and so meaningful to each of us,” she said.
The first exhibit on April 7 will showcase paintings of local Shepherdstown monument Shepherd’s Mill, alongside Bowman’s depictions of Appalachian landscapes in quilted sculptures. Works from Shepherd University’s Visual Arts Collection will also be exhibited the following week.
Eventually, Bowman would like to expand the trailer to accommodate emerging student artists across Appalachia.
“I just want it to be an opportunity for any Appalachian artists, whatever their concentration is,” she said. “It’s very hard to get into art galleries and get into shows. You have to pay all this money and it’s very hard especially when you’re a college student already struggling.”
Bowman said she’s trying to organize plans for the trailer to appear at festivals and events throughout the state. Its first appearance is scheduled in Shepherdstown on April 7 and 8 from 1 p.m. to 7 p.m.
Janice Summers-Young is one of two West Virginian artists who were selected for a new exhibit at The Museum of the Shenandoah Valley in Winchester, Virginia. The exhibit, called Second Time Around: The Hubcap as Art, features 287 artists from 36 different countries and opened yesterday.
Young lives in the community of Queen Shoals, about a mile from the Elk River, right on the line between Kanawha and Clay Counties. By day, she and her husband Terry work for their construction business. Most weekends they spend hiking, camping, and collecting materials that Young uses in collages that are on display throughout their home.
“I’ve always loved art, and I’ve always done some form of art, and tried to make my whole life a kind of art,” said Young.
When Young and her husband began to build their home, they discovered fossils in the rocks that they dug out of the dirt. So they decided to use the fossilized stones to build the exterior of their home.
“The area had been coal mined quite a bit, some years back. We started building our house here, we started hand-picking our stones from where we had dug here, the excavation, the stones we turned up, and also stones along the creek bank, because they’re rich in fossils. And I also wanted it to look like this house fit here,” said Young.
Credit Roxy Todd
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Young with one of her collage pieces
Young’s art, like her home, also includes objects from nature, from wasp nests that are preserved with porcelain, to pieces of driftwood that are constructed into circular collages, inspired by whirlpools she finds in rivers.
She also finds imaginative ways to incorporate pieces of trash that other people dump in the woods, like using scrap wire to shape into trees.
Her work drew the attention of Pennsylvania artist Ken Marquis, founder of the Landfill Arts Project. He invited Young to submit a piece of art for a new exhibit, which opened on September 7th. Over 1,000 artists from around the world were given a hubcap. Each of them repurposed their hubcap in their own way. Young was one of a few hundred artists whose piece was selected for the exhibit.
“When I got the hubcap, the first thing that entered my mind was the driftwood piece, inside the hubcap. I’ve seen so many hubcaps in the river. And I’ve watched them pop off the hill and roll down into the river.
And there’s swirlholes where the whirlpools land, and they’re circular. And they’ll have little bits of wood or stones collect inside of them, said Young.”
The Landfill Arts Project organized the exhibit to help encourage the public to think creatively about re-purposing old materials. What one person might consider trash, artists like Janice Young see as materials that can be used to create.
Credit Roxy Todd
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Painting of an owl, by Janice Summers-Young
“I thought it was a really really neat project that’s gonna have that many people from all around participating in something that I’m passionate about. You know, just not wasting so much and trying to reuse as much as possible. No, we can’t all be environmental saints, but any little thing that we can do all adds up eventually,” said Young.
Young says she doesn’t consider herself an environmentalist. But as a West Virginian artist, she does feels inspired by the delicate beauty of the mountains and the rivers. Often, it’s a beauty that she thinks is abused.
Credit Roxy Todd
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Part of one of Young’s paintings
When she sees trash in the river, she picks it up, and tries to turn it into art. Now, that art will be on display in a museum, surrounded by the works of artists from across the world. All 287 of them are tied together by the willingness to create– out of the waste that most people call trash.
Young and another West Virginian artist, Romney Shelton Collins, will both have their hubcap art on display at The Museum of the Shenandoah Valley in Winchester, Virginia through next March. The museum is open Tuesday-Sunday, 10-4.
The sculptures of West Virginia artist, Cherese Weaver, are quite stunning. You don’t just look at them as much as you feel that they are looking at you. And when they look at you, it’s like that person you meet who sees you for who you really are. That’s how powerful these pieces are.
She has captured something primal, like lost civilizations, with a gallery of faces that may be the gods and goddesses of the mythic imagination of antiquity.
These are Jungian archetypes, the dreams of artists living millennia ago, that she has brought forth through her voracious interest in archeology, anthropology and theology.
I believe that she has tapped into something real; meaning these faces are part of the Collective Unconscious.
At an exhibit, a historian pointed out that she was making Jōmon pottery and yet she had no knowledge of that period.
This all sounds otherworldly, yes? I believe there’s an element of that present.
So, take the tour of the pictures and listen to the interview.
“I am always doing what I cannot yet do, in order to learn how to do it.” ― van Gogh
Soft, watery, Impressionistic, veiled, implied, nuanced: these might be descriptions of the art of Sharon Lynn Stackpole.
She describes her style as “being all over the map” and indeed the pieces have a broad palate of styles. Still, there is a unity and a recognizable style to her work.
What does it mean? Well, that can vary both in message and depth. Speech recalls a traumatic childhood issue with speaking; thus the overwhelming proliferation of words around a Munch-like foreground figure. The delicate grace of Watery Fish reflects just a love and fascination with aquatic life and environs. In A Moment’s Hesitation, the gesture is more enigmatic as if to say, “You, the viewer, must discern the meaning.” This is an artist who goes with the flow and follows where she believes the piece wants to take her. To let the piece evolve at its own pace.
"I try to get out of my own way and not think too much when I'm in the zone. It's kind of like being a leaf in the river. I'm just going along the current and letting it happen."
Which brings up the general discussion of meaning. Do you need an obvious narrative for the art to speak to you? In my experience, I am more often wrong than right in discerning the meaning of a work. That used to confound me, but now I see it as an unexpected surprise and pleasure. When I have the delight of freely wandering a gallery, my pulse quickens as I anticipate that epiphany when a work speaks to me.
To paraphrase the great Joseph Campbell, perhaps we are not looking for specific meaning in art, but rather to have the artistic experience. To be drawn out of one’s self, to surrender, to be swept up in another’s imagination. The world of art awaits our presence – we only need to look.
Sharon talks about her style, process and her thoughts on rules.
The artist talks about the works, Speech and Watery Fish. She lets us know, in a very unguarded moment, about a childhood struggle and how artistic honesty might help others.
“Anybody who wants to carve a mold, we have some right here,” WVU sculpture area coordinator Dylan Collins said to a crowd who gathered. “It’s going to be just like a cooking show! You see your ingredients there, art will get made here. So don’t be shy! And, Welcome! Let me know what you need!”
Credit Justin Steiner
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The inaugural iron pour of ‘Sputnik,’ the portable iron furnace, was both very cool and very hot at the same time…
It was a cool day—downright cold in the shade when the wind blew, but the iron furnace, pet-named Sputnik, fired up pretty quickly and was soon melting iron. The event lasted well into the darker hours, with pour teams pouring some 1,500 lbs of iron.
“This kind of started with myself and my friend Jeremy Entwistle, the sculpture program coordinator at Fairmont State University,” Collins explains. “We’ve been working collaboratively for the last year, going to cast iron conferences, getting our students together to work collaboratively together casting in iron, and we thought it would be a great idea to make a furnace where we could get a lot of metal out.”
Entwistle already has a furnace at Fairmont State but it doesn’t have as much capacity as Sputnik. So the idea was to create a larger furnace that would also be portable and go on the road for various iron casting events in the region.
They set to work, and the beauty of getting sculptors to build, well … anything, is that they consider beauty while designing. And Sputnik is certainly a fun thing to look at!
“It looks like a machine that has landed from another planet,” Collins said. Thus the spacecraft-based nickname.
Graduate sculpture student Megan Gainer said many sand molds were in the works for weeks leading up to the iron pour. She said invitations to collaborate were also sent out to other schools and community members.
“And we’ve invited a couple other universities, I believe there’s Shepherdstown, Fairmont, and even Virginia Tech here,” Gainer said, “as well as a couple other people from the community, and later today there will be a couple people from the Tamarak Foundation coming to see what we’re doing.”
Local businesses, including Construction Supply Company (CSC), 3 Rivers Iron and Metal, and Jack’s Recycling, contributed to the WVU Iron Pour event by donating materials and supplies.
The Iron Pouring Process:
Heat furnace with coke to get it up to temperature. (Coke is coal that has been cooked in an anaerobic environment.)
Once up to temperature, begin filling it with charges. (Charges are buckets of premeasured broken up iron, and more coke.)
Repeat. Continue to feed the furnace and the well inside starts to build up molten metal.
Tap out the little bot that keeps the metal held back, and let ‘er flow down a trough into ladles (high temperature cups)
Pour teams distribute hot metal into premade resin-bonded sand molds.
Collins says the sand molds are the handiwork of students, faculty, alumni, and members of the public. He says and that the object of the day is not only to make art, but also to celebrate history. “We’ve kind of merged the past and the present,” Collins said. “We’re bringing together these two different eras and helping people engage with this really rich industrial history which is a real mark of the culture here.”
Collins hopes to be able to take Sputnik around the region, celebrating history and art, beginning with a trip to Fairmont State in the near future.
