Area artists put their best work on display at four galleries

If your idea of a good evening out involves art exhibits, food and drink, and lots of fellow art lovers, tonight is the night for you: Gallery receptions are being held at the Arts Council of Southeast Missouri, the Southeast Missouri State University Museum, the Garden Gallery and the Schock Community Arts Center.

The galleries will feature a wide range of art -- everything from quilts and paintings to installation pieces and bongo drums.

Although area galleries usually open their exhibits on the first Friday of the month, only the Arts Council has a new exhibit every month. Luckily for art lovers, April just happened to be a busy time for all the galleries.

At the Arts Council there will be 45 quilts by members of the local River Heritage Quilters Guild on display this month.

This is the fifth time since 1990 that the guild has exhibited its work at the Arts Council.

A portion of the exhibit includes work from the guild's "Crayola Crayon Challenge," where each member had to create a quilt based on the color of a crayon picked at random.

Arts Council spokeswoman Chelsea Bowerman said they are expecting a busy night because of the other receptions.

"There's so many things to do, it draws people out," she said.

Over at the Garden Gallery the work of young area artists Myka Bohnsack, Tim Chisman, Lauren Hirschburg and Melissa Parrot will be on display.

Bohsack, who currently is working toward her art degree from Southeast Missouri State University, is the daughter of Garden Gallery's owner, Linda Bohnsack.

It was Myka who first brought the other artists to her mother's attention after she saw the work of Hirschburg and Parrot at the university.

All four exhibitors know one other from Central High School in Cape Girardeau, and all of them except Bohnsack graduated from Southwest Missouri State University in Springfield.

Each has his or her own specialty, though.

Chisman works with ceramics and makes bongo drums, Parrot is a printmaker, Hirschburg works with metal and Bohnsack is primarily a painter.

"It's nice that they can all support each other," Linda Bohnsack said.

Since she opened the gallery about seven months ago, Bohnsack said her primary focus has been giving young artists who are just starting out a place to exhibit their work.

Bohnsack said Cape Girardeau may have had a reputation of not supporting the arts in the past, but this has changed over the last year or so, with the creation of the Schock Community Arts Center in Scott City and the Arts Council's new, larger location.

"The arts council got the momentum going, so people were thinking more about art than the previous year, and that's a positive step," she said.

Paul Schock, the man behind the Schock Community Arts Center, said the number of student exhibitions and the places they exhibit has increased in the 2 1/2 years he has been teaching art at the university.

It used to be that students would just display their work in the art building's hallways, but now they are excited to have it shown outside of the school.

Schock said he even has had some students discuss the possibility of renting spaces to display their work.

Friday's reception at the Schock Center opens the "Salon des Refuse" show. All the work on display is by Southeast students whose work was not chosen to be part of the university's Student Juried Art Assessment Exhibition.

There are more than 100 pieces by more than 50 students on display at the Salon show.

"It will be a nice, big night for the students," Schock said. "It allows the students to really expose themselves to the public and educate other individuals in what art can be."

At the University Museum, the work that was chosen by visiting judge Josephine Stealey from the University of Missouri at Columbia will be on display.

Last week Stealey chose 89 pieces from the work of 160 art majors. At tonight's reception Stealey will choose eight merit winners and one best-of-show winner of the exhibition.

The 89 pieces on display include work from the paintings, ceramics, fibers, graphic design, sculpture, drawing and new-genre studios.

"It think it's our best show ever," said art professor and department chairperson Patricia Reagan.

Reagan said the students' work has been growing stronger since the creation of a bachelor of fine arts degree at the university several years ago.

The art majors have to complete up to 80 hours of art courses, and all that hard work has started to show up in the work they produce.

"It's just getting tighter and better," she said.

After the awards are presented at 5 p.m., Reagan said students and faculty take advantage of all the artwork on display at other galleries and usually wind up the night at the Schock Center.

"These exhibits now on First Fridays are really crowded. I can't even get through the door," she said. "It's just a real celebration."

kalfisi@semissourian.com

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