I love how my town—many others have, too—has instituted an arts night. For us, it’s the second Friday each month and for me, personally, making it to openings or special events at our local museum (because how lucky am I to walk by the very wonderful Smith College Museum of Art every single day?) is more often good intention than anything else. I don’t often mention my stock excuse, but if I thought about it, I have a pretty good one: I have a toddler and toddlers do not mix well with all arts exhibitions, especially the most tantalizingly tactile ones (I’m thinking of your incredible exhibition at the Smith Museum, Lesley Dill or your most inviting worlds displayed recently at the Oxbow Gallery, Harriet Diamond). Honestly, though, with three other kids who do not always want to go to openings, getting out for something I want to do can be a great notion that goes poof like a cartoon cloud.
I know, though, toddler hands notwithstanding, that my kids will enjoy two openings this week: Threadbare at APE Gallery and First Graft: Pulp-Paper-Prose at Oxbow Gallery. Threadbare will consist of work by three fiber artists and a photographer; First Graft is an installation by artist and writer Lydia Kann Nettler. Although the work shown will be—as they say at preschools everywhere eyes only—I know that my kids will feel what they are seeing and that’s partially why exhibitions like both of these, different as they will be, are so fun to venture off to see—and sense. I know their senses will be engaged this way because I know how I feel when viewing such vibrant installations. There’s that synapses firing sensation that goes beyond simply seeing.
For my—and key to our getting to the opening, my kids—friends Kathryn Greenwood Swanson and Christalena Hughmanick I know that not simply seeing has much to do with why they like to work in fiber. They like tactile. They like how color and fingertips collide, how thread weaves stories and how history can be shared (and new things created) through endeavors that are not new. They are interested in useful purpose and whimsy. And from the photographs taken as they installed the show, APE Gallery will be an intriguing and colorful place this month.
Lydia Kann Nettler also works with bringing disciplines together, hers being visual art and fiction writing, her medium being paper. The photographs of her trees, stories grafted upon them, becoming integral and yet not simply told, not laid out in a way that is entirely straightforward, but something to experience can get you thinking about all sorts of things, including how stories find their ways into our lives and how our own stories sometimes surround us, as if internal landscapes can be made external and seen—perhaps—anew. I know that Nettler was inspired to take a leap with her impulse to bring visual art and writing together after seeing the Lesley Dill show, and so I’m eager to experience her installation and feel what it’s like to live in her story for a spell.
Again, wherever it is you are located, and whomever you live with (small kids, homebody spouse, your own reluctant sometimes to go out alone self) there’s a bigger message to the whole Arts Night Out or whatever your city or town calls it movement and it’s this: support your local artist and discover how much fun it is to see who else is also supporting local arts events. Getting into the art on the town groove is a delightfully accessible way to participate in making arts lively where you live. You can even add a nibble, an errand, a drink or a movie and support your local economy that one drop in the bucket more toward helping the place you live to thrive.
