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At tonight’s First Friday receptions at White River Junction, two recently opened galleries will be doing something local art viewers don’t often see.
Both Tourist, a gallery on South Main Street that open in january, and Kishka Gallery & Library, which open this summer on Gates Street, exhibit works by artists from far beyond the Upper Valley.
For a show called “Under Pressure,” Tourist brought together four artists from Hartford, Connecticut; Bayonne, New Jersey; Cincinnati; and New York.
During this time. Kishka opens “He Loves Me Not”, a mask show by North Carolina artist Lakea Shepard.
The intention, said the operators of the two galleries, is to exhibit a diversity of art for the benefit of local and regional viewers. But these exhibitions also suggest how the Haute Vallée is part of a larger artistic community and the influence of social media on how gallery owners choose what to exhibit.
“I always say we’re interested in regional artists but not local artists, because I think it’s important to bring artists into the conversation,” said Chad Etting, who opened Tourist with his wife, Heidi Conner. “We are trying to expand what is offered in the Haute Vallée.
Etting, 37, is from Connecticut and is an artist himself. His studies took him to France, and he exhibited in Europe and New England. Conner, 34, grew up in Chelsea and graduated from Sharon Academy. The couple live in Lebanon and both hold administrative jobs at Dartmouth College.
Opening a gallery had been Etting’s project for some time. He enjoys the process of putting together a show, from identifying artists and touring their studios to hooking up the show and opening it up to viewers.
“It’s like taking on a whole new life in the gallery,” Etting said this week.
But showing artists’ work “connects us to other artists and their networks,” he said.
Part of it is internet based. If Etting or Conner contact an artist through the gallery’s Instagram account, the artist can browse the gallery’s photographs and already mounted exhibitions and feel like this is a serious business. And the internet gives the gallery a larger constituency than it could have in White River Junction on its own.
“It’s interesting, we’ve generated sales through Instagram as well as through retail,” Conner said.
To set up the new show in Kishka, co-owner Ben Finer reached out to Lakea Shepard in May, also via Instagram.
Finer, who grew up in Norwich and now lives in Hartford Village, is an artist who has long been interested in masks. He was following Shepard’s work on social media. He said he “used to contact people I don’t know because I comment on their work on Instagram.”
It could be generational, Finer said. He’s in his early forties, barely older than Etting, and squarely in the generation that embraced the Internet as teens and young adults.
“Platforms like Facebook and Instagram have gotten us into the habit of seeing other people’s lives from afar,” said Finer.
As a native of the Upper Valley, Finer can see the value of showing artists from faraway places.
“I guess I’m back to that kid from Hanover High” who was hungry to see new arts, he said. “We would love to be a place where you see something that wows the mind of this child.”
The sites in the Haute Vallée already do this, of course. The Hood Museum of Art presents a global survey; AVA Gallery and Art Center showcases the best of visual art in New Hampshire and Vermont; and the smaller galleries occupy their own niches. Finer said the Main Street Museum, which paved the way for White River Junction for many years, made him say “Whoa! When he was just getting out of college.
So, at Tourist, a viewer may be blown away by Alberto Casais, a self-taught painter and tattoo artist who grew up in the industrial town of Brunswick, NJ, and paints every day. Or by the photographs of Stephen Barker, which was recently written by Hilton Als on The New Yorker website.
Shepard, of which work is in sight in Kishka, deploys traditional African weaving, beading and basketry techniques to make elaborate and colorful masks and hairstyles, some of which are inspired by “slave masks”, metal masks that slaves were forced to wear.
“This series of head sculptures is dedicated to one of the most misunderstood groups of people: black men,” Shepard writes in her artist statement. “Rather than attaching metal to their faces, I carefully constructed masks, encrusted with semi-precious stones with healing properties.”
A native of Winston-Salem, North Carolina, Shepard was the only African American study at the Department of Crafts at the College for Creative Studies, from which she graduated in 2013. She will soon be exhibited at the Contemporary Art Museum in Raleigh.
Despite the seriousness of their intention, the operators of Tourist and Kishka do their best not to take themselves too seriously. The accessible names of the two galleries are signifiers.
“I wanted a one-word name that is unrelated to art,” Etting said. It means “Come take a look,” and so far people approach it with that in mind.
Tourist is open the first Friday from 6 p.m. to 8 p.m., but will remain open as long as visitors are in a hurry. “Under Pressure” is visible until September 18th.
Kishka is hosting a 5-8pm reception for “He Loves Me Not”, which is on view until September 26th.
Three exhibitions of work by Vermont painter Paul Gruhler have been canceled by new COVID-19 precautions.
The exhibitions, at the Vermont Supreme Court and at the Spotlight Gallery of the Vermont Arts Council in Montpellier, and at the Gallery of the Central Vermont Medical Center in Berlin, were due to open on September 17th in conjunction with the publication of a new catalog of Gruhler’s work. All three shows have been canceled, Gruhler said in an email Thursday.
Alex Hanson can be reached at [email protected] or 603-727-3207.
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