5 of 6: BIMA boasts five new shows during museum’s sixth changeover

Published 11:06 am Tuesday, October 14, 2014

Though spring is the season usually associated with new beginnings and fresh starts, this Saturday the Bainbridge Island Museum of Art will welcome fall with five new exhibitions featuring several regional artists working in a variety of mediums, including a retrospective of the late Rachel Feferman, for whom the largest BIMA gallery is named.

These shows will be the museum’s sixth rotation of exhibitions since opening in June last year.

Along with the Feferman retrospective, “A Hole in the Heart,” the museum will display photography by island lensman Harry Long-street, paintings by Port Townsend’s Karen Hackenberg, the stone and wood carving, printmaking, fused glass and jewelry art of Suquamish’s Larry Ahvakana and a group exhibition showcasing the works of several local children’s book artists.

Admission to the museum, located at 550 Winslow Way East, is free.

BIMA is a collecting museum with a focus on artists and collections from the Kitsap and Olympic Peninsulas, as well as the broader Puget Sound region. The art museum regularly features new themes and artists ranging from emerging and lesser known artists to recognized masters.

BIMA is open daily from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m.

For more information, visit www.biartmuseum.org.

Rachel Feferman Retrospective: A Hole in the Heart

Spanning 35 years of artistic creation in a wide range of media and moods, this retrospective illuminates the work of Rachel Feferman, who died of breast cancer in 2010 at the age of 55. The exhibition includes more than 20 large-scale drawings featured in her book “Golden Hands,” as well as earlier, lesser known, work.

The show will feature Feferman’s work in textiles, prints, ceramics and puppets as well as drawings and paintings in gouache and watercolor.

Feferman settled in Port Townsend after spending much of her early life traveling Europe. She studied at the San Francisco Art Institute, Lone Mountain College and the University of Washington.

She lived alone with a dog and a cat in the home, studio and garden she designed with noted Northwest architect Russ Chapin.

Feferman’s work has been featured in numerous solo shows, among them at the Cunningham Art Gallery of the University of Washington, Davidson Galleries in Seattle and other galleries in the Pacific Northwest. She was a major award winner in the 1989 Northwest Annual juried by Leon Golub and Nancy Spero, and held at Center on Contemporary Art (CoCA) in Seattle.

Feferman’s book, “Golden Hands: Drawings and Reflections,” will be available in the BIMA store as a companion to the retrospective.

Karen Hackenberg: Watershed

Hackenberg’s ongoing series “Watershed” addresses the tenuous boundary between living nature and human encroachment.

“In my ongoing painting series, ‘Watershed,’ I take a light-hearted yet subversive approach to the serious subject of ocean degradation, presenting a tongue-in-cheek taxonomy of our new post-consumer creatures of the sea,” she said. “The ‘Watershed’ paintings are inspired by the incongruity of the man-made detritus found washed up on the otherwise pristine shores near my Discovery Bay studio.”

Hackenberg collects this flotsam and creates meticulous gouache paintings from her seascape compositions.

This exhibition includes a selection of her paintings, as well as her collected castaways.

Larry “Ulaaq” Ahvakana: Land/Water

Raised in Barrow and Anchorage, Alaska, Ahvakana is best known for his Inuit or Inupiaq figures and animals.

“All my life, I was surrounded by my culture and my people, the Inupiaq of northern Alaska,” he said. “The dances and songs of the Inupiaq tradition are our oral history — the emotional interpretation of our respect for and involvement with the environment of the North Slope of Alaska. My work incorporates many media and materials and a sense of my cultural design. The interpretation is very personal. I hope the conceptual format gives viewers an idea of the Inupiaq tradition.”

This survey exhibition draws from thirty years of work and includes artworks in stone and wood carving, printmaking, fused glass, and jewelry art. These artistic creations are complemented by photographs, the artist’s ephemera, and other sources of inspiration.

This particular exhibition is the second of four planned shows in the Ames Family Foundation Cultural Diversity Series at BIMA.

Two other solo exhibitions in the series include the past summer exhibition of work by Romson Regarde Bustillo, and the planned exhibition of work by Barbara Earl Thomas (slated for the fall 2015).

BIMA is also planning a group show of emerging artists whose work is inspired by their cultural heritage and life experiences.

Harry Longstreet: Photography

Photographer Harry Longstreet’s work is documentary in nature, what he calls “humanist realism.”

A long-time island resident and retired television writer, producer and director, Longstreet has had one-man shows, group shows and had images selected for more than a 160 national and international juried exhibitions. He’s a two-time Merit Award Recipient (Single Image) from Black & White Magazine (2010 and 2012) and Color Magazine (2011 and 2012).

Longstreet uses photography to try to capture the truth about diverse people and how they live and reflect on their respective spaces. His subjects never know they’ve been photographed. He doesn’t set up or pose any shot, and he never employs any artificial lighting.

“No one just takes up space,” Longstreet said. “The human condition is an entire canvas of thoughts, emotions and reactions to circumstances.”

Longstreet’s images will be on display on the museum’s first floor in the John Kenyan Ellis Bistro.

Children’s Book Illustrators 1: Points of Entry

This group exhibition, on display in the museum’s MESA Gallery, will showcase the works of several ­­­­­­­­local artists and authors known for their work in the field of children’s books including Jennifer Mann (Bainbridge Island), Woodleigh Marx Hubbard (Bainbridge Island), Nikki McClure (Olympia) and Julie Paschkis (Seattle).

The exhibition will include their original paintings and drawings, plus some process pieces and works in progress.

For a complete list of the artists included, visit www.biartmuseum.org.