Family Planning Art Show

Preparations have begun for this year’s Annual Friends of Family Planning Art Show Benefit which takes place May 21 to 24, Memorial Day weekend. New artists are invited to participate and returning artists are welcomed back. Paintings, all media and furniture, pottery, three-dimensional art, jewelry and weaving are all encouraged.

Dragonfly Gallery’s Summer Heat show will offer a wide variety of artwork, photography and sculpture from the 30 artists who are currently represented by the Gallery. Refreshments, beverages, and fine art will be served during the ever-popular arts district stroll on Saturday, July 18 from 4 to 7 p.m. The show will hang until July 26.

The July arts district stroll is a wonderful opportunity to explore the depth and breadth of the national and regional artists represented at the Dragonfly.

Poetry Painted is the theme of a new art exhibition opening Sunday, August 2, with a public reception from 4 to 7 p.m. at the Treehouse Gallery in North Tisbury.

Featured is Paul Murray, who has embedded lines of poetry within his colorful acrylic paintings. Poets quoted include Rumi, William Carlos Williams, Pablo Neruda, Walt Whitman, Gerard Manly Hopkins and Emily Dickinson.

The Carol Craven Gallery, located off Holmes Hole Road in Vineyard Haven, will be opening for its 14th season today, Friday, May 22.

Gallery hours are 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. Friday and Saturday, and 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. Sunday and Monday.

This first show features new work by John Digby, Claire Chalfoun, Kitty Cloud, Palmer Davis, Nancy Furino, Anne Grandin, Nene Humphrey, Cindy Kane, Barbara Kassel, Danielle Mailer, John Neville, Kathy Peck, Gretchen Dow Simpson, Maxine Smith, Rita Stern, Mark Andrew Stimson, Nancy Taplin and Jules Worthington.

Spotlight at Shaw Cramer

Through the Lens is the last show in the Spotlights 2009 series celebrating 15 years at the Shaw Cramer Gallery. Island photographers Karen DiMaura, Gary Mirando and Kathy Newman join Michael Beatty and Eric Jensen, each with their distinctive style. Photo silk-screened stoneware vessels complement spare images of the cranberry bog house and Lake Tashmoo. It’s about the artists personal vision.

What do you do on the ferry? Vineyard artist John Holladay may know, because what he does on the ferry is observe other passengers, and sketch them. Recently, his sea-born pen portraits had been transported as paintings and mixed media works on exhibit at Louisa Gould Gallery in Vineyard Haven. However, due to a flood in the gallery, the works are now only available for perusal and purchase on Ms. Gould’s Web site, louisagould.com.

Vineyard-born artist Max Decker tends to mold his artistic personality to match his environment. His Island summers inspire classic landscape paintings, but come fall, his return to his home in Brooklyn seems to trigger a more aggressive and figurative form of expression.

“I guess by osmosis, what’s around you is kind of what you start producing,” said the artist. “When I’m in New York, it’s kind of loud. Here [on the Island], I get a little more atmospheric, a little more subdued.”

Big Benton Exhibition

The Tisbury School will end its traveling art exhibitions with Thomas Hart Benton, the American muralist and seasonal Vineyarder who delved into the images of heroic everyday Americans during the era of the Great Depression.

The exhibition celebrates ordinary people who made America great. Given the artist’s strong Vineyard ties, his fans sometimes speculate that the faces of individual Island personalities can be found in his murals.

Shaw Cramer Lights Up

Luminous defines the fourth spotlight 2009 show at Shaw Cramer Gallery from July 17 to 30. Ten artists, including Island artists Eva Gallant and Andrea Hartman, present artwork with luster and light. Collages of iridescent glass with stone, knitted wire, miniature sculptures of luminous bead-covered vessels, silk appliqued pillows, glass lanterns and a lighted tall clock of bird’s-eye maple and stainless steel combine to create a shimmering collection.

Shaw Cramer Gallery today opens Repurposed, Recycled, the latest in its spotlight exhibitions.

Furniture, paintings, metal, glass, jewelry and collage by three Island artists and seven national artists combine to present an elegant collection of work composed of repurposed and recycled materials.

Wendy Weldon has painted on her used painting sandpaper, Rose Abrahamson created a collage and paint composition, and Laurene Krasny Brown combine gouache painted paper strips that form a quilt-like pattern.