Arts Council holds annual Arts Bar and open house

The Churchill Arts Council will present its annual Holiday Art Bar and Community Open House at the Art Center on Dec. 6 from 5-9 p.m.

It’s a great chance to get together with family and friends for a cup of holiday cheer. The ChArts store at the Center will also be open and you can peruse its eclectic collection of artworks, ceramics, jewelry, books and other items for holiday gift ideas.

There will also be two new exhibitions on view in the Center’s galleries. The E.L. Wiegand Gallery show will be “West of Everything,” an exhibition of new and selected paintings by Montana artist Gordon McConnell.

The paintings are based on stills from the black-and-white heyday of American western films, such as “Stagecoach,” “My Darling Clementine,” “Red River,” “Yellow Sky” and many others.

In McConnell’s hands, the epic western landscapes portrayed in the movies blur and dissolve, becoming almost, but not quite, abstractions of this archetypal American art form, one in which the Hollywood studios created the myth of the west and its settling.

The Classroom Gallery will feature works by another Montana artist, Jane Waggoner Deschner, who works with found photographs, and her show is entitled “It Must Be True.”

For more than 30 years she’s used these found vernacular pieces, often using them as surfaces upon which she embroiders drawings and aphoristic quotes from a wide range of authors—from Freud to Katherine Hepburn to Nietzsche.

Her works draw upon the snippets of everyday life found in family photographs to make new assertions about the meanings of family life, even stitching disparate image together to form quilts and garments.

For more information on the new shows and the Open House you can all the Arts Council at 775-423-1440.

On Thursday, the night before the Open House, Stremmel Gallery in Reno will open “Deck the Walls,” a new show of works by five artists. The gallery is located at 1400 S. Virginia St., and there will be a reception for the artists from 5:30-7:30 p.m. that night. The reception is free and open to the public.

For information on the show, you can call the gallery at 775-786-0558.