Also open for: Gallery Hop: Friday, November 3, 7-9 pm (Artist will be in attendance.) Art Crush: Friday, November 17, 7-9 pm
Wendell Myers is entranced by the transformative power of improvisation and the extraordinary outcomes that arise with spontaneity and reaction. Jazz music, with its emphasis on evoking emotion, stirring the heart, and kindling creativity, has been a wellspring of inspiration for his work.
“Dreaming in Gold”
Myers artworks take the form of abstract landscapes, weaving together memories from the diverse places he has inhabited and explored throughout life. His creations are a tribute to the ever-changing beauty of the natural world. Through his art, Myers aspires to encapsulate the very essence of these locales and share his profound affection for them with others.
“Purple Fantasy”
Painting, with its immediacy and ability to yield rapid results, is a medium that can be guided but never entirely controlled. Myers employs motion, light, color, and energy as a vocabulary to evoke emotional states and conjure an air of mystery. A fascination with improvisation is ever-present, resembling the improvisational nature of jazz, where musicians simultaneously listen, react, and create. In the realm of both music and art, it is the unforeseen results that are the most expressive and delightful.
Betti Pettinatti-Longinotti: “Celebrating Women Artists”
Exhibition Dates: October 4 – 29, 2023
Artist’s Reception and Gallery Talk: Sunday, October 22 from 1:30 – 3:30 pm. Talk begins at 2:00.
Also open for: Gallery Hop: Friday, October 6, 7-9 pm Art Crush: Friday, October 20, 7-9 pm
“Celebrating Women Artists” presents 145 portraits, vitreous paintings on glass. This installation is a ‘Gestalt’ in that the sum of these women artists is greater than all their contributions combined. The installation of these portraits serves as an archive of women artists completed gradually over the last 12 years. It honors artists that are varied geographically and of local, regional, national, international, and historical reputation.
Betti Pettinati-Longinotti works in drawing, painting and glass. She received a BFA from the Maryland Institute, College of Art and her MA from the University of the Arts/ Philadelphia, in Art Education with a studio major in Glass; an MFA in Visual Arts through the Lesley University College of Art and Design.
Her work has been shown internationally. Betti is a juried member of Artworks Gallery, Piedmont Craftsmen, Studio Montclair Gallery and also holds membership in the American Glass Guild.
Artworks Gallery Presents: Kimberly Varnadoe: “Contemplating the Elements” and James Gemma: “Exploring the BOLD in Abstraction”
Exhibition Dates: August 27-September 29, 2023
Artists’ Reception and Gallery Talk: Sunday, September 17, 2-4 pm. Talk begins at 2:30.
Also open for: Gallery Hop: Friday, September 1, 7-9 pm Art Crush: Friday, September 21, 7-10 pm
James Gemma,” Exploring the Bold in Abstraction”, showcases digitally created art prints on archival paper and inks, as well as acrylic paintings on wood panels. His work is contemporary in nature and explores unique combinations of strong colors and bold shapes to express his abstract conceptions. This work uses both hard edge and geometric approaches as well as a surprising diversion. This exhibition also includes two black and white prints, which express the ultimate in strong contrast.
After graduating with advanced degrees from The Ohio State University and careers as a university professor and consumer research professional, Mr. Gemma studied art and printmaking at Salem College (under Kimberly Varnadoe), and at Wake Forest University. He also has participated in multiple art workshops at Penland, the Huntington Museum of Art, and the Sawtooth Center for Visual Art. Mr. Gemma served four years as board member of Associated Artists of Winston Salem. As Marketing Chairperson of that group, he created the Practicing Artist Series of lectures and critiques, bringing the participation of nationally known artists to Winston-Salem. He is currently a practicing artist and has been a member of Artworks Gallery in downtown Winston-Salem since 2009.
Jim Gemma, “Strata Various” and “Converging/Diverging”
Throughout history, the Elements of fire, earth, air, and water have been used as powerful symbols to convey ideas, emotions, and narratives. Depicted in a wide range of artistic styles, the elements provide inspiration and are used to explore themes such as love, loss, transformation, and the passage of time.
Kimberly Varnadoe, “Contemplating the Elements”, utilizes oil painting as a direct response to a personal passage through emotionally conflicting times. Creating spontaneously as a meditation process, Varnadoe focuses on the natural elements as a basis for understanding oneself, the natural world, and the human experience. The Elements remind us of the natural world’s beautiful complexity, and recognizing the interconnectedness of the elements can inspire a deeper understanding of ourselves and the world around us. By appreciating and respecting these elemental forces, we can cultivate a sense of wonder, curiosity, and reverence for our world, enriching our lives and inspiring us to forge meaningful connections with the people, places, and ideas surrounding us.
Kimberly Varnadoe received her BFA in Painting from the University of South Alabama and her MFA in Printmaking from the University of Memphis. She currently works in oil painting as a meditation practice and explores automatic mark making. She enjoys experimentation and feels that art is most alive during the art creation — the final work of art is the record of the process. Varnadoe is a retired Art Professor from Salem College where she mentored artists for more than 25 years. She has been a member of Artworks Gallery since 2003, serving on the board and serves on the boards of Associated Artists of Winston-Salem and DADA, the Downtown Arts District Association. She is a Founding Artist of Artfolios, an online fine art gallery, where her work can be viewed online. She maintains a studio with the Culture WS collective in Winston-Salem.
Kimberly Varnadoe, “LIVE•GROW•FEEL•CARE” and “FLOW”
Artworks Gallery Presents: Water A full member exhibition celebrating the life-giving properties of water
Exhibition Dates: July 30-August 26, 2023
Reception with a presentation by Edgar Miller of Yadkin Riverkeeper: Sunday, August 13, 2-4 pm. Talk begins at 2:30. (Details below.)
Gallery Hop: Friday, August 4, 7-9 pm
Art Crush: Friday, August 18, 7-10 pm
Water, as our most precious resource, has been intimately linked to humankind and cultural development. The spiritual relationship between human beings and water is still present in many indigenous communities today. Nowadays, this spiritual and sacred value of water tends to clash with the perception of water as a resource at the disposal of society that can be used for economic development. Water is the foundation of life and approaches to valuing it vary depending on users.
Jessica Tefft, “Royal Fish,” Wiley Akers, “Ripple in Still Water,” Steve Mizel, “Refuge from the Storm”
Water carries numerous symbolic meanings that resonate deeply with our human experience. Its life-giving essence covers over 70% of our planet and has always held a deep significance in cultures around the world. Its multifaceted symbolism and deep-rooted significance in cultures worldwide, holds a wealth of wisdom to explore. From its properties of adaptability and purification to its association with emotions and intuition, the water element teaches us valuable lessons about the nature of life, power, beauty, wisdom, and the essence of the natural world.
Reception with a presentation by Edgar Miller of Yadkin Riverkeeper: Sunday, August 13, 2-4 pm. Talk begins at 2:30.
Join us on Sunday, August 13 for a reception featuring a presentation by Edgar Miller, executive director of Yadkin Riverkeeper, Inc. Come learn about the history and importance of the Yadkin River,—which provides drinking water to more than one million North Carolinians— plus threats to our water resources and what you can do about them.
Artists’ Forum, “A Conversation on A.I.”: Sunday, July 23, 2-4 pm (See details below.)
Artificial Intelligence (A.I.) and Adobe Photoshop’s new release, Generative Fill, are both technologies that play a role in the creative process. As creatives, we coexist and collaborate with these tools, but ultimately, it’s the work we produce that receives praise or criticism. When using these technologies, it’s important to focus on the work rather than the tools themselves.
AI art is undoubtedly impressive, as it can create imaginative and captivating worlds. However, without a human connection, it lacks depth, feeling, and passion. Ultimately, it remains nothing more than lines, shadows, and colors, like an elaborate pen without a hand, or a paint brush without an artist’s eye.
“Body & Soul” and “Joe Cool”
Owens Daniels is a photographer based in Winston Salem, North Carolina who happens to be a creative visual artist. He received a 2021 Kenan Institute Creative Catalyst Fellowship at Reynolda House of American Art and was the awardee for the 2019 Lead Artist for the Presence Absence Project.
His vision is to create artwork that builds bridges, promotes cultural exchanges, and artistic endeavors between organizations and institutions that speak to the diverse communities they serve.
His career started at the U.S. Army Photographic School of Cartography, learning the basics of photography and photo printing. In addition to his formal training, he continues to work as a freelance photographer with a distinctive and intimate photojournalistic signature style in visual storytelling which has led to various opportunities that include artist in residences, a Fellowship of American Art, public art Installations, grants and varied other commissions.
“Bass” and “Funky Drummer”
Owens uses the visual arts to express his interpretation of the world, and photography to open unexplored spaces between the subject and viewer exposing them both to a world of opportunities and experiences. This objective can best be obtained with a focus on our commonalities which keeps us in the moment and stops us from regretting the past or fretting about the future.
Owens Daniels’ “A.I. Art Innovation” blends A.I. technology with human creativity.
This exhibition is free and open to the public.
“A Conversation on A.I.,” Artists’ Forum: Sunday, July 23rd, 2-4pm
“I don’t want to be on the ash heap of creativity… Therefore, I CHANGE!”
Owens Daniels speaks about the new works in his Artworks Gallery exhibition, “A.I.: Art Innovation.”
Come out and connect with new artworks exploring the relationship between technology and artist Owens Daniels. Daniels will lead a conversation with creatives Leo Rucker, Nathan Ross Freeman, Leo Morello, and many more artists and community friends!
These new creations represent Winston-Salem’s first Artificial Intelligence (A.I.) art exhibition with over 40 different works from the styles of Dali, Picasso, Thomas Hart Benton, and many other artists reinterpreting Jazz and Blues.
Karen Kopf, “D.C al Fine” and Jessica Tefft, “Peaceable Kingdom”
Exhibit Dates: May 28 – July 1, 2023
Gallery Hop: Friday, June 2, 7-9 pm
Art Crush and Artists’ Reception: Friday, June 16, 7-9 pm
Karen Kopf is inspired by jazz, classical, and rock music, merged with the natural world to create a sensory experience rather than a narrative one. Sketching the natural forms in the world, she then composes the painting by overlapping individual forms to create more forms within the whole. The result is a web of conflicting energies with many intricate textures.
“Leaves” and “Coltrane’s Crescent” by Karen Kopf
Gold, silver and copper leafing is used liberally throughout the works. The overall impression of the paintings is a tactile and luminous interpretation of the energy within forms in nature.
After studying painting in Austria for a year, Karen Kopf established a studio in Marbella, Spain on the Costa del Sol. Five years under the bright Spanish sun added an intensity to the colors of her palette and a wide range of experiences and exhibitions to her career as a professional artist. Her works from this period are in collections all over the world.
Upon returning to the U.S., she painted in upstate New York, where she was resident director of the Guy Park State Historic Site. Eventually she moved to Winston-Salem, North Carolina, where she earned a master’s degree from Salem College and worked for twenty years as a teacher while she and her husband raised two sons. She currently exhibits at Artworks Gallery in Winston-Salem.
A framed print of the “Peaceable Kingdom” by Edward Hicks hung in Jessica Tefft’s living room when she was growing up. The lion’s eyes appeared to watch over her. Later, she realized Hicks’ painting was a visual sermon promoting spiritual and earthly harmony. In addition to being a painter, Hicks was a Quaker minister, and his works were based on Isaiah 11:6-9: “The wolf also shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid; and the calf and the young lion and the fatling together; and a little child shall lead them.”
“Madonna” and “Peaceable Kingdom” by Jessica Tefft
When Tefft created this new body of work, she thought about how the Peaceable Kingdom would look today in our gun-crazed country. These works express her thinking on how the things we hold most beautiful are also the most targeted.
Jessica Tefft is an artist and professional photographer based in Winston-Salem. She believes art offers her the language to explore themes of trauma and healing. She also sees art as a lens through which to interpret current events. She worked as a photojournalist in Washington, D.C., and elsewhere and has exhibited and won numerous awards for her work. Photojournalism took her from Cuba to the Alaskan wilderness, and then the presidential campaign trail. She assembled and edited an entry for coverage of the D.C. sniper that was a Pulitzer Prize finalist. She graduated from Wake Forest University with a degree in studio art and is currently working toward a master’s in public administration. She is the founder and executive director of The Art SHAC, a creative reuse nonprofit providing affordable art supplies to her community.
Marion Adams, “Out of the Blue” and Seth Moskowitz, “Odds and Ends—The Covid Years”
Exhibit Dates: April 30 – May 27, 2023
Gallery Hop: Friday, May 5, 7-9 pm
Artists’ Reception: Sunday, May 7, 2-4 pm
Art Crush: Friday, May 19, 7-9 pm
“Out of the Blue” and “Partly Cloudy” by Marion Adams
Marion Adams looks to the sky for inspiration. Working with pastels as her medium, she captures ethereal effects of the ever-changing scene overhead. Adams’ intention is to capture the sky in its various moods, show the turbulence of clouds before a storm, haze drifting overhead on a moonlit night, and small points of starlight gradually appearing after sunset. The single acrylic painting, “Wonder”, stands alone among the pastels as a representation of her own quest seeking answers and, at times, the right questions.
“Celestial Sky” and “Haze Lifting” by Marion Adams
Marion Adams is a retired Middle School Science and Math teacher. She has taught art history, painting and drawing on the college level. She holds a master’s degree from Georgia State University. She has been a member of Artworks since 2015.
“Signs of Spring” and “Runnin’ Out of Time” by Seth Moskowitz
When Covid 19 made us prisoners in our own homes, Seth Moskowitz frequently found himself filled with fear and frustration. But despite the dramatic changes in almost every aspect of daily lives, Moskowitz also experienced intense gratitude for a life that remained healthy, happy, hardy and whole.
During “The Covid Years,” Moskowitz produced a constant stream of images that were never quite completed. To celebrate the many splendors of the Spring of 2023, Moskowitz decided to finish and free these images from the messy confines of his head. He hopes the viewer will find connection with some of the places and spaces he passed through during these sometimes seemingly interminable “15 Days to Slow the Spread.”
“What a Tangled Web II” and “Echoes” by Seth Moskowitz
Seth Moskowitz is a Winston-Salem based artist who creates and combines photographic images into artworks that rarely resemble photography or the images that they incorporate. After a challenging career in the corporate world, he began to create visual art in 2004 as an escape from the verbal cacophony of the workaday environment – a way to enter a peaceful, magical place that is literally, beyond words. He has been a member of Artworks Gallery since 2017 and a member of Associated Artists of Winston-Salem since 2005.
Wiley Akers, “Post Covid – Post Modern” and Don Green, “New Paintings and Sculpture”
Exhibition Dates: April 2-30, 2023
Gallery Hop: Friday, April 7, 7-9pm
Reception: Friday, April 21, 7-9pm
Wiley Akers’ new work is an exploration of humans in an abstract style. With an empty mind and no preconceived ideas or plans Akers begins with pencil marks on the canvas of a human form, as if the image and artist is having a conversation on how to evolve. After studying the marks, one thing leads to another with paint. Some are quickly done to repress thinking while others are completed over days.
“The Light” and “Smile” by Wiley Akers
Wiley Akers has a BFA in painting and a MEd from UNCG. He has taught art to middle and high school students for 25 years.
Don Green is exhibiting new paintings and sculptures inspired by the natural landscape. His large-scale paintings reflect the Abstract Expressionist style of art representation. The source of inspiration is primarily nature: the land, rocks, streams, trees, etc. His sculpture is also influenced by the natural world: mountains, sky, trees especially distorted or odd shaped trees with more character.
“Untitled Bronze 1” and “Reynolda Greenway” by Don Green
Don Green received his MFA from the University of Wisconsin, Madison, Wisconsin in 1966, his BFA from Illinois Wesleyan University in Bloomington, Illinois in 1964, and an Advertising Art Degree from the American Academy of Art, Chicago, Illinois in 1956.
“Grit” is the name of a new exhibition open during the month of March at Artworks Gallery in downtown Winston-Salem. The show is a combination of the work of two artists under a single theme, focusing on overlooked moments and objects found in urban landscapes. In addition, the gallery will be transformed into a setting that captures the frenetic nature of looking for beauty in unintended places, whether on the ground or in the sky.
In addition to the work itself, certain pieces have QR codes for additional narration by the artists explaining the motivations behind their work. There are also flyers posted throughout the exhibit with music suggestions so you can have a private listening party while you view the art. Bring your earbuds!
Julian Silverman is a photographer from New York City who has recently relocated to Winston-Salem. His work focuses on the unintended beauty and narratives coming though stolen moments in time.
Elliot Strunk is a collage artist who uses discarded items in his work. His compositions highlight items of visual interest often discarded once their original use has been exhausted. A throughline of his work is what we all consume in terms of food, time and information.
Alix Hitchcock is exhibiting new hand colored and hand pulled dry-point prints. These one of a kind monoprints are based on initial drawings from shadows of trees and foliage.
Working instinctively, Hitchcock considers the art process an unpredictable visual journey that starts with a structural set up but with much left for accidental results and evolving responses. Her work communicates a sense of awe in the presence of Nature, and brings the viewer into each art work’s world of mystery, as well as portraying a type of “emotional abstraction”, as the artist Arthur Dove said of his art.
Hitchcock received her MA in painting from NYU, and her BFA in printmaking and painting from UNC-G. She is a retired Instructor in Drawing at WFU. She was the W-S Artist of the Year in 1998, and is a founding board member of Artworks Gallery. She has exhibited widely in N.C., and in shows in Kentucky, Virginia, South Carolina, New York City, and Wyoming.
A large ink drawing of banana leaves by Lea Lackey-Zachmann is one of four graphite, ink and acrylic works in this exhibition. Three dimensional paintings and large colored pencil drawings complete her showing.
The similar shapes and forms in trees, leaves and feathers common in our natural environment are subjects in this exhibition. An appreciation for the complexity and similarities in these natural forms provides an avenue for understanding and appreciating the commonalities with all living beings and the natural world.
Lea Lackey-Zachmann holds an MFA in painting and graduate teaching certification from UNC-G and a BA from Winthrop University. She is retired from teaching art at High Point University and prior regional colleges. She has shown her works throughout the southeast and is a founding member of Artworks Gallery. Gardening is her passion along with her husband, two dogs and their cat, Be.
This exhibition is free and open to the public.
Alix Hitchcock discusses her workLea Lackey-Zachmann discusses her work
