Published - March, 17, 2006
Enjoy a spring fling
with Gallery Night
Downtown merchants ready
their wares for tonight's showcase
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"Music" by Xavier Cortada at the Artel Gallery. |
Forget
dying your beer green with food coloring today and bursting into song
with "Danny Boy," or "Will Ye Go Lassie Go." Instead, celebrate St.
Patrick's Day the civilized way with art and culture at the 14th Annual
Spring Fling Gallery Night.
It's worth veering off the beaten path.
For the first time, Susan Campbell, 31, a Pensacola native who moved
home from New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, will unlock the door of
Susan Campbell Jewelry, 208 S. Alcaniz St., with a grand opening and
trunk show featuring Tiffany Peay.
Peay, a jewelry designer from Fall River, Mass., makes handmade beaded
jewelry featuring colored gold and candy-colored gems. Peay launched her
first collection in the mid-1990s at Barneys New York. Her necklaces,
earrings, bracelets and rings have been featured in InStyle and other
fashion and jewelry-trade magazines.
Campbell stocked her store, in the historic Quina South House built
circa 1840, with different, new, not trendy, but designed-to-last,
pieces ranging from less than $100 to more than $1,000.
"I wanted to get a bunch of different styles," she said. "I tried to get
something for everyone."
Campbell, an art history major and former metal sculptor, sees jewelry
as a modern form of sculpture.
Barbara SilverStein, another Massachusetts' designer stocked by
Campbell, works in braided stainless steel to create elegant, affordable
timeless necklaces, bracelets and earrings.
On the right person, jewelry can be worn forever and handed down to
other generations, Campbell said.
"That's a very important aspect of jewelry," she said. "I like the idea
of women's wealth passed from generation to generation (along with a
sense of history)."
And that "something for everyone" Campbell talks about includes fine
chocolates.
Not far from Alcaniz, at the nonprofit Artel Gallery, 505 Adams St., is
exhibiting 30 works by Xavier Cortada, 41, a Miami-based Cuban-American
artist, attorney and activist who has collaborated with diverse groups
across the United States, Europe, Latin America and Africa to create
pro-social community murals and participant-driven art projects.
Cortada's "Mangroves," which is in its last days at Artel, depicts the
mangrove -- in mostly oil and acrylics on canvas -- as a symbol of the
journey and interconnectedness of Floridians.
"The mangrove is a perfect metaphor for community," Cortada said. "How
we interact with nature... or is nature a part of our being?"
In depicting mangroves in a variety of ways, the viewer noticing the
subtle nuances and the details may then become more in tune with nuances
of the world, at least that is what Cortada is aiming at personally and
for his audience.
"Art is what I do to work my way through the world," Cortada said. "It's
an interesting path, journey if you will."
In the six years Maria V. Butler has been involved with Gallery Night,
the executive director of the Pensacola Museum of Art has witnessed it
become part of the downtown scene.
"The more quality, the more people want to get involved," she said.
"People know when Gallery Night is. More and more people are beginning
to realize that more things are going on downtown."
Campbell hopes to be a part of the downtown renaissance and its
burgeoning arts scene.
"This is a great city. It just needs a little kick," she said.
WHAT: Spring Fling Gallery Night.
WHEN: Today, 5 p.m. to 9 p.m.
WHERE: Downtown Pensacola, business and gallery district.
COST: Admission to all venues is free.
TROLLEYS: 6 to 9 p.m. Free trolleys begin at Palafox and
Garden, and Palafox and Romana streets, and run the entire Gallery
Night route, stopping in front of or near each venue.
DETAILS: 432-9906 or www.artsnwfl.org.
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