Special FestivALL ArtWalk June 22

Downtown Charleston will celebrate its creative community at special FestivALL ArtWalk Thursday, June 22 from 5-8 p.m. at more than 20 participating businesses.
 
Coordinated by the Charleston Area Alliance, the event will include sidewalk musical performances plus a Musical Easels exhibition with local artists collaborating to create original artwork during ArtWalk.
 
The June 22 Downtown Charleston ArtWalk will feature the following exhibits:
 
The Art Store: The Hale Street gallery will present: Stonewall Jackson Middle School Pop-Up Gallery. The mini-exhibition celebrates young, local talent and will fundraise for the visual art department at Stonewall. The Pop-Up Gallery will feature a diverse range of engaging and whimsical young artists work for purchase in various media from paint and pastel to collage and clay. All proceeds and donations from the Pop-Up Gallery event will go to Stonewall. This event will help the visual arts program at Stonewall to purchase art supplies, resources and learning materials for the outstanding local students in our community for the upcoming school year.
 
Romano Gallery:  The gallery will feature artist Staci Marie Leech-Cornell of Still Maybe Studios. Her work will accompany other artists who have designed and created a chair piece for the YWCA’s Annual CHAIRity auction. There will also be a group of narratives on display from the Senior group at the Charleston Family Resource Center.
 
Charleston Ballet:  The ballet will feature the artwork of Mandy Powers. Unable to remember a time when she didn't own a camera, her trilogies show a range from people she loves to landscapes and city skylines, everyday life to once in a lifetime trips including Greece, the United Kingdom and the Canadian Rockies. Many of her photos are straightforward while others are open for interpretation. She loves that what one person sees behind the lens is not necessarily what another sees in the final print. She graduated from the University of Charleston with a Bachelor of Arts in Psychology (2000) and currently works for a small nonprofit organization.
 
Dressmaker’s Closet:  Dressmaker’s Closet will feature the work of Betty McMullen, a full-time studio artist. She maintains a studio in her home and also in a warehouse building on the West Side of Charleston. She spends her time painting both abstract and realistic paintings.  Betty is an accomplished weaver, and created fine art handwoven wall hangings for many years before returning to painting. She enjoys the discipline of realistic oil painting, as well as the freedom of intuitive non-objective painting with acrylics. She travelled the world as a child, with her parents. She developed her strong sense of color from time spent in Korea, Japan and India.

Virginia Lee:  The clothing boutique will feature the work of Marisa Jackson, a watercolor artist, illustrator, calligrapher, and designer behind MarisaMade. MarisaMade is a full service design studio specializing in watercolor illustration and calligraphy for all occasions. Her studio offers a wide variety of services from event stationery design, modern and copperplate calligraphy, greeting cards, hand lettered wooden signs, to logo design for small businesses. 
 
Art Emporium:  The gallery’s featured artists is Tonie Garrett. Her technique is to paint and draw all in the same strokes after initially under-painting to assure harmony in her work, creating a painting style that reflects an impressionistic and painterly look. Subjects vary from flora from the garden, to children in her family and grandchildren of special friends. Landscapes are Tonie's newest endeavor and she says painting water is a thrill to her. It is Tonie’s desire to share her love of nature and color through her paintings and stir the instilled emotions of the viewer.
 
Rock City Cake Company:  Donn Kinney and Seth Kitmiller, two West Virginia artists, will showcase their artwork at the Capitol Street cake company. Kinney, from Logan County, is a well-known sculptor and doll artist in his own right with pieces in collections around the world. He trained at the Art Institute of Pittsburgh in his younger years and worked with Jim Henson's Creature Shop on projects such as Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles 3 and Fox Kids Cubhouse. He does sculptural work at his private studio and travels across the country hosting student workshops. Donn is also an avid collector of natural history specimens, which he often incorporates literally and figuratively into his art work. Kitzmiller, from Randolph County, studied painting and drawing at West Virginia Wesleyan College in the early 2000's, and ever since then he's had a passion for birds and their mythologies. He developed his style at the New York School of Visual Arts and the Vermont Studio Center and his work has shown in New York, New Mexico, Vermont, and even Istanbul, Turkey.
 
Delfine's Jewelry:   Delfine's Jewelry will feature artist Lindsey Webb for June's ArtWalk. From cheesy coasters to framed mirrors, most beer cap pieces are a far cry from what one would call "fine art". They're more like a Pinterest project gone horribly wrong.  Lindsey was determined not to do that.  Lindsey's pieces are not about beer (although the caps are a fun medium to hunt down and secure).  Lindsey's pieces are about the process of optical color mixing, and color theory. All while using the basic pointalism style. The way that simple colors, when placed together, create new colors. Value and depth can be achieved from a proper viewing distance and this to the artist is an amazing study to embark on. All of the colors add up from each cap and interact with each other revealing a subject in the end.  The artist's pieces combine her appreciation of high quality craft beers with her ongoing love affair for fine art, and what else could be better than that?
 
Gilded Age Tatoo:   The Hale Street shop will feature the work of Emily Sokolosky, owner, designer, and printer at Base Camp Printing Company. Base Camp Printing is a letterpress shop on Charleston’s West Side. The shop strives to keep its process identical to a print shop back in the day, when a cast-iron printing press was state-of-the-art technology. Base Camp specializes in posters, invitations, stationery, and business cards, designed, set and printed the old fashioned way — by hand.  The prints showcase the shop's collection of century old type and carvings.
 
Annex at Taylor Books: The Annex Gallery feature artists Christopher Worth and David Seth Cyfers. 
The two artists have worked together for a number of years, both formally and informally, responding to each other, pushing the distinctively different aspects of their work forward, while sharing in some formal and conceptual similarities. 
 
Worth, born in Connecticut and adopted to West Virginia in 1990, earned his M.A. at Marshall University. He has always focused on how the primary visual elements can come together to explore the psychology of where mind and world intersect. As an artist with a disability, cerebral palsy, Chris has often felt like he was fighting for people to see him not as “the disabled artist,” but as an artist who uses her/his physical circumstances to add to the dialogue expressed by his mark-making. This current work, “The Red Tie Series,” began to develop shortly before Chris moved to St. Louis, MO., and then found an accelerant as he dove into work organizing people with disabilities, especially around 2015, and became more aware of the intersectionality of that community struggle and therein, their power. 
 
The more things change, the more they stay the same. The Red Tie Series speaks not only to the glossiness of millennial communication in America, but so to the on-growing shadow of the JP Morgans which still control the fears, hopes, and dreams of this America, an America which has made an art of continuing racism, ableism, sexism, environmental devastation, and the ever present division of classes within those dynamics. 
 
David Seth Cyfers has always been interested in creating the artistic experience as physical space inviting the viewer to interact with the art, whether we are talking about his early collage works or his push to curate art shows which push the interactive aspects of the audience, both in challenging them and them pushing the art forward. When the audience interacts with the art, the relationship between artist, art, and audience becomes reciprocal. The artist presents the art to the audience, who then pushes both it and the artist in new directions. Seth’s current work plays on a mature approach to the three-way interaction just described. This current work, titled “Fake Art,” brings the viewer face to face with a culture of mass communication. It plays with serendipitous word play that harkens back to Seth’s history with graphic design, typography, and printmaking. 
 
Clay Center POP UP Exhibit : Ambient Noise   The Clay Center is partnering with Riggs Commercial Reality at 205 Capitol Street to bring you unexpected art experiences in a variety of downtown locations. This month the POP UP will be exhibiting a joint show between emerging artists: Tyler Woodward and Zack Merritt. The show, titled Ambient Noise, utilizes televisions, cameras, and sound to create atmospheric realms full of surprises.
 
For a full list of venues participating in ArtWalk, visit artwalkcwv.com.
 
About Downtown Charleston ArtWalk
Downtown Charleston ArtWalk is a free, self-guided walking art tour located in several blocks of Downtown Charleston. This semi-monthly event is held on the third Thursday of the month from March through December, except in November when it is the Friday following Thanksgiving and June when it falls during FestivALL. ArtWalk was founded in 2002 by a handful of gallery owners as a platform to encourage the community to learn about the city’s vibrant arts scene and visit Downtown Charleston. For more information, please visit www.artwalkcwv.com. ArtWalk is coordinated by The Charleston Area Alliance and sponsored by the Master Law Firm.