(Click to enlarge): Open Monad, Section 1, 2005, by Cynthia Camlin. Watercolor, acrylic on wood structure. Longest side 48 inches.

OPENINGS: ‘Eccentric Geometry’ by Cynthia Camlin, April 2-27 at the Della Brown Taylor Gallery in the Davis Fine Arts Building at W.Va. State University in Institute, W.Va. Reception 6-8 p.m., Monday, April 2. Gallery open 9 a.m. to 9 p.m., Mon-Fri. Call 766-3196.

Cynthia Camlin is a Visiting Assistant Professor in Painting at West Virginia University in Morgantown. Her show of work at the W.Va. State University in Institute, opening Monday, April 2 with a reception, features paintings of abstract crystalilized structures on paper, panels and three-dimensional forms. She studied painting as a post-baccalaureate student at Yale University and received her MFA in Painting and Drawing from the University of Texas at Austin in 2000. Previously, she earned a BA from Duke University in English Literature and Art and an MA from the University of Virginia in Religious Studies.

Represented by dBerman Gallery in Austin, Texas, Camlin’s work has been shown in a number of solo and group exhibitions, including the Austin Museum of Art and the Jack S. Blanton Museum of Art in Austin, Texas, the Arlington Museum of Art in Arlington, Texas, the Selby and Crossley Galleries at Ringling School of Art and Design in Sarasota, Florida, the Marsh Gallery at the University of Richmond, Richmond, Virginia, and Kipps Gallery at Indiana University, Indiana, Pennsylvania. In 2003, she was nominated for the Louis Comfort Tiffany Biennial Award. In 2006, she was awarded a Mid-Atlantic Arts Foundation Fellowship for a residency at Virginia Center for the Creative Arts.

WORK ONLINE: See a slideshow of some of her current artwork right here.

Artists Charly Hamilton, Mark Wolfe and Amy Williams have recently collaborated in a mini-exhibit featuring apocalyptic imagery, now showing at Annex Gallery, Taylor Books in Charleston. The exhibit ranges from big — a large woodcut painting of the destruction of Charleston, to small — a row of felted owls representing death, famine, pestilence and war. An end-times ‘zine accompanies the exhibit and explains: “From time to time, prophets and zealots claim the end of the world is near. For most of us, the apocalypse comes less dramatically but just as seriously - in the form of a bad health diagnosis, a relationship breakup, a job loss, or the death of someone we love.” A reception for the show takes place 3 p.m. April Fool’s Day at the Annex Gallery.

More works in the show (click to enlarge):

An opening reception for “E PLURIBUS UNUM: Recent Photographs of New York” by Betty Rivard takes place 5:30 to 7:30 p.m. today (Tuesday, March 20) at Frankenberger Art Gallery at the University of Charleston, with a gallery talk at 6 p.m., in the gallery on the 2nd floor of the Geary Student Union. The exhibit remains up through April 5. Regular gallery hours are 8:30 a.m. to 5 p.m., Monday through Friday. Call 357-4795.

Detail from one of Chris Jordan’s work, depicting 60,000 plastic bags, the number used in the US every five seconds.

W.Va. artist Paula Clendenin passes on a link to an illuminating, striking and sometimes scary artistic website. The work is by Chris Jordan and there’s no West Virginia connection, it’s just a powerful set of work. Jordan says:

“This new series looks at contemporary American culture through the austere lens of statistics. Each image portrays a specific quantity of something: fifteen million sheets of office paper (five minutes of paper use); 106,000 aluminum cans (thirty seconds of can consumption) and so on. My hope is that images representing these quantities might have a different effect than the raw numbers alone, such as we find daily in articles and books…”

Click here to check out the site. — click on “Running the Numbers. ” It’s worth it

“The Seine, Right Bank, Paris,” a 1905 pastel and goache work by Edward Shinn (1876-1953), part of the Daywood Collection

Click here to view a slideshow of some notable works from the Daywood Collection at the Huntington Museum of Art. The slideshow is a multimedia companion piece to an article in the March 11, 2007 Sunday Gazette-Mail by Bob Schwarz, on the 300-piece Daywood Collection. It came to the museum in the mid-60s, along with restrictions, which museum officials are happy to live with to house such a body of work.

By Bob Schwarz

When Ruth Wood Dayton was shopping around her Daywood Collection in the mid-1960s, the Huntington Museum of Art was still in its early teens.

Dayton wasn’t wanting money, but she sought a guarantee that the new owner would properly house and show the American art that she and her late husband, lawyer Arthur Dayton, had taken so much care assembling.

Sunrise Museum, just getting started in Charleston and not yet a collecting museum, said no thanks. West Virginia University, decades away from its current plans for an art museum, passed too. The Huntington Museum got the 300-piece Daywood Collection after agreeing to build a big new wing and display highlights from the collection six months a year.

In a single stroke, Huntington gained paintings by big-league American artists whose works you could see in major museums across America: Childe Hassam, Robert Henri, Winslow Homer, Edward Hopper, Everett Shinn, Ernest Lawson, Charles Burchfield, Andrew Wyeth, William Glackens.

It was a coup - except for one thing. The obligation to keep Daywood on the walls six months a year kept other works off the walls…

To read the rest of this story, click here.