New Yucca Valley Visual & Performing Arts Center to open Inaugural Season’s Closing Exhibition, PENTAMEROUS, May 4
YUCCA VALLEY, CA — The new Yucca Valley Visual & Performing Arts Center will follow the highly extolled exhibition, ABSOLUTELY ABSTRACT, with a collection of individual exhibitions, opening May 4, 2019. The celebratory public reception will take place that evening from 6-9 pm and will include a cash bar. The state-of-the-art facility, an annex of the Hi-Desert Cultural Center, will finish out its inaugural season with a blockbuster collection of five exhibitions entitled PENTAMEROUS. The individual shows are WEST, the work of Eric Nash, COSMOVISION by Ulrike Arnold (guest curated by Patricia Watts), LUSH LIFE by Coco Hall, and a month-long Student Exhibition featuring works by visual arts students of the Hi-Desert Cultural Center’s acclaimed ArtsTech Academy program. Following the Student Exhibition and opening on June 8, PERPLEXING VISIONS AND UNREALITIES, the work of Pablo Romero and Matthew Couper, will join the four primary exhibitions and show through the close of the PENTAMEROUS Exhibition on July 28. This array of exhibitions is executive curator Michael McCall’s choice to branch out from the past year’s focus on single-themed shows.
ABOUT THE ARTISTS
Eric Nash, a California artist and resident of Yucca Valley, works in oil and charcoal. In WEST, His subject matter focuses on icons and scenes inspired by California and the West. Often highly realistic, his images are pared down to their idealized essence often conveying a film still or a memory.
German born, Ulrike Arnold, has created paintings made from soils, mud, and clay from all five continents over the past thirty years. In COSMOVISION, she will present the paintings from her journey two years ago to the Yucatan Peninsula which combine a the mud and clay from the region, as well as meteorite dust from the meteorite, Chicxulub that hit the earth near Merida, Mexico approximately 65 million years ago.
In LUSH LIFE, artist Coco Hall displays her colorful fabric, ceramic, and other artworks with a humorous flair. Based in Joshua Tree, California, Hall’s main current is in the wonderful/horrible of the world and likes showing this through the use of humor because it helps “open the mind.”
PERPLEXING VISIONS AND UNREALITIES is a two-person exhibition. Pablo Romero is an artist living in Landers, California, whose work is based in the imagination of the mind in what he sees and feels. Some of what he paints are true stories and some are fiction always combined with a bizarre sense of humor. Matthew Couper, a native of New Zealand currently living in Las Vegas, created artwork rooted in his admiration for the anonymous devotional paintings that flourished in Spanish Colonial societies. He creates personal and idiosyncratic narratives that explore myth, religion, politics and personal experience.
The Students of the Hi-Desert Cultural Center’s extensive visual arts classes will present a collective body of work featuring the culmination of this past season’s classes, including ceramics, comic-book illustration, watercolor, and more.
The Yucca Valley Visual & Performing Arts Center is located at 58325 Highway 62 in Yucca Valley, California, 92284. The gallery is open Thursday through Sunday from 1-6 pm, holidays excluded, and there is no admittance fee. All artworks in the PENTAMEROUS exhibition will also be available for viewing and sale via its online gallery. More information on the new exhibition and the brand new visual and performing arts center may be found online at YVArts.org.
The Yucca Valley Visual & Performing Arts Center is a program and annex of Hi-Desert Cultural Center, a GuideStar “Gold Status” non-profit 501(c)(3) organization that serves as the regional visual and performing arts organization and arts agency for the communities of Joshua Tree National Park.
PHOTO CAPTION: Eric Nash is one of several artists being featured in the Yucca Valley Arts Center’s newest large exhibition, PENTAMEROUS, opening with a gala public celebration May 4th from 6-9pm.
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ABOUT HI-DESERT CULTURAL CENTER
With its multi-venue performing and visual arts centers located in Joshua Tree and Yucca Valley, California, the Hi-Desert Cultural Center (HDCC) is a non-profit 501(c)(3) tax-exempt corporation (Federal Tax ID# 23-7425816) that has been serving as the regional performing and visual arts organization and arts agency for the gateway communities of Joshua Tree National Park for more than 50 years. The Cultural Center owns and operates its own performance venues and facilities and produces award-winning community and professional live theater, concerts, art exhibits and galleries, festivals, the Joshua Tree Philharmonic symphony orchestra, a master chorus, an artist residency for veterans, an extensive educational arts and technology academy program for youth and adults, and more. The Cultural Center is the largest and oldest non-profit arts organization in the region with several million dollars in assets, employing over 30 full-time and part-time employees, and with an annual budget exceeding half-a-million dollars. Having achieved GuideStar Gold status and recognized as an organization of artistic excellence by the National Endowment for the Arts, it instructs over 700 adults and youth weekly and operates a significant financial aid and scholarship program so that no children are turned away from programs due to their socioeconomic situation. Learn more at: www.hidesertculturalcenter.org