GREEN December 9, 2006

This event is FREE with live gypsy jazz by Le Chat Lunatique and food provided by local restaurants. Exhibition runs through January 27, 2007. Opening reception event from 6-9pm Dec. 9th.

The public is invited to the grand opening of 516 ARTS, a new arts destination in Downtown Albuquerque, to celebrate GREEN, the inaugural exhibition. GREEN features a cross section of artists who make New Mexico their home, with internationally known as well as up-and-coming artists working in a variety of visual
media from painting, sculpture and fine craft to photography and digital arts. The exhibition celebrates the regeneration of the arts at 516 ARTS, New Mexico’s premier independent museum-style gallery, and reaches out to a broad mix of artists and audiences, young and old, traditional and contemporary. GREEN pulls from the past and looks to the future, giving an expansive view of the state of art in New Mexico today. The wide range of artists spans from Acoma potter Mary Lewis Garcia, who is working today in a tradition that has existed for thousands of years, to Santa Fe painter Grant Hayunga, whose abstracted contemporary paintings celebrate the vast sky of the New Mexico landscape with an untraditional approach, to internationally renowned Albuquerque photographer Joel-Peter Witkin, whose masterful black and white compositions honor life in the face of death and darkness, to Cerillos artist Bill Gilbert, whose digital map compositions chart a human’s path through the landscape like constellations mirroring the heavens on earth. The exhibition features 56 pieces by 23 artists who come from Albuquerque, Santa Fe, Taos, Acoma, Hondo, Cochiti and Apache Creek. The exhibition is curated by 516 staff, Suzanne Sbarge and Andrew John Cecil, and will be accompanied by an exhibition catalog with an essay by author Sharyn Udall.

Official Website: http://www.516arts.org/exhibitions.html