The October exhibits will be on display from October 4th through October 28th. Please join us on Friday, October 7th from 6:30—8:00 pm for the gallery reception.

The Mazie Jones Gallery is featuring the artwork of Teresa Cerda. Teresa was born in Santiago de Chile. She grew up and lived there until 1990, then went to Madrid, Spain, where she lived until 2005 when she moved to Watauga County. Teresa has worked with and around art for many years. She has worked as a framer, decorated for special community events, and designed and made sets for plays.

She is a multi-talented artist and we are pleased to have her exhibiting here in the Jones House. From 1990-2005 Teresa developed an artistic series of work that was exhibited in various places in Spain. Most of this work was sold to two major collectors in Madrid. The title of this show is “Landscape and Colors II”. This exhibit is the continuation of a work that she has been developing for some years. It is the result of her observation of the forms and colors of nature. This observation became an idea that developed into a language of geometrical shapes and colors and is primarily an abstract work. She’s inspired by Mark Rothko and Jackson Pollock on one side but has also looked to Monet and Klein. This work uses the concept of landscape, although it’s not a copy of it, it’s a poetical concept. Teresa uses a layering process along with different mediums and tools to obtain the quality she wants.

One of our Regional Artist Project Grant recipients, locally, Teresa has exhibited at the Jones House, the Looking Glass Gallery, The Turchin Center, The Greenhouse, the Crossnore Gallery, and the Dripolator Coffeehouse in Asheville. She has not had a solo exhibit here for a couple years and we are so excited to have her back at the Arts Council for this exhibit!

The Open Door Gallery is pleased to have the creative handmade books of Sharon Sharp. She studied book arts at Penland School of Crafts, and became captivated by nontraditional book forms. Since then, she has enjoyed exploring the interplay between form and content, especially regarding nature-centered themes. Sharon specializes in designing and creating one-of-a-kind and limited-edition artist’s books, under the Curious Pursuits Press imprint. Often sculptural, her books incorporate widely varying features—origami folds, tunnels, pop-ups, envelopes, and more—many of which the Open Door Gallery’s visitors will get to see.

Sharon served as Mammoth Cave National Park’s 2009 Artist-in-Residence, and in 2006 she and visual artist Lucia Harrison collaborated as Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore’s Artists-in-Residence. Special books were created for donation to the respective parks. The Open Door Gallery exhibition will include one of the Pictured Rocks sets, descriptions of both residency experiences, and a recently created complex sculptural book inspired by Mammoth Cave’s history. Vamp & Tramp Booksellers represent Sharon’s works, which are held in corporate and private collections, as well as in the special-collections libraries of Denison University, the University of Vermont, and the Savannah College of Art & Design’s Savannah campus. One of her books appears in 500 Handmade Books, and others have been exhibited regionally and nationally, most recently at the University of South Carolina, Seattle’s Columbia City Gallery, and The Bascom’s “American Craft Today” exhibition. Sharon received a 2011 Regional Artist Project of Northwest North Carolina Grant from the Arts Councils of Watauga, Ashe, Avery, and Wilkes. She applied this to attendance at a premier workshop series called Paper & Book Intensive (PBI), held this year at Ox-Bow, a school of arts and crafts in Saugatuck, Michigan. For the Open Door Gallery exhibition, Sharon will display several prototypes of the books she learned to make in the PBI workshops. Sharon has taught bookmaking at the Florence Thomas Memorial Art School (Glendale Springs, NC) and in other settings. Her portfolio, resume, and book-arts musings appear on her website, www.sharphandmadebooks.com.

The Serendipity Gallery’s featured artist this month is Janie Endress. She has taken different workshops while exploring various art mediums and enjoys the ongoing adventure of creating and experimenting with the Art process. Janie has been under the instruction of Marsha Holmes and is a resident of Blowing Rock.