Blooms & Things will display “Love Thru the Eye of the Aperture” — work by photographer Marla Smith, who has lived on Vashon for 30 years and is known for her wedding photography. In the shop’s annex, called the Bloomroom, members of Comunidad Latina de Vashon will serve free handmade Mexican food and collect donations to ensure that Spanish-speaking toddlers get a chance to attend preschool on Vashon. The group will also donate a portion of the donations to the Vashon Schools Foundation.
Café Luna will show photography by Jenny Bell, with images from Italy, Samoa, Australia, Vashon and other places for sale. A portion of Bell’s sales will go to the Shillong Clean Water Project, a project she created with a partner, Eliza Steele, to support a community in northeast India in its needs for clean water, sanitation, women and business, and education for the poor. For more information, visit the group’s Facebook page.
The Hardware Store Restaurant will be the site of “Print Arts: New Work,” a show by the artists of Quartermaster Press. The 10-member group will show an array of work in monotype, collograph, limited-edition prints and collage and mixed-media pieces. Imagery will range from representational to abstract. The cooperative’s studio is located at the Beall Greenhouses. Regular printmaking classes and workshops are offered there throughout the year.
Ignition Studios and Gallery will show “Between the Tides: An Intertidal Art Show,” to benefit the Vashon Beach Naturalists. The show includes multimedia art celebrating the beauty of Vashon’s beaches. The evening will include a “people’s choice” contest and a raffle that will award prizes to artists as well as viewers. The show was planned by Adria Magrath, who has selected oils, watercolors, encaustic works, pottery, seaweed pressings, sculpted wood as well as many other works of art to exhibit.
The Little House will exhibit new work by potter Christine Beck, who is co-owner of Waterworks Studio. Beck’s mostly Asian-influenced work has been exhibited widely at Pacific Northwest Crafts Gallery, the Cornish Gallery, Bellevue Art Fair, The Henry Gallery, Cheney Cowles Museum, Vashon Allied Arts and others. A 35-year resident of Vashon, Beck has worked as a production potter, a legal investigator, and in recent years, she took a short detour into earthenware production before returning to high fire porcelain. Her show will include platters, teapots, brie bakers/butter dishes, large bowls, individual and large casseroles and mugs made exclusively for The Little House.
Raven’s Nest, a Native arts gallery and gift shop, will celebrate its one-year anniversary in its downtown location. Owners Sue and Israel Shotridge will be on hand to welcome visitors with a free Shotridge Collection print while supplies last. New art prints, art cards, cedarbark weavings, jewelry, apparel and books will be on view, and a new collection of beaded deer skin and seal medicine pouch necklaces by Sue and Autumn Shotridge have been created especially for this event. Beaded medicine pouch necklaces will also be displayed, and a short explanation about traditional herbs and uses will be included in the evening program.
Snapdragon Café will celebrate its one-year anniversary on Vashon with a dance party featuring DJ Michael Whitmore and live music by Middlemarch. The café will also take over the empty shop adjacent to it, and exhibit “Thomas Patrick Hastings: A Photographic Journey 1962-1975.” Hastings, the father of café co-owner Megan Hastings, was an artist, designer, collector of antiquities from Asia, Europe and the Americas. As a traveler, he documented communities in Ireland, Hong Kong, Sweden, Zanzibar, Greece and Africa.
Two Wall Gallery has held over three teen shows that opened in May in the space, with an encore reception scheduled for the gallery cruise. The first show is of gourd masks created by McMurray eighth-graders in a workshop with artist-in-residence Charlotte Masi. The second show, of Polaroid emulsion lifts, was created by students in a workshop led by photographer Ray Pfortner in Terry Swift’s art class at Vashon High School. The third show is of photo transfers done through a transfer with beeswax/encaustics, done by FamilyLink students with instructor Ray Pfortner.
Vashon Community Care will be the site of a show called “Hers, Mine and Ours,” a mother-daughter exhibition featuring the work of island artist Geri Peterson, and ink drawings by her daughter Bonnie Bristow. Both women discovered a love of making art at age 49, with Peterson driven by color and light, and Bristow beginning with design and pattern. Peterson, a watercolorist, has shown at Vashon Community Care many times, but this is Bristow’s debut show anywhere. Some of the pieces in the show were created by the duo as a team, passing works back and forth. Steve Amsden will play music at the opening reception.
Vashon Tea Shop will show Beth Reiter’s “Tea Bag Cocoons” — small works of art created by using dried tea bags. Reiter opens dried tea bags, empties and cleans then and then fills them with cotton and treasures before sewing them back up and sealing them with beeswax. “Each cocoon is opaque so that you can sort of see what’s inside, but not completely,” Reiter said. “A nod to the unknown.”
