December Exhibitions + Open Studios
Open Studios, December 2-3 in Portland
Thank you for taking an interest in my work and events.
On Saturday, December 2nd and Sunday, December 3rd from 10am-4pm, my studio building will host our annual Winter Open Studios & Holiday Market. In addition to artists, NW Marine Artworks houses a diverse group of makers and designers, and these events are a great way to visit studios while also shopping for handmade goods. We’ll have food and drinks as well: coffee, tea, donuts, burritos, libations…
I’m lucky to have found space here three years ago when we made the permanent move to Portland. NWMAW provided a safe place to land, windows, light, views of Forest Park, and a great community that helped me feel connected during Covid. There are some incredibly talented people here who always put on a great event.
NW Marine Artworks / 2516 NW 29th Ave. Portland, OR 97210
More event info can be found here.
Exhibitions
I’ll be showing work in two exhibitions opening in December and running through 2024, both in San Francisco:
Holographic Sky at the San Francisco Arts Education Project
Minnesota Street Project
1275 Minnesota Street
San Francisco, CA 94107
Saturday, December 2nd, 2023 – Saturday, January 27th, 2024; Opening Reception and Live Auction: Saturday, December 2, 4:00-7:00pm
With the sky as jumping-off point, we've invited 20 visual artists – many of them current and former teachers with the San Francisco Arts Education Project – to share their visions of what resides above in the spectacular new group show Holographic Sky.
Works are for sale, with proceeds to benefit SFArtsED's educational programs and the artists in equal measure. At the opening reception on Saturday, Dec. 2 from 4-7pm, five additional works will be offered in a live auction. Esteemed San Francisco gallerist (and longtime supporter) Catharine Clark will be our auctioneer. To register in advance for the live auction, which will begin around 5:30pm, please send us your contact information here.
Participating Holographic Sky artists:
Kim Anno, Jeanette Au, Agelio Batle, Gil Batle, Val Britton, Zoe Farmer, Aaron Gach, Renée Gertler. Sheila Ghidini, Doug Hall, Diane Andrews Hall, Sam Lopes, Judit Navratil, Tiersa Nureyev, Richard Olsen, Yulia Pinkusevich, J. John Priola, Sharon Shepherd, Lindsey White, lan Winters.
And we're thrilled to share the artists whose additional works will be part of our live auction on Saturday: Chester Arnold, Agelio Batle, Zoe Farmer, Richard Olsen, Yulia Pinkusevich.
Encode/Store/Retrieve at the San José Museum of Art
110 South Market Street
San José, CA 95113
Friday, December 8, 2023 – Sunday, April 21, 2024
Member Reception: Friday, December 8, 6–7pm; Opening Celebration: Friday, December 8, 2023
The landscape of memory has shifted dramatically over the course of the Digital Age, marked by the ease and speed at which we can record, store, and share information. Through digital technologies, almost anyone can participate in the production of memory at any time. Yet the ever-growing digital archive has substantial financial and ecological impacts that we must address.
Encode/Store/Retrieve draws together artworks primarily from SJMA’s collection to explore low-tech forms of memory production from the past sixty years. The sculptures, paintings, photographs, installations, and works on paper brought together here are organized into thematic groupings that reference the key processes underlying cognitive and computational models of memory—encoding, storage, and retrieval. Bridging conversations about digital, biological, institutional, and ecological memory, the artists in this exhibition provide us strategies to grapple with the emerging issues of our growing digital archive.
Featured artists include Wallace Berman, Val Britton, Jim Campbell, Enrique Chagoya, Chryssa, Binh Danh, Steven Deo, Bruce Hasson, Xandra Ibarra, Dinh Q. Lê, Darlene Nguyen-Ely, Margaret Nielsen, Harold Paris, Beverly Rayner, Analia Saban, Katherine Sherwood, Rose B. Simpson, Stephanie Syjuco, Stella Waitzkin, and Xiaoze Xie.
Looking at, listening to, and reading
I’m still thinking about the immersive installation and intricately crafted Jacob Hashimoto works from the exhibition I saw in October at Miles McEnery.
This song on repeat.
Last summer I read Everything She Touched: The Life of Ruth Asawa, and found Ruth Asawa’s experiences and challenges as an artist, human, and mother to be contemporary, timeless, and relevant. So I was delighted when Pete Belkin invited me to be part of the show he was curating at SFArtsED, the organization started by Ruth Asawa and friends in 1968 and woven into this thoughtful and heartening biography. I taught a weeklong summer class there in grad school, unaware of its storied history. I love it when experiences come full circle.
Ruth was brilliant and relentless, and her contributions to art and education continue to reverberate. Ruth forever.
Thanks for being here -
Val
⋰ Website
⋰ Email : val@valbritton.com (or respond to this email)