Blyth Festival Art Gallery announces 2025 season, artists

BY SHAWN LOUGHLIN

This year’s Blyth Festival Art Gallery season is now officially set and will begin on Friday, April 25 with the opening of the always-popular Student Show.

 

The Student Show, with an opening reception on April 25 beginning at 7 p.m., will be followed by the Community Show, and its opening reception on Saturday, May 24.

 

Just before the professional season begins at the gallery, the committee will bring back last year’s successful Chalk Around The Block event that engaged area children last year. Young people were gifted sidewalk chalk and their very own patch of sidewalk to adorn as they saw fit, all against a backdrop of other fun activities, such as face-painting.

 

That event is set for Saturday, May 31 with a rain date of one week later: Saturday, June 7.

 

The professional season then begins on Saturday, June 21 with a group show being curated by the gallery’s Exhibition Committee Chair Kelly Stevenson, herself an artist, entitled “The Rural Queer Agenda”. Stevenson, who curated “Anything But Hysterical” last season, a not dissimilar group show for female-identifying artists, said this show will be open to all members of the LGBTQ community and, while each participant’s contribution is their own to create, it comes at a time in which rhetoric both locally and internationally has worked to disenfranchise this community in subtle and not-so-subtle ways.

 

That show’s opening reception is set for Saturday, June 21, beginning at 4:30 p.m. - an earlier start time than in previous seasons.
Another popular feature from previous seasons will be the return of the Poetry in the Gallery series, which brings in one poet per professional show for a special reading in the gallery, further expanding the gallery’s artistic offerings beyond paintings on a wall. The poet for this show is Ashleigh Weeden, though it should be noted that specific dates for the Poetry in the Gallery series have yet to be confirmed, but they will be at some point during the run of the show.

 

The second show of the season will feature a familiar face to readers of The Citizen as reporter Scott Stephenson and his wife Chelsea Gamble will be the focus of a two-person show entitled “Apocryphal Photography of Jutland Norton”, a mix of photography and poetry and text.

 

Stevenson noted that Stephenson and Gamble will be donating their proceeds from the show to the Lucknow Adopt-a-Pet/Pet Rescue. The show will open on Saturday, July 26 at 4:30 p.m. The poet for this show will be Tom Cull.

 

The third show will be a mixed media show from Toronto-based artist Amanda Baron. The opening reception is scheduled for Saturday, Aug. 23, beginning at 4:30 p.m. and the artist for the show will be Mark Hertzburger.

 

In addition, with it being the 50th anniversary season of the gallery, there will be special events and nods to the history of the gallery sprinkled throughout the season, both in person at the gallery and through the gallery’s social media channels.

 

For more information on the season or past seasons, as the gallery marks this historic milestone, visit the gallery’s page on the Blyth Festival website or follow its social media accounts.