For its latest community art show and sale, titled Love Laugh Leap Live!, Featherstone Center for the Arts in Oak Bluffs has cast a wide net and pulled in a brimming catch.
Seventy-five Island artists contributed 150 new works for the exhibition, which is open daily through March 3 from noon to 4 p.m. in the center’s Francine Kelly Gallery.
Highlights include Traeger di Pietro’s brightly-hued painting of romantic aquanauts, It’s a Love Story; Lisa Augstave’s acrylic Summer Circuit, a musical view of Oak Bluffs; John Holladay’s painting You Gotta Love Menemsha and photographer Liz Dolan Durkee’s architectural highlights from colorful Oak Bluffs cottages.
The show abounds in various media forms, from collage, sculpture and seaweed to fine jewelry, ceramics and fiber arts, with a number of refreshingly-unexpected combinations.
Jennifer Strachan set her broken plate mosaics of singing cardinals in dark-wood frames from the 1800s, and Mary Beth Daniels’s needle-felted alpaca wool, mohair and silk into a dramatic moonlight scene.
Among the show’s other surprises are a pair of appealing contour sculptures of dogs by Marston Clough, who is widely known for his landscape paintings. Titled Leaps of Love and Playing With My Heart, the two coated-wire outlines express the uncomplicated joy of the great comic-strip pups, Snoopy from Peanuts and Earl from Mutts.
One gallery wall is devoted to the show’s youngest artists, ranging in age from 3 to 10.
Nearby, a pair of embellished papier-mâché fantasy figurines by Debbie Ware flourish banners embroidered with Beatles lyrics: “It’s only love and that is all” and “Whisper words of wisdom, let it be.”
The next exhibition in the Francine Kelly Gallery, opening March 10, will celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Martha’s Vineyard Commission. Other upcoming shows include Take Flight — A Look from Above, opening April 7 and The Art of Flowers, opening May 5.
For more information, visit featherstoneart.org.
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