Mark your calendars

Jazzy Opening Night Reception (admission $50)
Thursday, April 26:  6:30-8:30 pm

Free admission:
Friday, April 27:  6-10pm
Saturday, April 28: 1-10pm
Sunday, April 29:  1-7pm with Artists’ Reception 4-6pm

Volunteer Coordinator Needed

We need a dynamic Volunteers Coordinator who has significant experience in people/project management to help marshal the human forces of Artists Against AIDS. This person would generally be devoting 3 or more hours each week toward reviewing volunteer applications, meeting with potential volunteers in group settings and general staff scheduling for some parts of the show/sale which takes place the last weekend in April. Interested parties please email: info@ArtistsAgainstAIDS.info.

Attention artists!

Tim Pellegrini, our artist coordinator, will be communicating with you soon on all the details you need to know for this year’s show.  If you are new this year, or thinking about donating your art this year, please contact Tim at tpellegrini32@gmail.com. He will put you on the distribution list so you receive all the necessary information. We’ll be adding a page to this site with all the information you need. And please spread the word to other artists you think may be interested!

Artists Against AIDS
19th Annual
Art Exhibition and Sale

804 North Neil, Champaign IL
(1 block north of Neil St. Post Office)

April 29 – May 2, 2011

The doors open at 6 p.m. Thousands of pieces contributed by over 200 artists are arranged in 11,000 square feet of space.

Music is cued.

Wine is chilling, and food is being prepared.

We’re waiting for you.

See you tonight!

Say hi to Pegy! She’s in charge of the jewelry booth, and is making good-good use of downtime by sweeping and cleaning!

We’re giving the the live “social networking” a practice run on our first drop-off day for the big show!

The doors opened at 4:00, but art started rolling in 1/2 hour before. Volunteers are ready and waiting, to help you carry, label, and fill out forms, if you didn’t get the downloadable form off of our website.

45 minutes into Drop-Off Day 1, we have over 75 canvases submitted!

Artists Against AIDS is sharing the gallery space and walls with BeeMi Gallery, “Champaign’s Best Fly-by-Night Gallery.” BeeMi is a traveling art show established 2 years ago by Amanda Bickell and Rebecca Reid. Their initial intent was to display at The Boneyard Festival, but they’ve since expanded and continue to show their work in other venues when opportunities arise.

We all play so nice! In exchange for sharing our walls & pillars, BeeMi Artists met this weekend to help rid the gallery of construction dust—so you won’t have to pardon it!

We used sweeping compound to clean up. Just sprinkle this bright red, slightly tacky compound on the floor before the brooming begins. The dust adheres to the compound, making the clean up cleaner. No dust storms to settle behind us, and our floors and walls are going to be clean and ready for art and artists in their show and ours.

Once the floors were shiny, we had to place the walls that the Lincoln’s Challenge kids assembled last week. They were tucked away nice and neat, but it’s show-time, and they had to be moved. It was no small task; they’re tall, and had to be moved in an upright position. We were lucky to have a good crew of volunteers to make short order of the job.

Once the walls were in place, the other half of the gallery was cleaned, and the next task at hand was tackled: wiring and lighting. Hundreds of feet of wire had to be strung, and dozens of lights and spotlights placed.

Interesting FYI: You may not know that part of setting up a 4-day art show would be learning, knowing, and abiding by a myriad of city zoning codes. The gallery space has to be inspected before the show can open. Building inspectors and fire inspectors have to approve the placement of every. little. thing before we, or BeeMi, this weekend, can open the doors to the public.  Square footage is determined, and a proper number of fire extinguishers are placed every x-amount of feet. If we don’t fulfill the requirements, the doors will not open.

I popped back into the gallery space last night to see how things were going. The lights are all in place, as is a lot of the art from the BeeMi artists. I’ll give you a bit of a sneak preview, but you have to promise me that you’ll get yourself down to the Blue Line Station sometime this weekend to see the rest for yourself. It’s so much better in person, and there’s so much more of it to see.

I took this picture of a beautiful spider. When I walked past it and turned around, I swear it was in this same position. As I moved through the building after that, I wouldn’t dare turn around and look back.

Lights & Art:

Now that you’ve peeked, I’ll remind you of the address:

Boneyard Arts Festival/BeeMi Gallery
April 7-10, 2011
The Blue Line Station
804 North Neil Street
Champaign

I wrote in the last post that we were done with the moving part of Move-In Day within 2 hours last Saturday morning. I ran out to do errands, and returned just in time to see this:

The young men from the Illinois National Guard’s Lincoln’s Challenge were just arriving to the venue.

Lincoln’s Challenge is an amazing program that began in Rantoul, IL, 17 years ago. It’s a voluntary military school for kids that dropped out of high school. Did you hear voluntary? The youth (both male and female) that attend Lincoln’s Challenge have made a choice to attend this program, get their GEDs, learn valuable life skills, and to turn their lives around.

I’m always impressed when I see them in uniform around the community. I know that they’ve each chosen to get their lives in order, and that they’re allowed to walk away from the academy any time they want to.

We’re so glad these young men opted to stick around, because we had work for them to do! We had them in cover-alls in no time, and after brief instruction, put them to work. Lighting elements needed to be checked, walls needed to be assembled, and painted, and shelves put together.

They worked smoothly together, and seemed to have a lot of fun. The remainder of the day’s labor—construction and painting—was finished in 2.5 hours!

Lincoln’s Challenge, you rock! Kudos to you all!

It was *this* blogger’s first year in attendance for this day, and I am amazed at how it went. Have you ever shown up to help a friend move, only to discover that nothing’s packed, there are no boxes, the truck hasn’t been secured,  and no one else shows up to help?

It was nothing like that.

There were volunteers aplenty at the venue, on time. Instructions were given that the day would be split into three segments:

• Phase I: Drop cloths
• Phase II:  Move supplies from there back to here
• Phase II: Young men from Lincoln’s Challenge Academy would arrive to take care of physical labor: assembling and painting walls.

Phase I: Drop Cloths!

Later in the day walls would have to be assembled and painted, and polite as we are, we were determined not to mess the place up! A big shout-out to  Adams Outdoor Advertising for helping us  keep things tidy by donating 10 x 20 ft. vinyl billboard signs that were obsolete or left over, to use as drop cloths. They gave us a big bundle of them for free, and we are now contemplating what other uses we can find for the leftovers.

Phase II: Moving

It didn’t take long to cover the gallery, and we were then off to do the heavy work:

It’s amazing how many supplies you have to have to throw a show of this magnitude. Tables and walls and pedestals—you will need to display art. Lighting! Spotlights and outlets and electrical wiring. There are bins of display materials, frames, cash register supplies, and clipboards. Shelving, and decorative display items such as tiles and white rock are carried in.

Tami Haubner rocked at orchestrating what should go where when we showed up with the goods. She had a grip on the future of the show, the layout, and what needed to go where. Volunteers moved about with no confusion at her direction, placing items on this wall, or that, or right in the middle of the floor. It was clockwork—clockwork, I say!—and we were finished with Phases I and II by 11 a.m.

In 2 hours’ time we’d completed 2/3 of the days’ accomplishments, and began setting up for Phase III: Walls.

Phase III is a story in itself, with its very own photos, so that will be our next post. Be sure to check back here in a day or two and read about the Lincoln’s Challenge Volunteers stepping up to the plate.

The show is just 1 month away. All of our talking and planning is now being implemented, and we hope you’ll stay tuned, and continue to share our links and promote the show for us, as we kick it up a notch at the venue.

Space, space, glorious space! Do you see what we see? Can you imagine it, filled with walls, and paintings, and sculptures? There will be tables with jewelry and glass and textile arts, oh, it’s going to be magnificent!

Keep tuning in here for updated photos of the space; the progress will only become more exciting the closer we get to show time.

If you’re interested in helping with that set up, which includes constructing and painting walls, volunteering in any other aspect of the show, send an mail with your contact info (name, phone, email) and general interest to: info@artistsagainstaids.info or contact the GCAP office at (217) 351-2437.

There are 2 forms available for downloading: One contains instructions and information about tagging and labeling your art; the second is the actual registration form.

We know that you have plenty of time to fill these out. Drop-off dates for your artwork are April 16-18, from 4 to 9 p.m. There’s a lot of energy and excitement on drop-off nights, be ready for a bit of hustle and bustle. Having your forms filled out correctly and ahead of time may save you a bit of time in line—and give you a few extra minute to peek at other pieces rolling in!

Grab a copy for yourself, send the link to your artist friends, and encourage them to donate a piece or three to the show to support the cause!

Last Friday night was Opening Night for a new exhibition in Art Coop’s gallery. Art Coop is actually an art supply store, one that this blogger/artist started shopping in when she was in high school, way back, in the ::cough:: late 70s. It was located on the UI campus then, and has just recently moved into Lincoln Square Mall, in Urbana.

One perk of the new store is that it includes a gallery, where customers and artists can show their work.  The current exhibit, entitled Where We Live, features black and white photos submitted by local photographers & artists.

Art Coop supports our artists, and at the same time supports the community: 20 percent of the sales of all photos will be donated to local, not-for-profit charities of the photographer’s choice.

Ahem! GCAP’s Artists’ Against AIDS is a chosen charity for some of those photographers.

We went the Opening Reception last Friday night; the gallery was abuzz with fans and photographers. I never get tired of attending art shows. The social aspect is nice, you’ll bump into old friends and acquaintances, and often make new ones.

But what I enjoy most is seeing what people create, how they see the world. Some of the photos at this show highlight places I have been, or things I have seen, personally, and I would not have captured them as this one did.

I love the photos with props, and imagine the photographer carrying a box of treasures to the photo sight, along with their camera. I note the weather, and the terrain. I wonder if the photographer knew, instantly, just what he or she had captured—Was this what they were after, or did it grow on them, upon review at the end of the day? Was a detail purposeful, or magical dumb luck?

I contemplate the art, and I contemplate the artist, and I contemplate the people, that like me, showed up for a glass of wine and the first glimpse of the show.

When it seems that all possible contemplation has been done, I sit back, and I smile at dapper top hats.

You still have plenty of time to head over to Art Coop and do your own conptemplating—and shopping. Set aside some time, in the next 6 weeks, to do just that, then come back and tell us what you saw.

Art Coop
“Where We Live”: An exhibition of black and white photography
February 18–March 31, 2011
150 Lincoln Square
Urbana, IL 61801
217-352-4562