Main Art Gallery: Upstairs

Like Main Art Framing, Main Art Gallery is located on the second floor of Main Art Supply. Our curatorial staff presents both established and up-and-coming artists from the Richmond region and the Southeast—artists working in a wide variety of mediums, from painting and sculpture to photography and installation. Every month we showcase a new artist or group of artist at an opening that coincides with other gallery openings in the city, the ever-popular First Friday series. Please join us on the first Friday of every month for an opening reception (hors d'oeuvres courtesy of Baja Bean Company) from 7 to 9 pm.

Click here to view our past exhibitions

The Figure in Printexhibition card

ARTIST STATEMENT

Originally, the arrangement of the vertical forms in my work was inspired by the layout of pig iron moulds*. In my painting, pig iron served as a starting point for abstraction. From this beginning the work has become a means to blend stasis with change, order with chaos, and presence with absence. It is a metaphor for family, identity, and existence.

All art is about existence.

*Pig Iron is a crude iron formed by the initial melting of iron ore. It is cast into uniform ingots or bars usually for transport to a distant location for further refinement and manufacturing. Before the automation of the Industrial Revolution, the ore was melted in blast furnaces and the molten iron would flow down a channel and into a mould dug into hard packed sand. The large channel would feed smaller perpendicular channels which when cooled and hardened would form the bars. The arrangement reminded the iron workers - who were mostly from agrarian backgrounds - of a sow nursing her piglets so they called the bars pig iron, and the name stuck.

Daniel Calder

Art lovers at Daniel's opening. Where were you?

Art lovers at Daniel's opening

MAIN ART GALLERY

EXHIBITION SCHEDULE 2009-2010


Georgianne Stinnett	Sep 4-28
Jake Urbanski	Oct 2-31
Jorge Benitez	Nov 6-30
Maruta Racenis	Dec 4-Jan 31
The Figure in Print x 6; Mary Holland-curator	Feb 5-28
Daniel Calder	Mar 5-29
Heidi Field-Alvarez	Apr 2-30
Jim Sconyers, Jr.	May 7-31
Jeremy Dunn	Jun 4-28
University of Mary Washington Students	Jul 2-Aug 30

Art lovers at Daniel's opening