Come See our Makers Alley Booth at the Eco-Week Events and Green Fair
Stop by and visit the Makers Alley booth during the Eco-Week Events and Green Fair at Lenape Park, Frenchtown, NJ. This event is being held on Sunday April 14, 2024 at from 11am-6pm. There you can buy and nurture a seedling tree and help the Schneiderwind family rebuild from the unfortunate fire at their home.
All proceeds, less the actual cost of the seedlings, will be donated to the Schneiderwind family.
What better way to celebrate the arrival of Spring than to share your art and design works in Makers Alley’s Spring-Summer Exhibition!
We’re looking for innovative art and design works in any discipline produced by Delaware River Valley Makers. Submitted works will be selected based on “Emerging” and “Experienced” skill levels.
Stay tuned, follow us on Facebook and Instagram as well as our newsletter outreach and we’ll keep you posted with location and time updates, artwork drop off dates and times, exhibition openings, Makers Talk discussions, reception notices and other related Spring Exhibition activities.
For those who might have missed it, here’s another “peek” of the wrap up video we made about our ARTOber 2023 Juried Exhibition
We would love for you to…get involved!
We’re going to need a few extra hands to help pitch in to put together the details of the Exhibition. If you have some time to get involved and are interested in supporting putting on the upcoming exhibition, we’re looking for some art supporters with event production experience, people to social media and website design support. If there are any digital journalist, video shooters and editors, digital design mavens that would like to get involved, please contact us at info@makersalley.org
Artist Profiles – Meet Camille Whiteman
From time to time we keep adding to the growing body of work the artist profiles and studio visit series we’ve been making. Here’s a peek at our latest artist profile on the mixed media artist Camille Whiteman.
Read Camille’s Print Profile -written by Tracy Ecclesine Ivie
Imagination runs wild in the world of mixed media sculptor Camille Whiteman, whose work includes a small, patchwork dog with a tree on its head and a wheel for a foot; a human-sized wooden abacus, anchored by a pair of men’s black shoes, and a mosaic woman’s bust, made of tiles and shells, whose head is crowned by barbed wire and whose backbone is made from a deer skeleton.
Her sculptures, which include many found objects, may appear whimsical, but often reflect more serious themes, she says, including incest, “broken children” and animal cruelty. “Some of my work is pretty intense,” she says. “It lies at the junction of beauty and sadness, the disturbing relationship between humans and the worlds they inhabit and create—the terrors and joys we all share. “I feel like my art is kind of a not-so-gentle nudge. People can get the message, or they cannot get the message,” she adds.
Behind the mystery are untold stories waiting to be revealed, such as the evolution of “Bee House,” a four-foot glass tower with more than 300 bees in tiny bottles. No, she didn’t kill them (as some people ask). They were ordered online by a friend and when their incessant buzzing alarmed postal workers, they wrapped the shipment in plastic, which led to the insects’ early demise.
“I felt bad for the bees,” Camille says. “So I went to a science surplus store and got all these little tiny bottles and built them all a home.” And as she pivots from one imaginative idea to another after more than 40 years as an artist, Camille hopes at least one of her messages will get through: that the world needs to be a better place and people need to start being brave enough to look at things that are wrong and do something about them.
Other Programming News – ARTOber 2024
As many of you already know, Makers Alley has been incubating the ARTOber art and culture Festival during the entire month of October for the last few years. River Arts Collective (“RAC”) has been set up as an independent, neutral arts organization operating under the fiscal sponsorship of Fractured Atlas, to manage the yearly regional Festival that provides a cooperative marketing and promotional support campaign to all the arts and cultural organizations that participate in the Festival!
A special thanks to over 40 arts organizations and businesses that have supported arts and culture, and all the artists and supporters who helped put the festival on last year!
For this year’s ARTOber Festival, RAC has been awarded a grant from the PA tourism board to expand the marketing platform for the Festival which will allow us to increase the media expenditures!
Planning meetings are underway!
For more information about ARTOber 2024 and for those that want to get involved with the events and activities presented in our Delaware River Valley, please contact info@riverartscollective.org.