City Art Connections Exhibition 2020 Has Virtual Opening
Earlier this month ArtHouse 43 unveiled works by artists on its growing City Art Connections series, usually held in Downtown Battle Creek, Michigan. The artists on this 2nd annual City Art Connections series were Sue Trowbridge, Pete Larouech, Kayce Gifford, The Moon (Grand Rapids based artists Natalie G’nat Wetzel and Mark Andrus) and Troy Ramos. The exhibition took place at the beautiful Record Box in Downtown Battle Creek with opening night on October 1.
“I felt so lucky to be able to work with these artists; they are such an interesting group doing really beautiful things,” said artist, founder and curator Troy Ramos. “Every year this series changes in certain ways and each one is unique. Obviously it would've been better if we could've had a traditional opening where everybody could've met in-person and hung out and had discussions and shared experiences and all that. But I think that's just one of the things that makes this second exhibition even that more unique. It turned out great and I’m happy that we could adjust enough to keep the show going strong.”
City Art Connections is an exhibition series bringing together artists from different cities to share their works and encourage the building of relationships between artists, cities and communities. This series is about supporting artists and creating larger networks of arts-inspired ideas. This is the 2nd annual exhibition for the Connections series, with founder and artist Troy Ramos curating the exhibit. The show required having to make some major adjustments this year due to the ongoing pandemic.
"It was such an interesting group of artists and I felt extremely fortunate just to have everyone show their work together on this series,” said Ramos. "Given the situation, the most important thing was safety, of course. But the close second most important thing was finding a way to get a platform for these artists. And I think having a 'virtual opening’ was a pretty good compromise between those objectives.”
The show was presented on opening night as a ‘virtual opening’. Ramos went live across all social media throughout the evening, showing each work and talking about about the artists and sometimes about their process. This ensured showing all of the work to anyone who wanted to watch safely from their devices. The sheer number of live recordings he did ended up being several hours worth of footage and reaching audiences far beyond just a local community.
"I went live on seven different social media accounts across Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and YouTube. It took me about four hours to get through all of them,” Ramos said. “It was super fun and I went through every work from start to finish for every recording. The interesting thing is that not only did we have local support but I also had people watching from around the world, something that I didn't expect. Every one of the videos has already had lots of views and it continues to grow because those recordings stay up there forever. So we're still getting views and interest and emails and things like that. It's been really quite fascinating to watch happen.”
This exhibition was funded in part by the WK Kellogg Foundation, the Battle Creek Community Foundation and the Art Center of Battle Creek. "It means so much to have the support of all these organizations. Their support means everything. It wouldn’t have been possible to do this show without their support and I want everyone to know how important they are for artists in the community and the community at large,” Ramos added.
To contact any of the artists you can of course send your message directly to ArtHouse 43 or each of the artists’ websites respectively:
The Moon: http://www.themoongr.com @themoongr
Kayce Gifford: kaycesart.weebly.com @kaycesart
Sue Trowbridge: painted-prayers.com
Pete Larouech: http://www.petelarouechartist.com
Troy Ramos: https://www.thisiswhereyouare.com @spaceswithlight
