First Friday – November 1, 2019: Unblurred Gallery Opening Reception 

BLACK THOUGHTS
Black Thoughts shines a light on the black experience. Artist AmunRay calls to question what is blackness and what do you think of when you hear the word “Black”? Visitors will flow through expressive paintings and have the chance to share their own experiences and thoughts that the exhibition calls to mind. 
 
ABOUT THE ARTIST
AmunRay (Ray Butler) is a born and raised Black Pittsburgh artist. Ray has spent most of his life dealing with both physical and mental health issues, in addition to bullying. Even though he has been painting and drawing from a young age, it wasn’t until 10 did he truly use art-making as expression and an escape. Ray is a Creative Consultant for 1hood Media, and teaching artist at Boom Concepts and Assemble. Ray pulls inspiration from social justice issues, his experiences growing up, and from different astrologies and mythological creatures. Ray’s works are an expression of his messages and ideas the way they come to him in his mind.

Past Exhibitions

October 2019: Rebecca Harrison

First Friday – October 4, 2019

Home Color Unblurred Gallery Opening Reception 

Home Color explores the natural, man-made, and cultural color and textures of Southwestern Pennsylvania. The exhibition will feature an installation of a bedroom, connecting a personal “home” to a regional “home”, as well as the relationships between land, culture, individuals, and industry.

 

About the Artist

Rebecca Harrison is a fiber artist from Washington, Pa who uses natural dye, embroidery, sewing, watercolor, and knitting in her practice to create functional artifacts. Upon graduating with a BFA in Fibers in 2014, she moved to Pittsburgh where she has been making things and teaching people how to make things. Her work is inspired by relationships between people and land, particularly the extraction of natural resources in Washington County as well as the cultural changes in Pittsburgh. The themes in her work began as a manifestation of homesickness, experienced through both geographical distance and distance through time. These days, she uses her work as a way to ground herself in the present; locally sourced plant-based dyes are only available during certain times of the year, and staying in tune with a rapidly changing cultural landscape in the Pittsburgh region requires daily observation.

September 2019: DÏ

 

New Divination

We are progressing further into a future unknown. Political factions are becoming increasingly polarized, our planet is wilting before our eyes and aspects of our democracy, like the economy and personal freedom, delicately hang by a thread, dangling over a pit of complete corruption. DÏ’s first-ever solo show, New Divination takes the guise of a 21st-century, agnostic spiritualist, utilizing ancient theological methods and ideas in order to facilitate the possibility of a calmer, safer future for the earth, or at least a better realization of how anxiety, confusion, and hope all intersect.

 

About the Artist

DÏ is the moniker of a 19 year old artist, hailing from the small town of Cuddy, Pennsylvania, approximately 30 minutes south of the city of Pittsburgh. DÏ’s work often displays a chaotic, scatterbrained aesthetic, influenced both by his application of history, psychology, theology, and philosophy into his work, and his personal struggles with severe anxiety and OCD. By creating not only fine art, but also music, films, clothing, sculptures, and poetry, DÏ attempts to take conceptual art to a new level of applicability to the viewer: the work does not only have a rich background of historical and analytic interpretations, but also induces a deep, personal relationship with the spectator, independent of all outside references.

August 2019: Stephanie A. Allegretti

Reverberations of Love

Reverberations of Love explores the visual representation of sound and aspects related to sound, through digital art and mixed media mediums. Sound comes in many forms, from the words we speak to the sound of musical instruments. The work in this exhibition focuses primarily on capturing the visual representation of positive words and phrases including, but not limited to “I Love You”, “You Are Loved”, “Peace, Love, Light” from various participants of different races, genders and ethnicities.
 

About the Artist

Stefani A. Allegretti is an interdisciplinary, contemporary, award-winning artist living and working in the Pittsburgh Metro Area. Her work has appeared in various regional and national exhibitions including “Art Meets Science: Is it Art or Is it Science? “, “Feast your Eyes: the art of Food”, the “Westmoreland Art Nationals”, “Loving Your Mother: Farming as if the Earth Matters” a photography exhibition presented at the (PASA) Annual Conference for the Pennsylvania Association of Sustainable Agriculture and many more.
 
The majority of her work focuses on the environment, nature or natural elements in the environment. She is also interested in exploring connections, connections between the natural world and the human body, connections in the environment and the human-to-human connection through the use of various technologies. Through this exploration, much of her work takes aspects of nature, science, or society that might typically be unseen by the human eye and brings these aspects into the normal visual plane. By seeing these aspects in a new way and from a different perspective, new connections can be made and an enhanced appreciation or awareness can be achieved. Allegretti uses a variety of mediums including mixed media and a combination of photography, digital imaging, and graphic design. For more information, visit her website at www.stefaniallegrettiart.com 

 

Major support for this exhibition is provided by