A variety of artistic styles and themes will be on exhibit at the Box Factory for the Arts from July 10-September 6. The public is invited to meet the artists at the Opening Reception on Friday, July 17, from 5:30-8pm. Light snacks and drinks at the Box Bar will be available. Phaseshifter Records, Benton Harbor's community record shop, will be spinning tunes from the stage next to the Box Bar. Featured artists are below.
Southwest Michigan Queer Art Show Williams Gallery (main level)
Queer Art SWMI is a collaborative group of artists dedicated to celebrating and promoting LGBTQ+ creativity within the Southwest Michigan community. Open to LGBTQ+ artists and their allies, this exhibition was juried by local artists Carr Pierce, Vicki Cook, Jessica Hightower, and Dawn Todd. With over 45 artists from South Bend, Kalamazoo, and all points in between, the show includes an eclectic mix of work including painting, printmaking, photography, ceramics, and textiles. A full list of participating artists can be found at https://www.queerartswmi.com/.
Abstracted Landscapes by Heather Boersma Whitlow Gallery (main level)
Heather Boersma’s large works will be on display in the Whitlow Gallery showcasing gardens, seas, and cities made from layered, loose, and suggestive strokes using oil paint; with real ferns, lace, bark and images of houses added for visual texture. See the world with fresh eyes through this exhibition focused on creating meaning, personalities, eliciting emotion/memories with everyday materials and colors.
Needle-Felted Tapestries by Meli Bandera Whitlow Gallery (main level)
Meli Bandera presents a collection of needle-felted tapestry works layered with beading, appliqué, drawing, crochet, embroidery, and dye techniques in the Whitlow Gallery. Drawing from Mexican folklore, her Midwestern Chicane roots, and personal family stories, the works re-frame memory and oral history as a form of folklore in their own right. In this exhibition, myth and memory collapse together, allowing ancestral narratives to live alongside family-specific stories of migration, ritual, and everyday life.
24 Artists by Greg Constantine Whitlow Gallery (main level)
Greg Constantine exhibits 24 well-known artists from Leonardo Da Vinci and Vincent van Gogh to Jean Michel Basquiat rendered in acrylic on ceramic. Objects from art history, nature, and things imagined have become the subjects of Constantine’s work. Through creating art about art (and artists), he alters his relationship to the final work and heightens the awareness of its illusion.
Life in Seasons on The Pleasant Peninsula by Zech Ray Riverwalk Gallery (lower level)
Zech Ray exhibits a selection of landscape vignettes, still lives, and portraits from his life in Michigan, arranged by the passing of the seasons. Using the raw material of his life as inspiration for paintings completed in oils and watercolor, every painting comes with a story of a moment of beauty; observed and captured on canvas. From his travels throughout Michigan, he has created a body of work that has become a description for the landscapes throughout the state.
Paintings by Danielle Bae Riverwalk Gallery (lower level)
Danielle Bae’s work is on display in the Riverwalk Gallery, showcasing her journey of learning portrait painting through Bob Williams’ Portrait Class at the Box Factory. Each of the oil portraits displayed were started during Bob Williams’ 3-hour Portrait Class. Bae has participated in exhibitions at the Box Factory, throughout Michigan and online, including the Michiana Annual Art Competition, and a solo show “Gracious New Start” at the JWL Gallery in Berrien Springs.
Symbiotic by Linda Schmidt and Andre Lemoine Skyview Gallery (upper level)
An installation of 2D and 3D work, this show explores the intersection between humans and nature, with a focus on shared behaviors and environment. Schmidt and Lemoine, a married couple living in Southwest Michigan, describe their art as informed by nature and forged by imagination. For them, the lines between inside and outside, and us and them are blurred, and it's within this blurring that the artists find their inspiration.
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