Arts Walk 2009

Friday Night was the Morgantown Arts Walk. Local businesses open their doors late into the evening and allow local artists to exhibit their artworks. It is a great reason to get out into the community, so we decided to hit the streets as a family.

We started at Black Bear Burritos, where Malissa had her paintings hanging. Thursday night Keith went with her and helped her hang them, and almost fell off a barstool in the process. They're there, they're square (mostly, some are more rectangular), and they're awesome. Still hanging there now if you want to go check them out.


Next we walked across the street to 123 Pleasant Street. These are some of the pieces we really liked.






These last two are by some dude I don't know named Brian Pickens, but Keith and I really enjoyed them.


These silkscreened mirrors are by Elissa Chaney Dray, whom I don't know either, but I really enjoyed her stuff.

After we left 123 we walked around downtown, but things were getting really crowded by that time. I mean REALLY CROWDED. When we got into the Mon Arts office, the place was so crowded you couldn't walk around without touching someone. I couldn't take pictures, and after a few minutes, I couldn't breathe either, so we got the hell out of there.

One of the college kid nightclubs up the street had a torch out in front signifying that it was a stop on the Arts Walk. I said "Lets go in there." Keith said, disgustedly "It's a bar." I said "What is the 123?" so he conceded and we wandered in past the bouncer (who needs a bouncer at 7pm?). We wandered around for what felt like a long time before we found the art on exhibit. It was a huge pile of cardboard boxes, stacked and taped together to form a little room on the dance floor, just big enough for a few people to stand inside. All around the cardboard box clubhouse plastic baseball bats were lying around, inside and out. On a big projection screen over the bar a video of people in costumes beating the crap out of pinatas was playing. The video was kind of disturbing to me because the people in it appeared to be screaming and angry and violent. I guess that later in the evening the artist and friends would pick up the wiffle ball bats and beat the crap out of the cardboard house. I tried to get Delia to comment on the value of that setup as ART, but she wouldn't make a judgement. Although clearly she was unimpressed.