Asheville Gallery of Art
Spring can’t come too soon this year. By late February, the very earliest flowers should be up. And Asheville Gallery of Art gets an even earlier jump on the season with its second new-member show of 2021, the monthlong Blooms, opening February 4 — a celebration of the coming season change via motifs of nature, new life, and florals. Viewers will see work from artists Kate Coleman, Cynthia Llanes, Jacqueline Oliver, and Claire Simpson Jones.
Interviewed last year in Asheville Made’s sister publication Carolina Home + Garden, multimedia artist Coleman is a well-known renderer of birds, but among the pieces she’ll show at the Asheville Gallery of Art exhibit is The Crocuses, a flower portrait that is layered, like most of her works, against the backdrop of vintage literature (in this case what appears to be a page from a botany book or field guide).
But Coleman is most excited about a work in progress, a nearly five-foot-tall portrait of a personal plant: “The Night Blooming Cereus.” The flower, she says, “has been passed down through three generations of my family. … When it blooms, it’s an event.”
Asheville Gallery of Art is open Thursday-Sunday, 12-5pm, or by appointment. The exhibition runs Feb. 4-28. www.ashevillegallery-of-art.com.