Blue Moon Gallery will close its azure-colored doors on Sept. 30 after more than 17 years of doing business in downtown Hot Springs.
The owners of the art gallery at 718 Central Ave. say their building has been sold to an out-of-town artist and they will not relocate their business.
"We will host our last Gallery Walk in September," owner Pat Scavo told The Sentinel-Record.
"A young man who is a photographer is relocating from Florida and wants to put his own gallery in and his plan is to open the first of the year."
Blue Moon Gallery began doing business in May 1997 at Spencer's Corner. The owners were Scavo, who managed the gallery, and her daughter, Dishongh Scavo, and Elaine Schindler, both artists who lived in New York City. Works of art by H. James Hoff, Steve Lawnick, Alex Hutton and Doug Sinclair provided the BMG's first exhibit.
Dishongh Scavo relocated to Hot Springs in 2000 and partnered with her mom to reestablish the gallery while her father, Phil Scavo, worked with them behind the scenes at the new location at 718 Central.
"Later, local and regional artists were added to the stable of artists and what followed was recognition by viewers and clients that we had attracted some of the finest contemporary artists to be found. Many of those artists have been showing at Blue Moon for over 16 years. We have received several significant honors during that time as have many of our artists and we are proud of our accomplishments," Pat Scavo said.
She plans to retire and remain in Hot Springs while her daughter will relocate out of state and continue as business partner with Texas artist Randall M. Good. Good's artwork has been shown exclusively with BMG for 15 years. They will expand Good's special exhibit and lecture series on a national front and work to bring his book "Era of Angles," the working title, to completion.
The gallery's final exhibit will feature local award-winning artist and retired art professor Thad Flenniken, who taught for more than 40 years at National Park Community College.
Flenniken will meet guests from 5-9 p.m. Sept. 5 during Hot Springs Gallery Walk and his show will remain at Blue Moon through September.
His large exhibit, "Eve's Mark," a collection of about 40 pieces of mixed media and studio drawings in a series he has worked on for more than 14 years, captures his subject Eve.
"He is profound in his approach to the subject," Scavo said. Some new pieces along with his evolving series will be displayed along with "Trace Her Mark," his first painting in the series.
When Flenniken started this series, he said, as an artist it was with dedication to the common origins of man, and unity is the ongoing theme in his work.
"I'm always interested in the human aspect of making art and the concept of oneness, the fact that even though we may be different races, different levels, different parts of the world, different aspects of humanity, basically we were all from one group of people that evolved out of Africa and so we have evolved into these different races and so on through the millennia," he said.
Virtually all of the pieces in the show including some drawings will trace Eve's mark.
"This is not biblical Eve, this is more archeological," Flenniken said.
"It's based on the concept of women carrying the traceable DNA so that we can track the evolution of human beings through their DNA. It's also about empowerment of women, the importance of women. I do this through symbols, mostly. There are repetitive symbols that occur through all these years and what I basically want people to do is look at the artwork and look at the symbols and then try to examine what kind of concepts are being told through those symbols and the images of the women in the works."
A family background in archaeology has encouraged Flenniken's participation in the search for minute strands of physical evidence.
"My brother is an archaeologist and I have worked on digs before. We grew up excavating. He turned toward archaeology and I turned toward art. There were some similarities in our childhood. I have been interested in that all my life."
Local on 08/23/2014