December LoDa ArtWalk: A Gallery-by-Gallery Guide to Friday Night

Downtown Mobile’s galleries roll out holiday exhibitions, concerts, and open houses for this month’s LoDa ArtWalk, the second-Friday stroll through the Cathedral Square Arts District running 6 to 9 p.m. along Lower Dauphin Street. The monthly event has become downtown Mobile’s signature cultural ritual — a night when the neighborhood’s galleries, studios, coffee shops, and historic corners stay open late and foot traffic between them turns the arts district into a single continuous party. This month’s edition layers holiday shopping, seasonal exhibitions, and a benefit concert on top of the usual rotation of gallery openings, giving visitors a full map of reasons to spend the evening on foot.

Anchor Exhibitions

The Mobile Arts Council (318 Dauphin St.) carries three shows through December 22: Work and Leisure in Old Mobile, a Fred Baldwin retrospective; Somewhere in Between, photographs from the University of South Alabama Archives dating from the 1890s through the 1950s; and paintings by Lauren Woods. Hours run Monday through Friday, 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. — 251-432-9796. The pairing of a contemporary retrospective with a century of archival photography gives the council’s galleries an unusually wide span of Mobile visual history under one roof this month, and the weekday hours make the ArtWalk visit a good scouting pass for a return trip.

Space 301 (301 Conti St.) hosts Strange Stories, a Scott Speh-curated group show of works by Fansler and Wolniak, Nicholas Frank, Joe Hardesty, Jaime Lynn Henderson, Eric Lebofsky, Angee Lennard, Frank Pollard, Kristen Romaniszak, Deb Sokolow, and Ben Stone, up through January 9. The library next door holds Imago: Memento, ceramic sculpture by BFA candidate Georgia Godwin. A curated out-of-town group show of this size is a notable catch for the Conti Street space, which has long served as the downtown district’s largest contemporary exhibition venue, and the neighboring sculpture show gives University of South Alabama graduate students a professional exhibition credit in the heart of the district.

Gallery Openings

Blue Velvet Studio (709 Dauphin St. #2) stages its Gift of Art sale — ornaments, cards, shadowboxes, and crafts all under $100 — plus an all-ages community mural painting. The everything-under-a-hundred format has made the studio’s holiday sale a reliable first stop for ArtWalk shoppers working through a gift list, and the community mural gives visitors a hands-on stake in the night’s artwork.

Art(ology) Gallery & Gifts (306 Dauphin St.) celebrates Angels Among Us with work by Ardith Goodwin, Claire Noojin, Gail Wilson, Marsha Sutton, Michelle Leech, Terri Keller, and guest Provie Musso. Iota (662 Spring Hill Ave.) debuts collage work by Ryan Jetten and Lillian McKinney under the title Deuterogamy of Dimensions. The two shows represent the district’s range on a single block-to-block walk: one a themed, accessible holiday exhibition built around familiar local painters, the other a formally titled debut pairing two collage artists in a venue a short step off the Dauphin Street core.

The Host Gallery (111 Dauphin St.) mounts White Christmas, featuring gallery artists Cal Breed, Mary Host Burch, Colleen Comer, Catherine Dominic, Heather Duffy, Jackie Ellens, Stevi Gaston, Amy Giust, Lydia Host, Tracy Host, Kristin Llamas, Wayne McNeil, Charles Smith, and Rebecca Wood, with food from the Downtowners. A fourteen-artist roster is a full-court press even by Host Gallery standards, and the inclusion of glass artist Cal Breed — whose Fort Morgan studio work is collected across the Gulf Coast — alongside the gallery’s own family line of painters makes the show one of the night’s anchor stops for serious holiday shopping.

Kangal Gallery in the Sail Loft (58 N. Royal St.) holds an open house for featured artists Gail Bramer, Jackie Davidson, and Karen Spaulding plus new arrivals Khani Ewing, Brenda Lomax, Larry Janssen, Fred Rettig, and Cindy Scott. The Royal Street venue, tucked into the historic Sail Loft building on the edge of the district’s western end, uses the open-house format to fold its newest artists into the evening’s circuit, effectively expanding the ArtWalk’s footprint beyond Dauphin Street itself.

Serda’s Coffee Company (2 S. Royal St.) shows works by Josh Ashley through December 31, and wellbornIdeas (356 Dauphin St.) pairs photographs by Justin Hartley with large acrylics by Colleen Comer, pouring wine from Taste! Wineshoppe & Bar. The coffee shop and the wine pairing are the ArtWalk’s connective tissue — the low-pressure stops where visitors linger, circle back, and decide which exhibitions to revisit — and Comer’s double bill, appearing at both the Host Gallery and wellbornIdeas the same night, makes her one of the evening’s most-followed painters.

Robertson Gallery (450 Dauphin St.) throws an All Female Revue celebrating local women artists: Joy Gardner, Leigh Brown, Kelly Ogburn, Mary Emily Davidson, Heather Duffy, Kate Seawell, and Caroline McCarthy. Seven-artist shows of this kind give the district’s mid-size galleries a holiday-season identity, and Robertson’s all-women roster puts a second Heather Duffy appearance on the same night’s map, two blocks from her Host Gallery work.

Cathedral Square Gallery (612 Dauphin St.) opens Winter Studio, with more than 60 local artists offering holiday-priced pieces — including USA student work — plus music from Elements of Difference and a wine tasting, hanging through December 31. The square-facing gallery sits at the geographic heart of the arts district — the park across the street gives the district its name — and a sixty-artist inventory under one roof is as close as the ArtWalk gets to a department store, with music and wine supplying the seasonal trim.

At 453 Dauphin St., Entre Arts joins Handmade in Alabama, Devlin Wilson Studio & Gallery, and Island Thyme Eats & Arts, capping the night at 8 p.m. with a funky-furniture live auction of transformed discards, auctioned by Darwin Singleton to benefit the Mobile Arts Council and AAF-Mobile Bay. The auction is the evening’s set-piece: salvage furniture reworked by area artists and sold to the crowd by one of Mobile’s most recognizable television personalities, with proceeds split between the city’s two leading arts support organizations.

Concert at Space 301

Rounding out the night, Live at the Space brings Jimmy Hall and Friends — with Donna Hall Foster, Jack Hall, and Rickey Chancey — to Space 301 for an 8 p.m. concert benefiting the Centre for the Living Arts and the Saenger Theatre chandelier restoration fund. The terrace bar opens at 6:30; tickets are $42 for CLA members and $62 for nonmembers, including a $2 contribution to the restoration fund — 251-208-5600. Jimmy Hall, the veteran Alabama vocalist and harmonica player best known for fronting the band Wet Willie, gives the benefit a headline draw with genuine Gulf Coast rock-and-soul pedigree, and the cause ties two of downtown Mobile’s cultural landmarks — the Conti Street art space and the historic Saenger — into a single evening’s bill.

And if film is more your speed, the Crescent Theater (208 Dauphin St.) runs Four Lions daily at 6 and 9 p.m., with matinees Wednesday and weekends, through December 16. The Crescent has spent years as the district’s art-house anchor, and the satirical British comedy offers ArtWalk crowds a mid-walk alternative to the galleries — a 6 p.m. screening before the stroll or a 9 p.m. show after the last gallery door closes.

Making a Night of It

The month’s lineup rewards a plan. The anchor exhibitions at the Mobile Arts Council and Space 301 sit at the district’s eastern anchor corners, with the Dauphin Street run of galleries — Art(ology), wellbornIdeas, Robertson, Cathedral Square Gallery, and the Host Gallery — spaced between them, the Entre Arts block and its 8 p.m. auction at the center, and the Royal Street stops at Kangal Gallery and Serda’s Coffee Company pulling the circuit toward the water. Visitors who start at 6 can walk the full district, catch the auction’s first lots, and still make the 8 p.m. concert or a 9 p.m. film.

The holiday edition also underscores what the ArtWalk has become for Mobile’s creative economy. A single night puts the work of well over a hundred area artists on display or on sale across a dozen venues, channels holiday gift budgets directly to working painters, potters, and craftspeople, and raises funds — through the furniture auction and the concert — for the institutions that keep the district running the other eleven months of the year. For a city whose downtown revival has been written about in cultural terms as much as commercial ones, the December ArtWalk is the argument in miniature: a walkable district, a full calendar, and a crowd that shows up on the second Friday, every month, whatever the weather.

Practical details round out the visit. The galleries cluster within a few blocks of one another, parking decks and street spaces near Cathedral Square fill early on ArtWalk nights, and the 6-to-9 window is generous enough that most visitors split it — an hour of galleries, dinner on Dauphin, and a return for the auction or the concert’s second half. Admission to the gallery stops is free, as it is every month; only the Space 301 concert carries a ticket price, and the Crescent’s screenings run at standard box office rates for those who want the film ending.