VESSEL 3 Art Show Opens on Dauphin Street With 40 Artists and a Mission to Help Penelope House

A sprawling multi-media art exhibition featuring the work of 40 local artists is set to open on Mobile’s Dauphin Street in September 2011, with all proceeds benefiting Penelope House, the area’s domestic violence shelter and resource center.

VESSEL 3, the third installment of the annual VESSEL exhibition series, opens on Friday, September 9 at Blue Velvet Studio, located at 709 Dauphin Street, during Mobile’s popular September Artwalk. The show will then move to Serda’s Coffee for the month of October, giving the community an extended opportunity to view and purchase the work on display. The two-venue run is designed to catch two different crowds: the thousands who pack the street for Artwalk’s monthly gallery night, and the regulars who pass through the coffee shop’s walls during the weeks that follow.

Curator Ashelea Penquite developed the show around the concept of androgyny, challenging each participating artist to create a piece that transcends the boundaries of gender and personal desire. The theme asks artists to think beyond the individual “vessel” of sexuality and instead explore broader ideas, from world views to the melding of gender to deep-rooted visions of the future. The result, organizers say, is a show that reads less like a themed group exhibit and more like a conversation, with each artist answering the same question in a different medium.

Penquite, who has become a fixture in Mobile’s creative community through street murals, restaurant installations, performances and more than 50 private shows, described VESSEL 3 as her annual celebration of the city and its thriving arts scene. She expressed hope that the exhibition would make a meaningful financial contribution to Penelope House’s ongoing awareness and outreach efforts, tying the show’s artistic ambitions to a direct community benefit.

An Opening Night Built for the Street

The opening night promises far more than paintings on walls. Attendees can expect live body painting and modeling, sculpture, fashion, photography and graphic design alongside traditional painting, turning the studio into a working spectacle for the Artwalk crowd that floods lower Dauphin Street each second Friday.

Bo Poston will perform firebreathing, while musician Adam Taylor, a local songwriter competition winner, will provide a live musical backdrop described as a fitting complement to the show’s boundary-crossing theme. The performance elements are calibrated for the sidewalk as much as the gallery, giving passersby a reason to stop, come inside and stay long enough to look at the work.

A highlight of the evening will be a large-scale lighting installation by JB Bridges on the front facade of Blue Velvet Studio. Bridges, a lighting designer whose credits include Mobile’s Saenger Theatre and Civic Center as well as Colorado’s Red Rocks Amphitheatre, plans to transform the studio’s Dauphin Street frontage into an illuminated work of art, effectively making the building itself the show’s first exhibit before visitors reach the door.

The Artists Behind VESSEL 3

The 40 artists contributing to VESSEL 3 include Karen Cassidy, Kristen S. Clikas-Murphree, Sol Davis, Chris Murray, Kate Merrill, Nikki Burkett, John Ross Thomas, Courtney Dreher Matthews, Will Fawcett, Ryan Jetten, Zach DePolo, April Hopkins, Randa Duhon, Renee Odom, April Livingston, Brandon Reneman, McKenzie Forbes, Evelyn Bradford, Kim McKeand, Jean Savage, Nathan Deakle, Crystal Yates-Devlin, Tasha Tupa, Brennan Gibson, Trey Lane, Jeff Worley, Mandy Youngblood, Amanda Solley, Lucy Gafford, Adam Taylor, Ashelea Penquite, Amy Woodward, Alison Connor, Cheryl Shifflet, JB Bridges, Bo Poston, Lillian McKinney, and Josh Holland.

The roster reads as a cross-section of Mobile’s creative class as it stood in 2011: muralists and painters who would go on to leave visible marks around the city, photographers and designers working commercial jobs by day, sculptors and performers who show up in the city’s festival scene each year. Several of the participating artists also appear elsewhere on the bill, with Penquite, Bridges, Poston and Taylor contributing work as well as organizing or performing, a reflection of how small and interconnected the city’s arts community remains.

For the artists, a show like VESSEL 3 offers exposure that gallery representation in a market Mobile’s size rarely provides. Proceeds from sales flow to the benefiting charity, which means each piece sold doubles as a donation, and the Artwalk setting puts work in front of casual buyers who might never enter a formal gallery.

The Beneficiary: Penelope House

Penelope House has served the Mobile area for decades as the region’s domestic violence shelter and resource center, providing emergency shelter, safety planning, counseling and court advocacy for survivors of domestic abuse and their children. The organization also runs outreach and education programs aimed at prevention, and it relies heavily on community donations and fundraising events like VESSEL 3 to sustain services beyond its core funding.

The pairing of an art show with a domestic violence shelter is more natural than it might first appear. Awareness is a central part of the organization’s mission, and an exhibition expected to draw thousands of viewers over two months gives that message a gallery-sized platform while turning art purchases into direct support for families in crisis.

The androgyny theme also gives the exhibition a curatorial coherence that group shows often lack. Rather than hanging unrelated works side by side, the brief pushes participating artists toward shared territory while leaving room for sculpture, photography, fashion and paint to answer it differently. Viewers moving through the two venues will see the same question posed in dozens of visual languages, which is precisely what the series title implies: the vessel as container, body and point of view all at once.

Organizers describe the annual series as a labor of love as much as an event, assembled by volunteers from the arts community and hosted by venues that donate their walls for the run. That structure keeps costs low and ensures the proceeds model works: with galleries, performers and curators all contributing their time, the money raised at the door and through sales can flow almost entirely to the benefiting organization.

Dauphin Street as a Canvas

The choice of venue is part of the story. Lower Dauphin Street has served as the heart of Mobile’s downtown nightlife and arts district since the neighborhood’s revitalization gathered pace in the 1990s and 2000s, when older commercial blocks filled with bars, galleries, studios and restaurants. The monthly Artwalk, staged along the street’s galleries and shops, has become one of the best-attended recurring events on the downtown calendar, and September’s edition typically ranks among the year’s largest as the summer heat begins to break.

Blue Velvet Studio’s position at 709 Dauphin places it in the middle of that foot traffic, and Serda’s Coffee, the show’s October home, sits a few blocks away on Royal Street in the same walkable downtown core. Moving between the two venues extends the exhibition’s reach across the district and keeps the work visible for weeks after the Artwalk crowd disperses.

The VESSEL series itself has grown with the scene. Each installment has drawn more participating artists and more ambitious production elements than the last, and the third edition’s lighting installation, fire performance and live music represent the series’ most elaborate opening yet. Annual shows of this kind serve as both fundraiser and reunion for a community of artists who often work in isolation the rest of the year.

For visitors, the practical details are simple. The show opens Friday, September 9 at Blue Velvet Studio during September Artwalk, runs at that venue through the month, and continues at Serda’s Coffee throughout October. Admission to view the work follows the venues’ regular public hours and the Artwalk format, and every purchase made during the run supports Penelope House’s programs.

With 40 artists, a themed brief that asks each one to think past the obvious, and a beneficiary whose work touches hundreds of local families each year, VESSEL 3 arrives as one of the more ambitious locally grown exhibitions Mobile’s downtown has hosted. Whether it succeeds as art, fundraiser or both, the intent behind it is hard to miss: a creative community celebrating itself while putting the proceeds to work where they are needed.

The September 2011 edition lands in a downtown that has steadily built the infrastructure to support shows of this scale. Galleries along Dauphin and Royal streets have multiplied, the city’s museums draw steady attendance, and the Artwalk’s growth has given emerging artists a monthly audience without requiring them to rent storefront space. A generation of Mobile creatives has essentially come of age on that street, and VESSEL 3’s participant list reflects it.

Community fundraisers in the arts district follow a familiar loop that benefits both sides: the venues gain foot traffic and goodwill, the artists gain exposure and sales experience, and the nonprofit gains reach into an audience that might not otherwise encounter its work. Penelope House’s placement at the center of that loop for this run makes the exhibition as much a civic exercise as an artistic one.