Blyth Friday

Blyth Friday

Come out to Blyth for an evening filled with Holiday Cheer & Community Spirit! From 5-9 PM on November 28th the town will be bustling with activity as downtown merchants stay open late with special deals, activities and guests. Support the less fortunate in our community by stopping by the Touch a Truck/Tractor event in partnership with the Blyth Lions Club Food Drive, stop into the Memorial Community Hall for a break and to find food, art, community organizations, crafts and some time with your neighbours. Not sure of you’ve missed anything- find the Blyth Friday Newsies who will be roaming the main street with maps to tell you all about what’s going on and all the locations you need to drop by to enter to win the gift baskets filled with items donated by local businesses and organizations. Start the Holidays right by supporting local and building community this holiday season. Check out Blyth Friday 2025 on Facebook and Instagram for all the event details.

‘Body Doubles’ by Amanda Baron-artist reception

‘Body Doubles’ by Amanda Baron-artist reception

Please join us Saturday August 23rd at 4:30 to celebrate the opening of ‘Body Doubles’ by Amanda Baron.

In Body Doubles, Amanda Baron explores the tension between inner experience and physical form. There is a focus on reflection, transformation, and multiplication throughout the imagery and process. Each piece begins as a digital collage which becomes the framework for a digital drawing, and is then translated through paint, yarn or video. Some synthetic elements are lost in play while texture and tangibility are added.

With a focus on natural motifs, portraiture, and personal symbology, each piece glimpses into a surreal environment, acting as visual metaphors for emotional spaces.
A deliberate imbalance in scale and detail invoke the feeling of revisiting a memory – some aspects rendered with special attention and others flattened into bold graphic shapes. The figures are echoed in their surroundings, as a second body or emotional double.

The exhibit runs August 23rd through October 5th and is open during Blyth Festival box office hours or by appointment with gallery volunteers.

Over My Head And Under My Feet- an art exhibition by Greg Sherwood

A fascination with the natural world and an obsession with its changes of colour and form are both part of being a landscape painter. Greg Sherwood often finds himself caught between the shifting patterns of the sky and the tangled growth beneath his feet, compelled to document the forces that shape the patterns of each. This series of recent paintings indulges his compulsion to examine the natural and human forces that shape a particular environment and the desire to convey a strong sense of time and place. 

Join us for the opening reception June 15th at 6pm.

Webinar with Molly Peacock about George Agnew Reid

Join the Huron County Museum and poet & biographer Molly Peacock for FLOWER DIARY:  A QUESTION-PROVOKING PAINTING BY GEORGE AGNEW REID RETURNS HOME, A virtual webinar about Wingham-born renowned Canadian painter George Agnew Reid.

Molly Peacock is the author of the award-winning Flower Diary: Mary Hiester Reid Paints, Travels, Marries & Opens a Door, which focuses on the lives of three artists, one of whom is George Agnew Reid.  Reid’s vigorous mural of a settler family with wagon and oxen fording a river has recently been donated to the Huron County Museum, returning to it the scene of its setting.  In this Zoom talk Molly Peacock will address the contradictions of Reid’s life and work apparent in this painting. How did a man who didn’t see a painting until he was in his teens leave his family’s East Wawanosh farm to become a painter so prominent he affected political elections, created the foundation for a nation’s art education, helped create a national museum, and opened up art organizations to women?  Why did he continue to paint farm life? How did he make murals of such imposing size? And further, how did his relationship with his painter-wife Mary Hiester Reid and their student and his second wife Mary Evelyn Wrinch affect his work, and he theirs?  How to we assess a painting that valorizes settlement given our awareness of indigenous stewardship of the land?  Can a feminist also be a misogynist?  Peacock will address these questions—and take those of the audience on Thursday, January 18, 2024, at 7pm.

Please register in advance for the zoom webinar:
https://us06web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_9eP0aZcnT_WSE662hJm5Ig

After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the webinar.

Peacock’s biography of Mary Hiester Reid, Flower Diary, supported by the Access Copyright Foundation, won an Independent Press Award (IPPY). She is also the author of The Paper Garden: Mrs. Delany Begins Her Life’s Work at 72. Her biography of Mrs. Delany was supported by a fellowship from the Leon Levy Center for Biography at CUNY and named a Book of the Year by The Economist, The Globe and Mail, Booklist, The London Evening Standard, The Irish Times, and The Sunday Telegraph. In 2024 W.W. Norton and Company will publish her eighth volume of poems, The Widow’s Crayon Box, written after the loss of her husband of many years.  A dual citizen of the US and Canada, with family roots in Ontario and New York, she lives in Toronto and maintains ties to New York City.