‘The Art of Tapestry’ opens March 10 at Shellman art center

SHELLMAN — The opening reception for the Art of Tapestry exhibit, featuring work by Jon Eric Riis, will be conducted 2-6 p.m. March 10 at the Center for Art & Rehabilitative Energies.

The opening for the exhibition, which will continue through May 5, is free to the public. Light refreshments will be served. The art center is located in a renovated onion barn at 3696 Pearl St., Shellman.

Atlanta artist Riis’s tapestries blend beauty with a powerful social message, officials with the Shellman art center said.

“If the medium is the message, as communications theorist Marshall McLuhan famously claimed, nowhere is this more evident than in the work of Atlanta’s Jon Eric Riis,” Ray Pierotti, founder of the Shellman art center, said in a news release. “Many cite him as the nation’s leading contemporary tapestry artist, known for weaving richly embellished textiles so masterfully executed.”

Pierotti said other motifs in Riis’s work are derived from nature, anatomy, skulls and mythology.

“He often incorporates monochromatic faces, dimensional feathers, jeweled embellishment, and precious or semiprecious metals,” Pierotti said. “Larger works can weigh more then 40 pounds.”

The biography on the artist from the Shellman center said Riis inherited his love of fiber and art from both sides of his family. His Swedish maternal grandmother grew flax and wove household textiles, and as a child Riis was fascinated with her looms.

His Norwegian paternal great-grandfather traveled from Oslo to demonstrate gilding at the Chicago World’s Fair in 1893. And both his paternal grandfather — a commercial artist — and his mother studied at the Art Institute of Chicago, which Riis himself attended before earning a master’s degree in fiber at Cranbrook Academy of Art.

“Plan to see this exhibition,” Pierotti said. “You owe yourself the moment to visit this tapestry exhibition, blending a visit for a powerful social message.”

For information about the Center for Art and the exhibition, visit www.shellmancenter.wordpress.com or call (229) 679-5069 or (229) 679-2070 for reservations and appointments. The center, a 501(C)(3) nonprofit foundation, is open weekends.