Happy Birthday POP Gallery
#4
Here is to many many more years of Philanthropy and love of art and artists!
and a special thank you to everyone that attended the Closing reception for the POP gallery On Love show New Years eve!
Press Release January 1-1-2011
Santa Fe, NM
Contact: Sharla Throckmorton-McDowell
POP Gallery celebrates it's 4th year! It is with sincere gratitude to our collectors, artists, colleagues, fellow gallerists, community of Santa Fe, and the greater art community of the world that we send this note of appreciation today. With every day we respect your support, press, feedback & partnerships all along this journey. We embrace the new year ahead and welcome the opportunity to bring interesting and exciting new works of art to the city. POP Gallery continues to raise the bar locally and draw established and emerging Contemporary and New Brow artists to Santa Fe from around the world. Our vision is rooted in providing art lovers with a thought provoking alternative. Rising from the underground world of tattooing and graffiti, comics, cartoons, pop art, illustration, and surrealist artists, the art showcased feeds of the blend of influences and energies well cemented in today's culture. In essence, POP Gallery continues to represent a celebration of mediums and ideas, the dynamic union between independence and spirit, the emergence of sub-culture on a contemporary platform.
POP Gallery, the pre-eminent Santa Fe pop culture showcase, is the launching pad for some of the world's most influential and important visual artists of the last 20 years, home to some of the Southwest's most exhilarating exhibitions and events, one of the country's first galleries dedicated to the brand new "new brow" aesthetic, and the halls where pilgrim hipsters come to worship at the feet of the culture-clerics, was humbly and appropriately born as a small but trendy shop just off the historic plaza, within the cloisters of an adobe style building. Here the original impetus was selling emerging and established pop art, animation & illustration, but soon POP Gallery burst rather ceremoniously into public and media awareness when world-renown allegorical Cartoonist/ Vic Lee aka Lynden St. Victor was chosen for the gallery's debut exhibit, "Poparazzi" in March 2007. A media-frenzy ensued, instantly embossing the familiar "POP" logo into our cultural psyche, and quickly POP has become THE gallery in which to be shown or be seen. POP exposed and promoted the unbelievable range of visual talent fermenting in this "New Munich". Soon US first-timers with names like Marie Sena, Brandon Maldonado, Brice Tahyi, Ryan Singer and many more soon-to-be nationally recognized artists would find their first successful exhibits in the heart of Santa Fe's plaza district. By 2011, some of America's leading cutting-edge art and culture journals such as "Juxtapoz", "Hi-Fructose", "Art Business News" and local NM art & culture magazines "Pasatiempo", "The Reporter", "The Santa Fean" , "IQ", "Albuquerque Journal North" have taken notice and even trumpeted the gallery and the artists who were emerging from this suburban, "underground-zero" into national prominence.
In 2007, Michael McDowell, POP Gallery Owner, fiercely believed in the fundamentally powerful relevance of this group of artists who used the visual vocabulary of popular culture (cartoons, rock posters, advertising, graffiti, tattoo) to communicate and express themselves in a way that broke through the worn ivory tower elitism of the then pervasive over-intellectualized art institutions. So he began to implement his grand vision for POP as the leading proponent of these brave underground art rebels by taking his own leap of faith and establishing the gallery with his wife & partner Sharla Throckmorton-McDowell. Motivated by personal challenge and a need to make this vision be a successful reality they began renovating a small candle shop into a salon style visually engaging hip fusion exhibition space for this pop-culture revolution. The newly improved cultural showcase opened to much fanfare and excited expectation with a "Grand Opening" exhibition entitled, "POP Goes To The Dogs", a charity event to benefit Assistance Dogs of The West, which included all of the POP regulars plus names like Diego Lukezic, Amy Nelder, Bradford Brenner, James Lofton, Cait Willis and many more.
Setting the bar high has led to key exhibits each year for the quaint gallery with such names as CJ Metzger and Miss Mindy, Kathie Olivas, Carrie Ann Baade, Julie West, Clifford Bailey, Thomas Barbey, Aunia Kahn, Daniel Martin Diaz , Michel Balasis and some of the most legendary Art openings in the city's history with exhibits like POP Femme Sugar Coated Strange, POP Native Vinyl, Memento Mori and POP Gallery On LOVE, all tied to local charities including Southwest C.A.R.E. Center, Read Across America, Santa Fe Children's Museum, and Bienvenidos Outreach, which gathered together some of the world's most prolific young artists like Kristen Margiotta, Julia Martin, David Ho, Catherine Zacchino, Trevor Mikula and so many more, which has helped build POP Gallery's mythic status, as patrons come from all over the world to visit this iconic little space.
Now POP moves on to a greater level of influence as it seeks to continue building partnerships with local charities, supporting the arts in our community while hosting world-class events in order to promote it's artists though venues around the globe and across the internet. With this new mission firmly in place POP looks forward to providing exciting announcements in the very near future. Be sure to check back with us so you don't miss anything!
Link To POP Gallery Video Dec 2010:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yPdezBJXf64
Cheers!
Michael & Sharla
Michael McDowell
Sharla Throckmorton-McDowell
POP Gallery, Owner
133 West Water Street
Santa Fe, NM 87501
505.820.0788
Sharla@popsantafe.com
www.popsantafe.com
