By DEBRA HAIGHT

Special to Leader Publications

BUCHANAN — Three artists with unique talents and perspectives are featured in new shows at the Buchanan Art Center.

The exhibit opens Wednesday, Aug. 30, and runs through early October.

A public reception for the artists is scheduled from 2 to 4 p.m. Sunday, Sept. 10, at the center. The center is located at 117 W. Front St. in Buchanan, and regular hours are 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. weekdays and 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. Saturdays.

Three galleries are available for viewing. The center offers classes and a gift shop.

In addition to the opening of the new exhibits this week, art center volunteers will be hosting their annual Labor Day weekend Raku Walk Through on Saturday, Sept. 2. Hours are 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. People invited to come in to glaze a piece of pottery, watch it be fired and take it home, all in one day.

The new exhibits feature “Word and Deed” with the drawings, paintings and prints of Ramiro Rodriguez, “Barns of Berrien County” with the photography of Linda Canfield and “In the Beginning” with the photography and repurposed books of Laurel Ellerbrook. Rodriguez lives in South Bend, while Canfield and Ellerbrook live in Buchanan.

The three are connected not only by their artistic talent but by friendship. Canfield and Rodriguez worked together for years at the Snite Museum of Art at Notre Dame, while Canfield and Ellerbrook have been friends for years with Canfield directing Ellerbrook’s daughter in plays at Buchanan High School.

Rodriguez is the exhibition coordinator at the Snite. He is the son of Mexican immigrants, and grew up in Fennville. He received his bachelor’s degree from the Kendall College of Art and Design and his master’s degree from the University of Cincinnati. He has shown his artwork all around the nation and in other countries.

His exhibit in the center’s Roti Roti Gallery includes the “Popular Wisdoms” series of relief prints he made through a grant from the Indiana Arts Commission as well as linoleum and lithograph prints on family, Biblical and immigration themes.

“A lot of the work deals with my family’s history and my cultural upbringing,” he said. “I did a memory search of my own and then sat with my siblings and parents to gather the sayings we remembered. The sayings came first and the images followed.”

Some of those sayings include “don’t play with toads or you’ll get warts” and “don’t eat fish before bed or you’ll have nightmares.” Rodriguez said he likes the challenges of making art with lithographs and block prints and finding the gradations between the black and white of the images.

This is Canfield’s second exhibit at the art center. Like her first several years ago, it features her love of photography. She is no stranger to the art center, being one of its founding members and a continuing volunteer. She has been active in the community, directing plays and serving as a storyteller of folk tales.

This exhibit in the Showplace Gallery is also a tribute to her love of barns.

“I’ve always loved barns, Rex (her husband) and I have had a good time this year travelling the countryside taking pictures of barns,” she said. “I remember visiting my cousins as a young girl and how much fun we had playing in the hay loft.”

“Many times, barns were built before the house,” she added. “They represented stability that people were going to stay in a place, they represented dignity and they represented the wealth of a person … It makes me sad when people let barns crumble, barns have so much character.”

Ellerbrook’s artwork is in the Hess Library Gallery as well as the nearby Showcases. This is her fourth exhibit at the art center and the third to feature photography. Her other exhibit featured “recycled junk” with a variety of the different items she has repurposed over the years.

This new exhibit has a few of her repurposed pieces but concentrates on her photography. She and her husband take five trips each year to different locations in the South and Midwest and the show features some of her favorite photographs from those trips with a twist.

As people will see, the twist in this exhibit involves the manipulations she’s done using computer software to distort and move around parts of pictures.

“I first discovered that I could make photos look like negatives when we went to the John C. Campbell Folk School in North Carolina and saw what they did,” she said. “I went home and started experimenting.”

In addition to the new exhibits, the art center now has a new executive director. Danielle Wilborn, of South Bend, began her duties in mid-August. She is a former exhibitor and volunteer at the center, and is also the founder of Artist Resource Tools and the director of the Leeper Park Art Fair for 2018.