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Organized in partnership with Creative Growth Art Center (Oakland, CA)
Curated by Tom di Maria, Director of CGAC

Opening Reception: Friday, December 11, 6-9 pm
Curator Talk: Saturday, December 12, 2 pm

Crosstown Arts is pleased to partner with Creative Growth Art Center to present the upcoming exhibition Extra Celestial. Founded in Oakland, California in 1973, Creative Growth serves adult artists with developmental, mental, and physical disabilities, providing a professional studio environment for artistic development, gallery exhibition and representation, and more.

In Extra Celestial, Creative Growth artists Luis Aguilera, David Albertsen, Terri Bowden, Susan Janow, Allan Lofberg, Dan Miller, Donald Mitchell, William Scott, Ruth Stafford, William Tyler, Merritt Wallace and Ed Walter explore concepts of inner and outer space.

This ethereal grouping of works on paper presents an otherworldly and highly personal view of inner explorations and celestial journeys. Often abstract, always visionary, these colorful and dynamic paintings and drawings serve as maps to a galaxy of dreams and to compelling utopian realities.

An important component of Extra Celestial is the gallery premiere of Starquarius, the new space exploration video from the Creative Growth Video Production Workshop that reflects and re-considers the iconic sci-fi films of our lives.

Curator Talk: Saturday, December 12, 2 pm

In conjunction with the exhibition, please join Creative Growth Director Tom di Maria for his gallery talk, From the Margins to the Mainstream: Artists with Disabilities Today. The talk will review the history and leadership of Creative Growth Art Center’s work as the world’s oldest and largest art center for people with disabilities. He will review the Center’s studio art practice, the evolution of several key artists, and its relationship to so-called Outsider Art and to the contemporary art world.

About Creative Growth

Creative Growth Art Center is the nation’s oldest and largest artist-run space for artists with disabilities, offering a professional art studio, exhibition opportunities, and a supportive artistic community for 154 adult artists with developmental, physical, emotional, and mental disabilities. Founded in 1974 on the idea that all people can gain strength, enjoyment and fulfillment from experiences in the arts and are capable of producing works of high artistic merit, CGAC’s studio program offers, at no cost, 74 ongoing workshops led by artists in a range of media. Our year-round Saturday Youth Art program provides 16 young adults with access to our award-winning studio. As a role model organization, CGAC has fostered the development of over 20 similar centers worldwide.

Critical to CGAC’s success is its landmark/adjoining gallery. Started in 1978 with a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts as the world’s first gallery for artists with disabilities, this museum-quality space, with its six extraordinary annual exhibitions, serves as a portal to the larger community of viewers and collectors. Over 12,000 people visit our gallery each year.

CGAC’s artists are thriving in the mainstream art world, making significant contributions to the field of contemporary art, and becoming recognized among the outstanding contemporary artists of our era. Recent accomplishments include:

–       CGAC artist Judith Scott became our third artist (Dan Miller and William Scott are the others) to have work acquired by the Museum of Modern Art, New York. These are the only three artists with developmental disabilities with work in the Museum of Modern Art’s permanent collection.
–       Participation in over 20 outside exhibitions and art fairs, including our artists’ first presence at: Art Fair Tokyo, Japan; D’Dessin Paris Contemporary Drawing Fair, France; and the Codex Book Fair, Richmond, CA.
–       CGAC artists Kerry Damianakes and William Scott received 2015 Wynn Newhouse Awards, given to artists of excellence who also happen to have disabilities.
–       “Bound and Unbound,” a major 5-month retrospective exhibition of CGAC artist Judith Scott’s eighteen years of sculpture making, was presented at the Brooklyn Museum.