Visual Arts

The walkway in front of Strohl Art Center has become a work of art in itself. Chautauquans Lowell and Rebecca Strohl felt the outside of the recently constructed art facility needed an extra touch to make it inviting to passersby. They collaborated with Judy Barie, director of galleries for Visual Arts at Chautauqua Institution, and Mike Conroe, an architect from Buffalo, N.Y., to spice up the walkway.

Imagination is a wonderful thing. When ideas exist only in the imagination, they have the potential to go anywhere. Be anything. They exist only in feelings and senses and thoughts and are completely at the mercy of the imaginer.

Three shows filled with color, creativity and artistic interpretation will have opening receptions from 3 p.m. to 5 p.m. today in the Fowler-Kellogg Art Center.

Guest Review Such the wonder of a new way of being in the world: the proposals that remake our visions, rare celebrations like the turn toward abstraction in art during the last century. Humankind at its best suggests new worldviews — that our ground is round instead of flat, for instance, and it is a shared amazement, like the suggestion that a star is at the center of things rather than us. And with these understandings, we are transformed.

Guest Review And how we love our animals. Our animals. We tame them. We worship them. We sleep with them. We admire them. We eat them. We use them for sport, for fashion, for profit. We nurture them, cultivate them, hunt them, kill them. They are devils. They are gods.

Guest Review I’m sorry, but this show is just not the way it is supposed to be. It’s off-kilter, sometimes upside-down and usually topsy-turvy. Give this 54th version of Chautauqua’s juried Exhibition of Contemporary Art a nudge and it would tumble over the line, across that careful border that too often marks what is right for art and what is supposedly not.

Abstract work from the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, N.Y., featured in the exhibition “Abstract in America: 1940s to 1960s” will be on display in the Strohl Art Center throughout the summer. This is supported by the three-year partnership with the Albright-Knox.