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Published: May 16, 2008 12:00 AM
Modified: May 16, 2008 01:43 AM
 

Art Picks

Durham's Third Friday Art Walk offers some particularly special visual treats tonight. At Through This Lens Gallery, Ramona Bultman-Lewis delivers fascinating stereotype-defying evidence from her family's photographic archives with "Thick as Thieves." In developing negatives inherited from her grandfather, Bultman-Lewis retrieved the history of her successful Depression-era mixed-race family from Sumter, S.C.

Her grandfather's family, accepted by this Southern community, achieved a comfortable lifestyle amid hard times, in contrast to the many images of poverty from the era we are perhaps more accustomed to viewing. In addition, Bultman-Lewis will show several images from her Elmina Series, large-scale photos from Ghana that have been digitally altered with overlaid Adinkra symbols and Ghanaian proverbs. Opening reception, 6 to 9 p.m. 303 E. Chapel Hill St., Durham; 687-0250, www.throughthislens.com.

The Durham Art Guild celebrates its 60th anniversary with a special retrospective exhibition of ceramics by the late Sally Bowen Prange Wainwright. About 50 works were chosen by curator Paul Hrusovsky from collections in Chapel Hill, Durham and New Bern as well as collections in Virginia, Tennessee and Montana. The show will chart her evolution from an early slab-built box, circa 1948, to last year, the year of her death.

Best known for her "barnacle" glazes and luster wares, her works were collected by the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Smithsonian Institution, the N.C. Museum of Art and the Weatherspoon Art Museum. A 68-page catalog accompanies the exhibit. Also at the Guild, a show featuring artwork from Durham's Riverside High School's permanent collection, purchased from among promising student work over the past 17 years, and a collaboration by Leah Sobsey and Lynn Bregman-Blass in photography and encaustic media. 6 to 9 p.m. 120 Morris St., Durham; 560-2787, www.durhamarts.org.

Bull City Arts Collective features "Boundary Lines," ceramics and paintings by Meredith Brickell, continuing her signature explorations in clay. Brickell continues her involvement with the subtle edges of form, places where hand-built joints meet, in a quiet white-on-white palette occasionally intersected by wispy, inscribed lines. Hand-built "canoe" shapes are placed below wall-mounted clay plaques and linear "paddle" shapes to create an intriguing overall environment. 6 to 9 p.m. 401-B1 Foster St., Durham; www.bullcityarts.org.

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