The Dove Block Project is a community arts center in historic downtown Geneva, inspired by the creativity and originality of the renowned Geneva artist Arthur Dove, devoted to fostering the arts in the Finger Lakes Region through exciting and innovative exhibitions, events, and programs, which are free and open to all members of the community.
Annual Arthur Dove Celebration, Saturday, April 12, 6:30 pm
This year’s Arthur Dove Celebration offers something different: an introductory concert, a live auction, and a one act play featuring the letters between Arthur Dove and Alfred Stieglitz. Come and enjoy hors d’oeuvres, wine, beer, music, a lively auction of art items and events, and a dramatization of the relationship between modernist artist Arthur Dove and his mentor Alfred Stieglitz.
Doors will open at 6:30 pm with the concert by students at St. Peter’s Arts Academy, with Violinists Claire Crisanti and Lucy Crisanti and Guitarists Malcolm Rohn and Vivienne Piersol. At 7:15, we will have a live auction with Carrie Hessney-Doranis a full-time professional auctioneer and champion bid caller who works with her father, Joe at Hessney Auction Co. in Geneva. Among the items that will be auctioned are: art class or youth party for up to 10-12; artwork donated by local artists; private showing in our micro theater; a private paint and sip event; and a studio visit/art coaching session with Phyllis Bryce Ely. After the auction, the play will be performed.
Register here! Suggested donation of $25 per person.
Arthur Dove (1880-1946), son of the Dove Block’s builder, William Dove, was born in nearby Canandaigua, New York, in 1880, and moved to Geneva when he was two. Growing up in Geneva provided an experience which would fuel his love of nature and his art for the rest of his life.
While residing in the Dove Block, he painted nearly a hundred of what are now seen as his most critically-acclaimed works, including what is perhaps his most famous, “Red Sun”; an abstract vision of the sun rising over Geneva’s Lake Seneca, with the area’s surrounding fields in the foreground.
Often heralded as the first American artist to try his hand at abstraction, Dove is perhaps best known for his nature-based abstract paintings, most of which stop short of total non-objectivity. Throughout his career, Dove drew inspiration from the stuff of the observable, material world. And then he distorted, even disfigured this stuff, pushing the majority of his pictures to the cusp of non-objectivity, distorting and inventing without altogether abandoning reference to the real.
Major funding for The Dove Block Project is provided by
And our many members, sponsors, donors, and grantors
THANK YOU ONE AND ALL!