Out & About: The Westmoreland’s revised happy hour puts regional artist in focus
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The Art on Tap happy hour at The Westmoreland Museum of American Art has been reimagined as Art After Hours.
While retaining popular elements such as an art scavenger hunt, musical entertainment, light refreshments and libations, the event now has an added emphasis on the artist whose work is showing in the Greensburg museum’s Robertshaw Gallery.
At the Dec. 10 session, Pittsburgh artist and educator Charlee Brodsky was on hand to talk about her still-life photography exhibit, “The Audacity of the Mundane,” with works that use “objects collected over the years to create worlds within small spaces.” Brodsky’s work will hang through Jan. 2.
The revised happy hour format “is tied to our mission a little bit more,” said Claire Ertl, the museums’s director of marketing and public relations. “We want to celebrate the regional artist whose work is currently on view. Guests will be able to engage with them and learn more about their practice.”
Start time for the happy hour has been pushed back from 5 to 6 p.m. to allow people coming from Pittsburgh or other distant locations to be able to make it after work, Ertl added.
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Brodsky is a professor of photography at Carnegie Mellon University whose award-winning work has been exhibited regionally and nationally and in a number of books, including two that explore the steel mill heritage of Homestead. She was Pittsburgh Center for the Art’s 2012 Artist of the Year.
In addition to meeting Brodsky, guests mingled in the community room, listened to live music by Bob Brooks of White Oak and strolled the upstairs galleries. They also could step outside on the pleasantly balmy December evening to view the Winter Lights display illuminating the building’s southern facade through Jan. 30.
The next Art After Hours is planned for Feb. 25, when the featured artist will be Tina Williams Brewer, whose art quilts tell stories of African American culture, family life, history and spirituality.
Seen after hours: Richard and Eileen Stoner, Barbara Ferrier, Anita Manoli, Gene James, Christina Bieterman, Tracy Zufall, Bruce and Kim Palmiscno, Jim and Karen O’Connor, Cordelia Lindsay, Dennis Bell, David McMunn, Victoria Werley, Jackie Hooper, Diane Smalara, Tim Bodnar, Criss Dudash, Susan Angelicchio, Lena Tomko, Nick Hughes, Nicole McMaster, Sarah Welsh, Steve Molans, Tom Harrold, Patricia Lonsbary and museum staffers Barbara Jones, Bonnie West, Doug Evans and Randall Oaks.