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Art Reception – Bruce Mitchell

Name: Art Reception – Bruce Mitchell
Start: 2025-08-01T16:00:00-07:00
End: 2025-08-01T18:00:00-07:00
Location: Lobby Art Gallery

August 1, 2025 @ 4:00 pm – 6:00 pm PDT

This month in the Lobby Art Gallery we present “A Richness of Materials” by Bruce Mitchell. Join us for his reception in the Dance Palace lobby on August 1st from 4-6pm.

Gallery Hours Monday – Friday 9am-4pm

A selection of wood kimonos and woodblock prints.

The formative moment in Bruce Mitchell’s life as an artist came from a visit to the De Young Museum of Art in San Francisco with his parents at age ten to see the retrospective exhibition of Vincent Van Gogh’s paintings and drawings. The raw power of Van Gogh’s work gave Bruce a huge appetite for art, and in future visits to the De Young, he found himself especially drawn to the forms, colors, and textures of tribal art from around the world. On a whim, Bruce started carving wood at 19, which led to him to be invited to work with Inverness sculptor JB Blunk on the monumental seating sculpture titled PLANET for the Oakland Museum of Art in 1969. While working part-time as Blunk’s assistant for another seven years, Bruce continued to develop his skills and then opened his own studio in 1977. Teaching himself to use a wood lathe, he began making functional bowls and sculptural vessels, and over the next several decades, he added sculptural tables, benches, and stools to his vocabulary of objects. Central to Bruce’s process is visualizing a shape within the material and responding to the changing rhythms of positive and negative shapes that emerge as a form develops.

Bruce has lived in West Marin since 1971, when he met his wife Nancy, who co-founded the Dance Palace Community Center that year. They raised their two sons, Owen and Drew, here and designed and built their home in Inverness. Bruce is a co-founder of Point Reyes Open Studios and is a member of Gallery Route One in Point Reyes Station. Bruce will be showing several wood kimonos that he began making nine years ago, along with a group of woodblock prints on paper, a whole new medium that he began working in last year.