At Open Sky Gallery in Montague, California, art is displayed alongside stories about the ways creativity can help people cope with grief, trauma and other challenges.
Director and curator Snow Thorner said the gallery has expanded its focus since 2024, when it primarily featured work by incarcerated artists and their families.
“Now we encompass artists, writers and musicians who have been impacted by mental health challenges, childhood trauma or abusive situations,” Thorner said.
The gallery’s current exhibit, “For Love of Nature,” includes landscape paintings by Roberto Gomez, who is serving a life sentence in Central California. Gomez said immersing himself in art helps him confront what he calls his “distorted thinking.”
The exhibit also features sponge paintings by Mel Jackson. He stopped making art while caring for his ill wife, but began working in the new medium after she died. He said the practice helped him work through his grief.
Earlier this year, the gallery hosted an exhibit by portrait photographer and retired social worker Jan Goff-LaFontaine. The exhibit grew out of Goff-LaFontaine’s book,
“Women in Shadow and Light,” which portrays the different paths 40 women, ages 19 to 95, took to heal from trauma. Four of the women live in Northern California, where Goff-LaFontaine also resides.
“They co-created a portrait where each woman shows how she personally rose above the trauma in her life,” Thorner said.
Thorner said the gallery hopes the artists’ work will make it easier for people to talk about their own experiences.
“We really want to normalize these types of conversations,” she said. “When we can talk about it and provide some compassion for one another, I think we connect very deeply, and we begin to heal.”
Open Sky Gallery’s “For Love of Nature” exhibit reopens Sept. 18-20 during the Montague Balloon Fair. The gallery is at 125 S. 11th St. in Montague
