ART: SUMMER EXPOSURES W/ RIVER VIEWS

Chicago artist Jay Ryan’s print promoting HUM AT MILLENNIUM PARK is among the new breed of gig posters on view at Red Bank Frameworks, in a show by the name of EYE + EAR.

• Thursday: LIVE WITH ART, at Butterfly Fine Arts. Natalia Bedaya’s all-new gallery at 116 Broad Street in Red Bank hosts a special reception for interior designers on Thursday evening between 6 and 9p. It’s part of a quarterly “Live With Art” event aimed at bringing fine art to the business environment, and there’s still time to register by emailing [email protected].

• Friday: SUMMER EXPOSURES at the Art Alliance. Officially closed for the summer as of June 23, the Art Alliance of Monmouth County gallery at 33 Monmouth Street will nevertheless play host to a special warm-weather display of nature images by two area photographers — Stephan Lowy of Oceanport and Eric Sambol of Brick — beginning Friday afternoon. Proceeds of sales from the show benefit the nonprofit Move For Hunger, an initiative that encourages people who are selling their homes and relocating to donate unopened food that they will not take to their new destination, arranging for the items to be delivered to local food banks throughout the country. The exhibit continues through July 13 between the hours of noon and 10p, Wednesdays through Sundays.

• Saturday: RIVER VIEWS Cocktail Gala, Exhibition and Sale. Since one never knows where they’ll be setting up easel next, the Plein Air Painters of the Jersey Coast tend to show up in the most unexpected places. On the evening of Saturday the 26th, they’ll be showing up at an uncharacteristically great-indoors setting on the picturesque banks of the Navesink, as Riverview Medical Center Auxiliary hosts a special 6-9p reception, art show and sale featuring the works of the PAPJC. Spotlighting “paintings of views from some of the most beautiful homes on the Jersey Shore,” the event takes place in the Blaisdell Lobby at RMC, with proceeds from the sale dedicated to the hospital’s Jane H. and John Marshall Booker Cancer Center. Attendees are encouraged to make reservations ($50) at (732)530-2480 or (732)431-1986.

The SUMMER EXPOSURES of Eric Sambol and Stephan Lowy are on display at the Art Alliance building on Monmouth Street, beginning June 25.

• Tuesday 6/29: EYE + EAR at Red Bank Frameworks. Forget those colorful but bogus flea-market repros, or those Xeroxed cut-and-pastes favored by your brother in law’s old punk rock band. There’s a new school of brilliant and creative concert poster art circulating out there — and beginning next Tuesday, you’ll be able to see and purchase much of the best of the recent crop courtesy of Red Bank Frameworks, the framing shop/ gallery space at 160 Monmouth Street (across from Juanito’s restaurant).

Spotlighting the work of such standout artists as Jay Ryan and Dan McAdams — both based in Chicago, where Frameworks proprietor Steve McMillion once owned a gallery/antiques business — Eye + Ear: Recent Concert Poster Design assembles a collection of silkscreened prints, very nearly all of them from this year. It’s a showcase for designers who, McMillion says, “have created a unique and highly individual style on the idea of music concert poster as art — I appreciate the technique and the craft that goes into this work.” Featured are posters promoting gigs from performers both better-known (Patti Smith, Bon Jovi, Wilco) and best-kept (The Black Keys, Andrew Bird, The Jesus Lizard), with the modified urban-abandoned landscapes of McAdams making for a particularly striking set of images of millennial America. The signed, limited edition prints are on display through August 14 during regular shop hours (10a to 7p, Tuesdays through Fridays). For more information, call (732)219-6688 or email here.

• Thursday 7/1: Travis Radcliffe at Jamian’s Food & Drink. The monthly art parties continue at Jamian LaViola‘s eponymous Monmouth Street bistro. Radcliffe is a  borough-based painter whose work (including some images of the downtown streetscape) has been likened here on redbankgreen to Vermeer — and, especially, Edward Hopper, the American master cited by the artist as “a very big influence.” We don’t think there’s an art enthusiast out there who’s going to balk at Radcliffe’s selection of himself as featured artist for July at Jamian’s; beginning next Thursday at 7p, a sampling of his portraits and streetscapes will grace the walls and complement the cool sounds as the restaurant opens up its inviting “convertible” facade all this coming month.

ARTIST WITH REFLECTING GLASSES — otherwise known as a self-portrait of Evelyn Leavens — is among the featured works in a retrospective of works by the lifelong Red Banker, at the Monmouth Museum.

• Friday 7/9: THE PAINTING WORLD OF EVELYN LEAVENS at The Monmouth Museum. Even when  the annual “all-star break” settles in at the Lincroft campus of Brookdale Community College, the Monmouth Museum is scarcely ready to surrender its year-round homefield advantage. From now through July 3, the Museum continues its Emerging Artists series with a display of compelling black and white images (of his native Ireland as well as his adopted home on the Jersey Shore) by Middletown-based lensman Michael Hynes. Then on the second weekend in July, the main gallery mounts a major retrospective on a painter who’s practically synonymous with the Monmouth County artscape — 85 year old Evelyn Leavens, the life-long resident of Red Bank whose career has spanned six decades, and who has expressed her calling by saying “Creating art is the only thing I ever wanted to do.”  The local legend is expected to be in attendance at an opening reception on the evening of July 9 — and you can expect to read more about the painter and the exhibit, right here on redbankgreen.