December Exhibitions at Blue Star

While the allure of four exhibitions opening simultaneously at Blue Star Contemporary is traditionally enough to bring Southtown out en masse, 2014’s final First Thursday and Friday pack a particularly solid punch. On view in the Main Gallery, the group show “Spatial Planes” uses print-based imagery as a thread linking 11 artists, including Texas State University professor Jeffrey Dell and SA’s own Angela Fox. A native of Coahuila, Mexico, locally based Fernando Andrade creates masterful drawings with a socio-political bent. Furthering themes presented in his series Jugando a la Guerrita, Andrade takes over the Middle Gallery with “Tierra y Libertad,” which employs “common games played by children” as a means to address drug cartel violence, deaths and disappearances. Led by artists Jason Reed and Mark Menjivar and art historian Erina Duganne, Borderland Collective is billed as a “social art project that facilitates the participatory exploration and documentation of geographic and sociocultural borders.” Named after the Central American region encompassing El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras, and featuring contributions from Adriana Corral, Joey Fauerso, Noah Sadowski, Vincent Valdez, Jennifer Whitney and Ricky Yanas, the Collective’s “Northern Triangle” is set to “activate the Project Space at Blue Star as a history museum, community center, and classroom” via photographs, maps, art objects, personal accounts, political documents, lectures and film screenings. And in Gallery 4, Bill FitzGibbons curates “Del Corazón,” a solo exhibition of paintings by Chicano artist and Gallista Gallery founder Joe Lopez.