Quirk Pop-up: Visual Treats + Blue Skies Workroom

On Saturday, May 4, experience a playful and fun pop-up featuring two makers: Joni Ulman Lewis of Visual Treats and Alyssa Salomon of Blue Skies Workroom. There will be all kinds of paper and fabric goodies for sale including cards, bags, pillows, hand-bound books and more! Joni Ulman Lewis of Visual Treats is an mixed media artist from Fredericksburg, Va. She attended art school at Virginia Commonwealth University back when they still designed with pencils. Post graduation, she stayed in Richmond to work in visual merchandising for the beloved Miller&Rhoads and Thalhimer's department stores where she made many lifelong friends. Her first serious relationship was with a xerox color copier, which became the gateway drug to a future as a paper junkie and collage artist. Her hand sewn greeting cards with strong opinions and a hilarious point of view were a natural next step as a way to utilize her paper habit. Joni's addiction to cashmere has also found a purpose. Sweaters rescued from early retirement have been successfully rehabilitated and restyled as scarves and hats. She'll be bringing several collections to tell her story including one of a kind shadow box collages made from found materials to share with Quirk. In addition to three dimensional story telling, Joni recently visited the stage at NPR's 'The Moth'. If you'd like to listen to her Story Slam event winning narrative, send her a shout. Under the moniker Blue Skies Workroom, Alyssa Salomon produces home goods, books, textiles, and HAPPINESS in Central Virginia with eco-friendly screenprinting, natural fabrics and luscious paper, for you to use and to give. Each utilitarian, handmade object is a conversation between color, materials and design, and creates an opportunity for dialogue between user and article, to fill or to fondle. Affordable pleasures for everyday living. Blue Skies Workroom is an exercise in radical optimism, the idea that in our chaotic everyday, acts of optimism are a bold force of will. As an artist and as a teacher, Alyssa strives to make joy and create beauty for the sheer pleasure of working within and bringing others into this space. Alyssa makes most of her screenprint stencils from hand cut paper, and prints primarily on linen for its heft, drape and sheen. As color study, pattern exploration and collage exercise, Alyssa has been making open editions of hand bound books, tapping decades’ accumulations of paper samples, scraps, ephemera, and never used prints. For colors, palettes and patterns, she takes inspiration from artists and designers such as Alexander Girard, Marimekko, Anni Albers, Liubov Popova, Sol LeWItt, Helio Oiticica, Lubna Chowdhary, and Camille Walala, as well as contemporary knitters, quilt repeats, African and Dutch wax fabrics, tribal rugs, and Japanese katagami. At this pop-up, Alyssa will be debuting her new line of throw pillows made from original screen printed fabric.