Featured Events in Claremont in February, 2024 (June Updated)

The Founder Chapter 1: The Ballad of Time is a groundbreaking docu-service that is a first of its kind. A private movie screening of this powerful event will be held at the Claremont 5 Theatre in Claremont, CA on Thursday, February 29, 2024. The screening will begin at 7 PM, preceded by a black tie dress code with a red carpet and photographer. This event offers a unique opportunity to delve into the journey of The Founder with Chapter 1: The Ballad of Time. It is a celebration of ministry, worship, inspiration, and the unwavering power of God's will. We warmly invite you to join us for this exclusive screening. To secure your tickets, please register for the event. This is an experience not to be missed. Don't delay, sign up today to be part of The Founder Chapter 1: The Ballad of Time Private Movie Screening at the Claremont 5 Theatre in Claremont, CA.

Our rapidly changing climates and expanding populations have challenged the pre-existing structures in place for meeting the demand for food and water. One solution, hydroponic farming systems, allows for accelerated agricultural production within compact urban centers, but these self-enclosed systems separate us from the land. Stitch Field offers an alternative to the plastic-filled warehouses of plants associated with hydroponic systems by using knitted sheep’s wool as substrate and replacing engineered crops with locally occurring plants. Alice-Marie Archer hand-knits fiber sculptures that are each embedded with seeds, creating patterns suited to the needs of each seed species—whether it grows best in a divot, pocket, or row. For this site-specific installation at the Benton, the artist has chosen seeds of locally occurring California plants with either edible or medicinal properties. Archer connects new technology through age old techniques with her sculpture. As an aid to her practice, she uses Midjourney AI visualizations to imagine her work in new spaces and forms. In these images her sculptures morph into home-like structures or walls of cascading plants that fit into imagined urban landscape modelling how this work can be implemented in daily life. Visitors will be able to see, smell, and feel the installation change daily as the seeds germinate, sprout, grow, and decay throughout the course of the exhibition. Archer’s sculptures will eventually be returned to the earth, completing the natural cycle of growth and death, and contributing once again to the local ecosystem.

With a minimum of means—often just a pencil and paper—artists have created drawings that open infinite worlds to us. They have used the practice of drawing to express their aspirations and anxieties, ask questions, raise concerns, and translate their inner experiences into physical form, whether in 20th-century New York, 18th-century India, or 16th-century Rome. The drawings in Infinity on Paper are prisms through which audiences can reflect upon the numberless outcomes of the creative process and even the nature of representation itself. This exhibition emerged from the Benton’s AllPaper Seminar, a professional development program designed to introduce graduate students and young professionals from all backgrounds to the field of works on paper. In the seminar, these emerging scholars engaged with the history of drawing and its practitioners, methods, and materials. The AllPaper Fellows were generously allowed access to the exceptional drawing collection of Jack Shear, artist, collector, and executive director of the Ellsworth Kelly Foundation. That rigorous engagement with drawings in the Shear collection as well as the Benton’s own holdings formed the basis of Infinity on Paper, comprising 70 drawings by more than 50 artists that offer a dynamic exploration of drawing in its various media, methods, and techniques. With its vast scope, the exhibition brings together works on paper by artists from the past and present such as Lee Bontecou, Vija Celmins, Mary Evelyn De Morgan, Gustave Doré, Torkwase Dyson, Maerten van Heemskerck , Jasper Johns, Alice Neel, Edvard Munch, Rita Ponce de León, Kurt Schwitters, Tiepolo, and Francesco Zuccarelli. Their works—at times intimate, at times bombastic—invite visitors to reflect on drawing as a major form of expression and revel in its infinite possibilities.