Ladies and gentlemen and kids of all ages! The Greatest Show on Earth has arrived! Witness fire eaters, trapeze artists, clowns, and beasts from every corner of the earth performing for your visual delight! Once again, Blackbird Studios is proud to host a group exhibit featuring amazing artists from Las Vegas and around the country.

The Greatest Show on Earth is inspired by the circus, carnivals, and freak shows that paraded through American towns from the early 1900s through the Great Depression and Dust Bowl era.  The artists whose work is featured have put their minds and souls into their artistic impressions & interpretations of “The Circus” in all its glory — and all its shabbiness.

This new exhibit continues Blackbird Studios tradition of group shows following the success of Grimm Fairy Tales and Peewee’s Playhouse over the last two years.

Blackbird Studios has been transformed into a circus ring for everyone to enjoy death-defying artistic acts! During the opening night celebration, the artists will be joined by circus performers of all kinds – jugglers, fire breathers, acrobats, and musicians.

Come one, come all, and take part in this spectacle! As always, we hope to show once again that art is FUN as well as thought-provoking.

Opening Night, First Friday, June 7, 6:00 pm – 11:00 pm

(open Preview Thursday, June 6 as well)

Exhibit will be on display through June 22.

Constance Stotzer’s debut solo show focuses on the natural environment, and the ways that children explore and interact with the natural world with a sense of wonder, while adults provide scaffolding for those experiences. The show demonstrates the ways in which adults are often separated in many ways from the natural world as objects slightly apart. Stotzer’s work will include color pencil drawings, layered shadow boxes, and paintings. She has brought the drawings to life and off the paper.

The exhibition will be on display from April 5th through April 26. Join the artist for an opening reception during First Friday, April 5.

About the artist: Las Vegas artist Constance Stotzer graduated from California College of Arts and Crafts with a BFA and a major in sculptural ceramics. Through her art, Constance explores the tensions between children’s conceptualizations of the world and those same concepts when held by adults. Her work reflects lifelong struggles such as developing a sense of home, finding a place to belong, and the role of fate and agency in our individual development. Constance utilizes a variety of techniques and mediums, including acrylic paints on wood, colored pencil drawings, and ceramics, to reveal the enduring child hidden within each of us.

Iranian artists Nanda Sharifpour and Ali Fathollali will display new work reflecting their lives in Iran, Turkey and the United States in a joint exhibition to be held January 7-26 at Las Vegas’ Blackbird Studios. With nearly 40 exhibitions between them in Iran and Turkey, Sharifpour and Fathollali look back to their lives in the Middle East and forward to their lives in the US in their first American showing.

“During this travel,” says Sharifpour, “I have carried three different lives with me and their happinesses and sorrows have enriched my art.” Sharifpour’s paintings focus on the hopes, dreams, and struggles of women, both women in general and specifically Middle-Eastern women like herself. Fathollali’s work combines collage, illustration, and sculptural elements to create a framework for his own experiences in the beliefs, stories, and superstitions of the past. Deliberately blurring ancient and modern styles, Fathollali creates a timeless space within which multiple generations — past, present, and future, encounter and confront each other.

An opening reception with the artists will be held during First Friday, January 7, from 6p-10p.