Tucked away at the side of Five Point Plaza, in a small storefront, is a gallery. If you look up while entering, you see a high ceiling, a reminder of the building’s previous history as a barn. This is the titular Five Points Gallery, a small but mighty venue that highlights some of Durham’s wonderful art talent.
Five Points’ origins lie in a previous gallery: Pleiades. Pleiades was created out of another gallery, when Renee Leverty (Graduate School ‘96) and Kim Wheaton left the Hillsborough Gallery of Art. The two opened a Durham gallery in hopes of nurturing a local arts scene. Both profit-focused and altruistically-motivated, Pleiades quickly became a staple of the local arts scene while putting on provocative, socially-focused exhibits and shows.
Five Points was founded out of a desire to create something focused purely on art, running as a for-profit entity. It has nine resident artists: Jenny Blazing, Teddy Devereux (Women’s College ‘66, Graduate School ‘71), King Noboyushi Godwin, Jim McKeon, Ley Killeya, Anne Gregory (Trinity ‘78), Annie Nashold (Trinity ‘76), Yuko Nogami Taylor and Susan Woodson. For most, their art is a part-time pursuit, in addition to working full-time. Fewer are retirees or full-time artists.
Five Points Gallery has been at the same Five Points location since their founding in 2019, except during the closure caused by the early months of the Covid-19 Pandemic. Thankfully, their landlord provided them with several months of free lodging and several more of reduced-rent, allowing them to stay in operation, unlike many other local art groups. The artists rotate staffing the gallery during the days it is open, helping to minimize operating costs.
The artists themselves work in an incredibly wide range of styles and mediums, including landscapes, portraiture and more abstract art as well as both paintings and sculpted glass. While the Five Points Gallery is quite small, the pieces don’t clash with one another. Instead, the art blends together in an interesting, exciting show. Of the regular pieces, I particularly enjoyed the landscape and portrait pieces. I also enjoyed the venue itself, which was smaller and more intimate than a museum while still being full of interesting, high-quality art.
Five Points Gallery hosts rotating exhibitions, which draw special attention to one resident artist. From Oct. 17 to Nov. 9,, they’re featuring a small, curated selection of the works of Teddy Devereux entitled “Vitreous Humor.” Devereux became an artist later in life after discovering a passion for glasswork and glass-based art through a workshop conducted by Dan Fenton. She works primarily in the medium of fused glass, on abstract pieces inspired by her career as a scientist at the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences.
According to Deverux, the exhibit’s title is a play on her chosen medium, as it roughly means “art glass.” She chose to feature a number of her science-focused pieces made throughout the course of her career, including both two-dimensional pieces mounted on metal and wood backdrops and a smaller number of three-dimensional pieces. The exhibit provides a more abstract take on science, highlighting the discipline’s inherent beauty and Devereux’s own history with such.
The exhibit was novel and enjoyable. It was fun to see an exhibit focus on the often neglected intersection of science and art and the aesthetic beauty of science. The pieces themselves were beautiful abstractions of scientific concepts and items that were easy to identify even in glass form. My personal favorite was “Onion Root Tip,” an artistic rendering of the cells of the titular object as viewed through a microscope, which drew me back to my first time using a microscope in school.
Five Points Plaza is open Thursdays and Fridays from 5:00 p.m. to 9:00 p.m. (though on the Third Friday of each month, it is instead open from 6:00 p.m. to 9:00 p.m.) and Saturdays from 1:00 p.m. to 9:00 p.m. Five Points Plaza can be found at 109 E. Chapel Hill Street.
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Zev van Zanten is a Trinity junior and recess editor of The Chronicle's 120th volume.