Final Gallery Night of the Year: This can double as a shopping trip for your art-loving holiday victims

In October, I had the honor of being a guest guide for Gallery Night. Guest guide is a pretty posh gig. Basically, you ride around and chat about art – and local restaurants, which somehow always come up – while your expert primary guide explains the shows and guides the ship. I was delighted to find myself under the informed and charismatic tutelage of Shannon Hadfield, and we took a lovely trip to the excitingly interactive EXPAND show at the Providence College Gallery, followed by a visually impactful collab by Swamp Yankee and Bill Shockley at AS220’s Resident Gallery on Matthewson St, complete with metal sculpted weapons, helmets and heads. That was followed by a surreal and visually stunning show by the artists of the 134 Collaborative, including discussion with artist Jonny Skye, and ultimately a visit to a new mural by the Avenue Concept. This included free hot chocolate and projected images that complemented and moved around within the building-sized murals in a display that mesmerized the viewer, akin to an IMAX-sized screensaver. Gallery Night is different every time – and every tour takes on different locations and themes, so you’ll never have the same experience I did – only our 20 fellow travelers on that trolley can lay claim to that. But you will have a satisfying, eye-opening group outing complete with tour guides and likely a few jokes and stories. Gallery Night’s last outing will be on Nov 21, the third Thursday of the month. Tours leave every half hour from the Graduate-used-to-be-Biltmore in PVD, between 5 and 6:30pm. Reservations are recommended – many of the tours sell out last minute, so if you’re walking in, walk in a little early. Details on all the tours, and the DIY version of each, if you can’t make it that Thursday, can be found at gallerynight.org (which, we must say, is a pretty cool URL!) •

Mike Ryan publishes Motif and has served as a board member for Gallery Night, as well as an occasional guest guide.