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Breckenridge’s Arts Alive puts up metal for February

Emily Galvin's metal artwork adorns the wall of the Arts Alive Gallery in Breckenridge. Galvin, a Summit County teacher, is the gallery's featured artist for February. A reception is planned for Saturday.
Eli Pace / epace@summitdaily.com |

If you go

What: Arts Alive reception for February’s featured artist Emily Galvin

When: 4-7 p.m., Saturday

Where: Arts Alive Gallery, 500 Main St., Breckenridge

Info: There will be wine, hors d’oeuvres and live music at this free event. For more info, call (970) 453-0450, find Arts Alive on Facebook or go to SummitArts.org.

Dillon Valley Elementary School teacher Emily Galvin has been crafting metal artwork with a blowtorch for more than 20 years. Now, she’s the featured artist at the Arts Alive Gallery in Breckenridge.

The eclectic co-op gallery picks a new artist — be it a photographer, jeweler, painter, potter, fabric artist or whatever — to feature every month and currently has a large wall devoted to Galvin’s work.

Also, there will be a reception for Galvin from 4-7 p.m. on Saturday, as the gallery regularly holds these events for its featured artists on the second Saturday of the month.



At this month’s reception, wine and light refreshments are promised, along with Galvin’s husband, Josh, providing live music on his acoustic guitar.

Emily Galvin’s work is often whimsical, inspired by nature and focused on movement.



They might not sell as well as her celestial pieces, Emily said, but she adores fabricating dancing sprites.

“I’m really big on pieces that convey movement,” she said while discussing her pieces, often in the image of animals, abstract art or wallflowers. “I love making dancing figures. They don’t sell as well as a lot of my other celestial pieces — everybody loves suns and stars — but I love designing sprites, dancing figures.”

Emily has been doing art in one form or another since age 19. First, she started doing clay pipes in San Francisco that looked like people. From there she moved into macramé and then jewelry. Finally, she got into fabric art, and that led her to learn from a welder how to bend, shape and cut metal.

Emily said she loves using metal for her pieces because it comes with such low overhead cost. She’s pulled materials — old metal, barbed wire, coils, springs or copper wire, just to name a few — out of trash bins, got them from her environmentally conscious trash-collecting sister and even dragged some items out of the woods.

It’s recycling at its best, Emily said, and the Breckenridge teacher has no plans of slowing down anytime soon.

“When Walmart in Frisco was remolding and they took down all that siding and roofing to redo it, I took a bunch of that home and cut it up into things,” she said, noting that she didn’t have to get permission because she found it in the trash bin.

Emily’s pieces sell for as little as $10, up to $250, with her most common price point being in the $40 range.

For more information, find the gallery on Facebook or go to SummitArts.org.


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