The Charlotte Street awards are a pretty sweet deal -- unrestricted cash grants given to a handful of local artists, which they repay in new work for an annual show. Because the exhibits aren't curated around a single theme or medium, the displays can seem disjunctive, but somehow this year's show at Grand Arts just worked. Michael Converse's vaguely figural drawings sprawled over much of the south wall, bookended by fiber artist Rachel Hayes' curtain of fabric and husband-and-wife duo Rie Egawa and Burgess Zbryk's modernist light designs. But the small gallery to the north housed the real treasures: Jay Norton's color-saturated paintings and Seth Johnson's sensory examination of violence in society. It defies logic, but the show had flow. We're looking forward to this year's installment.
