On the first Friday evening of October, the Village of West Greenville will fill with the low hum of a neighborhood out for a walk. Galleries throw open their doors, studios stay lit past dark, and the smell of coffee drifts out of The Village Grind on Pendleton Street. Among the stops on that roughly mile-long loop is Spoonbill Gallery, where a new exhibition called "Curiosities" opens with a reception for the artist, Traci Wright Martin, from 6 to 9 p.m. on October 2, 2026. Admission is free, and the public is invited to step inside, meet the artist, and hear about the observations and rituals behind the work.
The show is built on an unusual pairing: contemporary realism rendered in charcoal, set against hand-folded origami. Martin's pieces begin with charcoal as their foundation, then layer in pastel, paint, patterned paper collage, textiles, and other mixed media. In this collection, the subjects are the birds and wildlife that visit her own backyard, and the folded paper elements are not decoration so much as a second language running alongside the drawing.
"Curiosities grew from the simple act of paying attention," Martin says. "The more time I spend observing the wildlife around me and folding paper by hand, the more I realize that curiosity isn't about finding certainty, but is about remaining open to unexpected connections and allowing wonder to shape the way we see the world."
That idea of attention as a creative practice runs through Martin's broader career. She is an award-winning charcoal and mixed media artist and an internationally published author whose portrait and figurative work addresses representation, weaving contemporary realism together with abstract design elements. Her approach to mixed media treats charcoal as the anchor, then brings in combinations of paint, patterned paper collage, and experimental techniques to finish the design. A recurring thematic focus in her work is the legacy and evolution of the female experience and its influence on artmaking and cultural traditions, tying an autobiographical visual philosophy to a broader, shared human experience through symbolic elements of nature.
Her path to Greenville is itself a story of reinvention. Martin's lifelong passion for art began in drawing classes as a child in Oregon, deepened with an education in studio art and photography in college, and flourished through a career as an arts administrator, curator, and gallery owner in Oklahoma. She graduated with a BA in Art from Southeastern Oklahoma State University and spent her early career showing extensively across the Oklahoma and Texas art scenes, with artist teaching residencies in Oklahoma, Arizona, and Alaska. Her solo and group shows have included the Oklahoma State Capitol gallery, Oklahoma Contemporary, The Charles B. Goddard Center, IAO Gallery, 33 Contemporary Gallery in Chicago, the Wausau Museum of Contemporary Art, Brookgreen Gardens Museum, The Grand Bohemian Gallery, and both the Equity Gallery and the Salmagundi Club in New York City. She has claimed multiple "Best in Show" titles in international, national, and regional juried exhibitions, and her work has appeared in Fine Art Connoisseur, Artist's Network: Best of Drawing, American Art Collector, International Artist, Pastel Journal, New Visionary Artist Magazine, Vessel Magazine, and a selection of titles for PoetsArtists.
More recently, she joined the Greenville art community and works from a shared studio at OYE Studios, a collective in the city's art district. Martin is listed among them alongside painters, designers, and other makers, and it is from that studio that the observations behind "Curiosities" have taken shape.
The gallery hosting the show has a young history of its own. Spoonbill Gallery was created as an architectural space dedicated to original art, nestled in the historic Village of West Greenville. It embodies, in its own words, the spirit of its namesake bird, a strange combination of beauty, grace, and quirk. The gallery was the venture of Joseph Bradley, a nationally acclaimed artist known for wildlife-inspired paintings, who wanted to build "a beautiful architectural space dedicated to art curated by other artists." Bradley began working on bringing Spoonbill to life in 2023 with Kristina White, a recent transplant from New Orleans whose career in the visual arts began as a set designer and scenic painter for major motion pictures and television. White's credits include work on Anchorman II and scenic painting for The Vampire Diaries; she has also designed locally for The Children's Theatre and The Warehouse Theatre. She and Bradley, who are next-door neighbors at home as well as at work, thoughtfully curated a roster of artists for the gallery. Bradley's own studio sits just next door.
Since then the gallery's team has grown. Rachel Bradley, a trained pastry chef who spent nearly two decades in professional kitchens before the events of 2020 sent her home for good, now serves as owner and gallery director. She has said she found that a gallery and a restaurant have a great deal in common: both are about welcoming people in and inviting them to share a moment together. Lauren Hargraves, who came to the gallery from the floral design and merchandising departments at Twigs, a local flower and home goods shop, rounds out the team as gallery associate.
Spoonbill sits at 1292 Pendleton Street, in a stretch of the Village that has become one of Greenville's densest clusters of studios and galleries. The First Fridays tradition draws visitors through that district on foot, past the Greenville Center for Creative Arts in the former Brandon Textile Mill on Abney Street and on through the loop of storefronts and workshops. It is a walkable, informal kind of evening, the sort where a visitor might wander in to look at a painting and end up in a conversation with the person who made it.
That is precisely the invitation for October 2. The reception runs from 6 to 9 p.m. at Spoonbill Gallery, and Martin will be on hand to talk about the collection. Viewers are asked to look closely at the relationships between realism and folded origami, and to explore the intricate mixed media details that reward a slower look. For anyone who has ever wondered how a drawing and a folded piece of paper might speak to each other, this is the chance to find out. The event is free and open to the public.