One of the biggest success stories to come out of Bucktown Center for the Arts is Emily Christenson and her nature-inspired works. Some early visitors to doeGallery were impressed with her art and took a postcard of one of her paintings back to a favorite gallery in Washington, DC. Within a year, Christenson's work was hanging on the walls at the Fine Art & Artists (FAA) Gallery in Georgetown along with some of the big names of the 20th Century. Luck certainly played a role in Christenson's story, but if the work hadn't been so good and so captivating, it wouldn't have gone any further than being a souvenir postcard.

At FAA, Christenson enjoyed two years of strong sales, a solo show of her work, and a review in the Washington Post. She was preparing a body of work for her second solo show, Rivers & Rain, Pieces of Denali, when she got a call that the gallery was closing after 15 years.

More than a year later, Christenson is premiering both a new Bucktown gallery/studio (called "e|c") and the 10 works that make up Rivers & Rain, Pieces of Denali. The show runs through the end of December, and the gallery is in the southeast corner on the second floor.

Describing For Such a Time as This: Remembering Vietnam, artist Adrienne Noelle Werge said: "I wanted to build an environment in which people can come and meditate ... a space that is really built in such a way as to respect all the sacrifices that are made and all the lives that were touched by the Vietnam war and any war."

How could a show of teapots be extraordinary? Wouldn't that be like having an exhibition of kitchen appliances?

We all have an image of a teapot, but these are not those teapots. Teapots: Object to Subject, the current show at the Figge Art Museum, is like a Mad Hatter's tea party.

A small woman with clenched fists full of feathers plucked from her own legs is watched by smiling, colorful faces reminiscent of the simplistic advertising from the faux utopia of the 1950s. This is a microcosm of a room full of sculptures and paintings that present themselves with a straightforward charm that makes you smile, and then you realize there are darker themes that temper the smile with unease.

After digging through piles of water bottles, cardboard boxes, plastic forks, and take-out cartons lying near the tent, Samantha Dickey last week began to build a model for a sculpture. "Right now we are trying to come up with some ideas to make our main sculpture for the site that we have," said the soon-to-be-sophomore from North Scott High School. "My idea was to make a water fountain out of the tires."