The Historic City Hall Arts and Cultural Center has three new exhibitions planned for the rest of the year.

Hit Me With Your Best Shot

Starting Sept. 27, the sixth annual Hit Met With Your Best Shot will be shown at Gallery By the Lake. Each year, wildlife photographers submit their photographs of birds for completion.

Director of Cultural Affairs Payton Dodds called the competition a celebration of “South Louisiana’s beloved bird-watching hot spot.”

With $1,400 in prizes on the line, photographers have submitted photographs since April. Photographs can be submitted to two categories, open and fixed-lens camera.

Dodds said Hit Me With Your Best Shot is a juried competition, and entries will be judged by Bird Watcher’s Digest editors Dawn Hewitt and Bruce Wunderlich.

The exhibition will be available until Nov. 30.

Ubuhle Women: Beadwork and the Art of Independence

Starting Oct. 18, Ubuhle Women: Beadwork and the Art of Independence will be available for viewing.

The exhibit will showcase a new form of bead art developed by a community of women in rural KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa, the ndwango (cloth or rag). Ndwangos are created with Czech-glass beads beaded on fabric stretched out like a canvas. A single panel can take up to 10 months to complete, Dodds said.

She said the exhibit was selected from International Arts & Artists Traveling Exhibitions, and showcases the “unique skills, artwork and culture” of the Ubuhle Women’s technique.

“Using skills handed down through generations and working in their own unique style ‘directly from the soul,’ in the words of artist Ntombephi Ntobela, the women create abstract as well as figurative subjects for their ndwangos,” she said.

Ubuhle is a word that means “beauty” in the Xhosa and Zulu languages, and “describes the shimmering quality of light on glass that for the Xhosa people has spiritual significance,” she said.

“From a distance, each panel seems to be formed from a continuous surface, but as each tiny bead catches the light the viewer becomes more aware of the meticulous skill that went into each artwork and the scale of ambition,” Dodds said.

The ndwangos of six artists will be on display until Dec. 27.

Snow Village

From Nov. 26 until Jan. 4, there will be a Snow Village exhibit, a 700-piece collection of holiday-themed figurines, complete with a “skating rink, quaint town squares, festive neighborhoods and ski run” that are on loan from the McNeese Foundation.