Contemporary art is a primary driver of attendance and attention for art museums today. Museum goers line up for hours, online and in person, to score tickets to blockbuster exhibitions like Yayoi Kusama’s Infinity Mirror Rooms or to get into hot contemporary art museums like The Broad in Los Angeles, where you can watch the wait time tick up on a dedicated Twitter account. Contemporary art can also be a bit confusing. But the eclectic and inclusive nature of art being made today has a lot to teach us about how to experience the world we live in.
Valerie Cassel Oliver, the VMFA's curator of modern and contemporary art, shares ways to open up the experience of contemporary art and ways the art of our times provokes important conversations.

Valerie Cassel Oliver

For fiber artist Andrea Donnelly, the loom is a tool for mark-making, along with other materials like ink, dyes, and found items like milkweed pods. And making art is a full-body experience. When she finishes a piece, it contains not only the woven cloth and ink that we see, but also the marks of her body. The tension of opposing concepts also plays a big role in Andrea’s work - the discipline of weaving and the impulsivity of painting on cloth with ink, the presence of time and the shadow of memory, density and transparency, even the literal weaving, unweaving, and reweaving of cloth. What results is gorgeous and complicated, work that you want to spend time with. We spent some time with Andrea recently, ahead of her new solo show, Theorems and Poems, now on view at the Reynolds Gallery in Richmond.

Andrea Donnelly

Visiting an artist’s studio is a precious gift, and visiting the studio of fiber artist Michael-Birch Pierce is a special kind of awesome. His studio, in an old warehouse on Mayo Island in the middle of the James River, is a sensuous experience. Crystals and sequins sparkle from every surface, and sumptuous fur, velvet and lace are piled in every corner. Michael-Birch uses these materials in his work, using his background in fashion design to exquisitely craft sculptural pieces that challenge to viewer to think deeply about the identity that we wear. At the same time, Michael-Birch recognizes the courage of vulnerability as a way to claim who we are and connect authentically with others. Michael-Birch’s lush and revealing work is a part of the current costume and textiles exhibition at The Valentine, Our Hearts on Our Sleeves. The brilliant Kristen Stewart, curator of the show, joined me in his studio for a joyful conversation about art.

Michael-Birch Pierce

On first look, the flowers that are the primary subject of Nancy Blum’s work are reassuringly familiar. But look for a few moments, and you begin to notice that things are not what they seem. These drawings portray botanical superheroes with agency and power without relation to human beings - we are not a part of their world. The riotous energy that is barely contained in Nancy’s detailed wonderlands doesn’t depend on us. These plants carry on joyfully without us.

Nancy Blum

Categories of the past are collapsing in contemporary art. Artists use the medium and materials that are the best conduit for personal, political and social messaging, and often their artistic practices include many processes at once. 
As they looked closely at work being made by contemporary artists, curators Stefanie Fedor and Melissa Messina repeatedly saw the quilt being used by contemporary artists as a medium to explore questions and communicate messages. They put together an exhibition that allows  artists to tell us why the quilt right now. I spoke with them both, and quilt artist Gina Adams, just as the show opened.

The Embedded Message: Quilting in Contemporary Art

Bruce Wilhelm wasn’t born a painter, but almost. From the time he got his first set of paints as a teenager, painting has been at the center of his life. It’s how he works out thoughts and feelings. As a very shy young man, it was a way for him to put himself out there without words, and it is still a very intuitive process for him. In a new body of work, Bruce has wholeheartedly embraced abstraction. In his previous work, he often used figures to anchor work that explored many of the same themes seen in these new paintings - layering, construction, destruction, and reconstruction, color, and form. Now he has set the figure aside in an exploration of pure abstraction in large scale work that has an engaging presence and energy.

Bruce Wilhelm

Many people think about photography as a way of stopping time, preserving what we are seeing in the moment the picture is made.  But Chester Higgins uses his camera to search for the unseen and make it visible. He challenges what we think we know and asks us to see the spirit, giving visual definition to the lived human experience.
Chester’s works are currently on view at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts as part two of a series of exhibitions showing images from the Black Photographers Annual, a 4-part publication that was inspired by the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s and 70s. Volume two was the first to include images made by earlier generations of black photographers, one of whom was P.H. Polk. Chester Higgins first encountered Polk’s work as a student at Tuskegee Institute, where Polk worked as the official photographer, and Chester brought Polk’s work to the attention of the publisher of the Black Photographer’s Annual. Both Polk and Higgins worked to create opportunities for the black community to see itself through the eyes of its own artists, rather than be contented with a view of itself presented by others.

Chester Higgins

Born in Lima, Peru, Maria Chavez is an an abstract turntablist, sound artist, and DJ. Accidents, coincidence, and failures are themes that unite her sound sculptures, installations, and other works with her solo turntable performance practice. She visited Richmond for a ten-day artist residency at the University of Richmond and to kick off Sound Arts Richmond, a citywide sound arts festival that continues through August of this year. I spoke with Maria as she was installing Topography of Sound: Peaks and Valleys Series, a solo exhibition of new paintings and illustrations based on microscopic images of vinyl and needle. Chavez chose to show this work as two-dimensional rather than as a sound installation because, in the sound arts world and in the art markets, the expectation is that sound art can only be emitted sound from a speaker or from a person. And, as you will hear, Chavez is not a person who likes to be boxed in by external expectations.

Maria Chavez

Chris McCaw first encountered a darkroom when he was 13 years old, and he has been making photos ever since. What he does is straight photography - a lens, the light, a camera, and something to receive the light. That’s it. Elemental. Elemental is also the perfect description of the primary subject of his work - the movement of the sun across the landscape, often in the most remote places on  Earth. Chris has taken his homemade, monumental cameras to the Mojave Desert, the equator, and the Arctic Circle to photograph the cycle of night and day in its variations. The images that result have a reverence to them, a deep sense of respect and awe that these timeless processes and places exist and go on every day without regard for us.

Chris McCaw

Harrison Walker describes what he does as creating prints and/as objects. In his first solo exhibition at Candela Gallery, he presents his Portals project. In this series, he uses the most basic elements of photography - light, paper, and chemicals - to explore color, chemistry, and psychological perception. Each of Harrison’s striking images are the same in some very important ways - he uses the same steel disk in each piece, placed in the same place on uniformly sized paper. And yet, there is endless variation in the work, which consists so far of over 130 prints. Each of the prints embodies his effort to push the boundaries of what he does not fully understand or control, whether it is the chemical process of making the print itself, the celestial worlds that inspire his work, or the meditative act of looking at the work and the responses it provokes.

Harrison Walker

Since the 1960s, multidisciplinary artist Howardena Pindell has been pushing the limits. She was one of the first women of color to curate at a major museum, an abstract painter when black artists were expected to represent their ideas figuratively, and overt about social and political issues when abstract artists where expected to produce work free of such “impurities”. She broke the boundaries of painting itself, using unconventional materials and techniques in her work from the beginning of her career. And she continues to challenge art world dogma as her career moves into its 6th decade. Join LookSEE for a conversation with Howardena Pindell and co-curators Valerie Cassel Oliver and Naomi Beckwith as they discuss Pindell's career and the current exhibition, Howardena Pindell: What Remains to Be Seen.

Howardena Pindell:What Remains to Be Seen

Richmond is an artistically rich city and that abundance allows for fantastic collaborations like House Hold, on view now at Sediment Arts. Organized around a collaborative book project, Joan Gaustad, Michael Lease, Amber Esseiva and Claire Zitzow create a gallery collage, the creative story of all four, intimate and immersive.

House Hold: Joan Gaustad + Michael Lease

Ervin A. Johnson’s arresting large-scale, photo-based work is rooted in his personal experiences as a queer black man and the killing of black people across America. #InHonor is a series of photographic mixed media portraits that represent Johnson’s visceral response to racism and police brutality done to the black body. Johnson began InHonor around the time of the Trayvon Martin and Eric Garner protests as a way to make his voice heard. He wants these portraits to stand as a forceful and visceral reminder of the strength, resiliency and beauty of the black body.

Ervin A. Johnson

Growing Up in Civil Rights Richmond: A Community Remembers pairs oral histories with vibrant, large-scale portraits of 30 Richmond, Virginia, residents whose lives were altered by their experiences as children and youth during the civil rights movement.  The portraits are a collaboration between photographer Brian Palmer and the sitter - each person has clearly chosen the way in which he or she wants to be seen, and a visitor to the galleries cannot dismiss these powerful people and their courage and determination. Each is accompanied by excerpts from interviews conducted by UR professor Laura Browder as she spoke with participants about their personal experiences. Growing Up in Civil Rights Richmond shines a beautiful light on the importance of honest conversations about the ways in which race shapes our experiences. Through these portraits and the accompanying stories, the participants are reclaiming African American history and then connecting it to the rest of Richmond history in innovative and wonderful ways.

Growing Up in Civil Rights Richmond

Contemporary art is often defined as the art of the now. The work of Martine Syms is of this very moment. Defining herself as a conceptual entrepreneur, she adopts any discipline, any distribution method, any formal strategies and models that respond to the shifting boundaries of culture and business. Regardless of the lens she is using, her work investigates how Blackness is circulated as an image. One of her main interests has been the entertainment industry, especially film. Black references are at the core of the movies - black gestures, movement, language style, and fashion all essentially shape what we see on the screen. Through her work Syms pushes us to see that more clearly.
With her installation at the Institute for Contemporary Art at VCU, Martine Syms moves into examining technology, specifically artificial intelligence and social media. In this space, unlike entertainment, there is very little, if any, reference to Blackness. The third “release” of what Syms refers to as a research project, Shame Space asks what Blackness and Black femininity might look like in this space. Amber Esseiva, assistant curator at the ICA, talks about Martine Syms and this paradigm-shifting installation that happily raises many more questions than it answers.

Martine Syms

Aimee Joyaux is an abundantly creative and endlessly curious artist who has her artist’s mind in lots of places. She is a painter, a photographer, and a performance artist. She is a printmaker and a teacher. Drawing plays a central role in her artistic practice. The renovated antebellum cotton warehouse in Petersburg, Virginia, that she and her husband Alain call home contains artistic multitudes, including a painting studio, a darkroom, a print and letterpress shop and Alain’s woodworking studio. In her work, Aimee uses color, language, iconography, and found materials to respond in a visceral way to current events and to examine their connections to the histories and mythologies that make up our cultural identities.

Aimee Joyaux

Artist Cindy Neuschwander, who died in 2012, is known especially for her sensuous abstract encaustic paintings, but her artistic journey was diverse and varied. Early in her career, she focused on straight photography, using a large format box camera to produce modern images that explored issues of identity, vulnerability, relationship and isolation, among other things. Later Neuschwander experimented with where photography could take her in her exploration of these ideas. She painted and collaged over the images, marking and scratching the surface and sometimes even the negatives. The result was a body of work, made in the late 1980s, that draws the viewer in with color and directness while also keeping one out by obscuring and disguising the figures in the images beneath. This work is a wonderfully engaging moment of connection with Cindy as an emerging artist. Curators Jay Barrows, Emily Smith, and Park Myers, along with Angeline Robertson, drew on this extensive body of work to create an engaging exhibition that offers a glimpse into her early development as an artist.

Cindy Neuschwander

For the exhibition In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens, We Made Armor, artist and curator Mahari Chabwera creates a sanctuary site for Black womxn artists to honor their ancestors and honor and care for themselves, a safe place to make and show work, to be vulnerable, to be glorious, to heal, to grow, to dream. Mahari has gathered a group of 6 Black womxn artists who are each exploring the tension between protection and vulnerability, who are embracing the opportunity to be seen as artists in this cultural moment while also being thoughtful about what is seen and who will control those images. In this freedom-sharing, sanctuary-making exhibition, Mahari Chabwera shows that art as liberatory, magic medicine-making is a way to mend trauma and replace it with something that is rooted in freedom and an ethic of love.

In Search of Other Mothers' Gardens, We Made Armor

The exhibition Great Force, currently on view at the Institute for Contemporary Art at Virginia Commonwealth University, addresses the force of whiteness, the counter-force of black resistance, and the persistence of the color line in the United States. With new commissions and recent work by twenty-four artists, the exhibition presents painting, sculpture, photography, video, and performance that examine race in the United States. I had the opportunity to talk with the curator of Great Force, Amber Esseiva, about the show, its artists and works of art.

Great Force

In February of this year, a show, long in the making, of the work of a collective of black photographers in 1960s New York City called the Komoinge Workshop, had just opened with a joyful celebration at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. And then the world changed.  We are living with a pandemic. Our city was a center of racial justice protests that roiled our country in the wake of the killing of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and many others. And now we are on the brink of a national election that will speak to how we see ourselves as a nation.
AND YET . . . 
Kehinde Wiley’s statue, Rumors of War, stands on Arthur Ashe Boulevard. Commonwealth, an exhibition examining these very questions of who we are, how we define we the people, and how we can reimagine wealth and come together for the common good opened a few weeks ago at the ICA at VCU. Galleries around town are showing work that speaks to this moment, asks the hard questions, and holds up the mirror, as artists do. And at the VMFA, visitors can see the work of those 1960s black photographers, now through the lens of the events of the past six months.

Dr. Sarah Eckhardt, curator of the exhibition, joined me via Zoom to talk about the show.

Working Together: Louis Draper and the Kamoinge Workshop

Sarah Mizer is an artist who works in glass and on paper. In her work, she explores themes of time and fragility. Light itself is one of the materials Sarah works with, both in glass and on paper. And her beautiful gallery, Alma’s, uses the abundant light pouring in through the enormous storefront windows to great effect, showing off the beautiful things inside to their full advantage. The gallery combines handmade everyday objects and adornments with fine craft. A visit with Sarah at Alma’s is such a pleasure. Sarah is a fantastically generous tour guide for artists and works on display. She engages the visitor on a deeper level with the work every time, and here she takes us on a tour of her latest exhibition, In Season. This show celebrates food. Each of the artists uses food imagery as a tool for communicating more deeply with the viewer. It is a funny, gorgeous, exquisitely crafted and profound show.

In Season

LookSEE is an online forum dedicated to the visual arts in Richmond,Virginia. We aim to inspire the art curious with a window into artistic process, work, and philosophy. Paige Goodpasture hosts the LookSEE podcast and is a freelance audio producer, an art lover, and a lifelong Richmonder. Her favorite place to be is in a museum. A close second is a bookstore.

LookSEE

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