The Virginia Museum of Fine Arts presents Home/Grown: Photographs by Susan Worsham and Brian Palmer. The exhibition showcases photography by two contemporary Richmond-based artists whose works explore the nexus of place, memory, death, and healing.
The photographs by Worsham are from her series Bittersweet on Bostwick Lane. In these images that explore loss and redemption, the artist attempts to come to terms with her brother Russell’s suicide. After that devastating loss, Worsham developed a close relationship with Margaret Daniel, an elderly neighbor whose touching memories of Russell and insights into life and death served as poetic inspiration for the artist’s photographs of children, landscapes, and still lifes.
Journalist and photographer Brian Palmer first traveled to Virginia a decade ago when he came across a headstone for his great-grandfather Mat Palmer, who had been born into slavery and fought for the Union Army during the Civil War. After moving to Virginia, Palmer and his wife and collaborator, Erin Hollaway Palmer, joined volunteer efforts to reclaim Henrico’s East End Cemetery, one of numerous neglected Black cemeteries in the area. The cemetery and those who tend to it are evocatively presented in these images.
This exhibition, curated by Dr. Sarah Kennel, VMFA’s Aaron Siskind Curator of Photography and Director of the Raysor Center for Works on Paper, contemplates the intersecting themes of these poignant images and the stories they represent.
ABOVE Untitled (East End Cemetery), 2015, Brian Palmer (American, born 1964), archival pigment print. National Endowment for the Arts Fund for American Art, 2020.73. © Brian Palmer
TOP OF PAGE Georgia with Hibiscus moscheutos (Rose Mallow) (detail), 2018, Susan Worsham (American, born 1969), inkjet print. Courtesy the artist and Candela Books + Gallery. © Susan Worsham