Come experience a unique photographic journey through the beautifully decaying rural places within our state with which so many Virginians have become fascinated. Photographer John Plashal has commemorated these abandoned gems by capturing their beauty and delivering them to you in a presentation full of powerful imagery and emotional stories. Experience the “unseen” side of Virginia with all of the houses, churches, schools, asylums, diners and secret societies that have been “frozen in time” and now documented and photographed in Mr. Plashal’s coffee table book titled “A Beautifully Broken Virginia”. This talk is sure to satisfy your curiosities and captivate your imagination with exploration tips and photography advice.
” Appreciate them now…..for soon they will be gone…..but still they stand…….beautiful…….but broken.”
The artist Edward Beyer came to the U.S. from Germany after the Revolution of 1848. For several years Beyer, a graduate of the Düsseldorf Academy, traveled around the northeast U.S. and Ohio, sketching, painting oil landscapes, and exhibiting a moving panorama. In the mid-1850s he traveled to Virginia where he made panoramic oils in the western part of the state. For a number of towns Beyer’s view remains the best single historical representation. In 1857-58 he produced Album of Virginia, a portfolio of 41 lithographic views. In the Album, especially, Beyer’s vision was that of a European liberal who saw the world as a Jeffersonian idealist.
History begins with the cities of ancient Sumer, in southern Iraq; it is here that writing was first invented. But this first writing was used almost exclusively to record financial transactions; and so the visual arts, developed into a disciplined system to promote the power of the rulers of early Mesopotamia, give us access to the beliefs and values would not be put down in writing for many years to come. These rulers needed to record their military victories and their devotion to their gods, of whom they were mortally afraid. Here we see the first narrative images, of battles and of religious ritual; and we find images of the priestly kings and their ruling elite, desperate to continuously assure the deity of their unflinching service; and of the megalomania of these rulers, filling their burials with remarkable wealth and human sacrifice. This lecture will explore the ways in which visual arts of the first civilization give us insights into religion and politics that are almost totally absent from the written record.
In the middle of the 18th Dynasty, in the period of Egypt’s New Kingdom, a young pharaoh suddenly changed his name to Helper of the Sun, closed the great temples, moved the country’s capital, and declared worship of the Aten, the disc of the Sun, to be the sole state religion. To promote this radical new order, an astonishing new system of visual art was formulated, apparently at Akenaten’s personal direction, to distinguish the ruler and his family from all that had gone before. Far from simply being a form of caricature used for propaganda, art of the Amarna period (named after the location of his new capital) is some of the most refined in all of Egyptian history. In this lecture we will see the grotesque exaggeration of the king’s physical features, contrasting with the beauty of his queen Nefertiti, the role played by their children in public life, and the survival of Akenaten’s new art forms after the old ways were established under his son, Tutankhamen.
Soon after ascending the throne at age 13, King Louis XV of France decided to abandon governance in favor of a life of sensual pleasures, to be enjoyed with his wife, mistresses official and unofficial, and countless encounters with young adventuresses brought to him from many parts of his country. The formalities and complexities of love, legitimate and otherwise, among the aristocracy were brilliantly reflected in the works of the three greatest painters of the 18th century. Antoine Watteau, a Fleming whose success caused him to be ‘acclaimed’ to membership in the Royal Academy, portrayed an idealized and lyrical vision is bucolic settings, called the fête gallante; François Boucher, a bourgeois Parisian who had nearly every official honor bestowed upon him, painted the frank and unrestrained hedonism of his time; and Honoré Fragonard, from Grasse in the South, turned his back entirely on the public art establishment, painting risqué scenes of contemporary love exclusively for private clients. In this lecture we will introduce these great formulators of the rococo style, and investigate the meanings and public reception of their work for a society approaching its doom.
We see Greek vases standing in quiet dignity in museum galleries, their lovely shapes designed for service and display. But more than any other art form, the decorations on them give us a most vivid insight into the lives and character of the ancient Greeks. Painted with the greatest artistry, often by artists who signed their work and even boasted about their talent, they show us an energetic, rowdy people given to surprising extremes, in subjects taken sometimes from literature and at other times from daily life. We see episodes of abandoned revelry celebrated alongside the brutalities of warfare; athletes, artists, work and sex are seen along with myths and jokes, magical spells and events that we just cannot understand. This lecture will also introduce the forms of Greek vases and their functions, which often relate to the decorations of these wonderful art objects; and we will see why no one should want to pass by a display of Greek vases ever again.
Biology, art and activism merge in this presentation. Dawn Flores, Creative Director for The Forest Project, tells the story of how she collaborated with other artists to document a 60-acre urban forest clear-cut for development. Dawn has created over 1,000 fabric patterns from photographs she took, of the now clear-cut property, and works with quiltmakers to sew quilts commemorating what was lost. Her slide presentation includes detailed information about designing fabric on Spoonflower, a web site dedicate to creating fabric for designers. There will be time for a question and answer period and opportunity to view fabric samples and quilts made for The Forest Project.
Duration: 2 hours
Audience: middle school, high school, and adult
The Paris Exposition of 1900 was a pivotal moment for Western art and design. Explore artists and designers who were and who weren’t included at the exhibition and the works of art that dazzled and dismayed critics and the public.
Although activists often pinpoint its genesis in the 1960s, the environmental movement in the United States has roots in 19th-century American landscape painting. Beginning with the Hudson River School, artists, predominately painters, have depicted the environment as an allusion to such disparate ideologies as manifest destiny, environmental concerns, gendered places, or literary devices. Looking at specific examples from the VMFA’s permanent collection, we will consider works by 19th century painters, including Thomas Cole, Albert Bierstadt, and Frederick Church, 20th century painters, such as Thomas Hart Benton, Winslow Homer, and Childe Hassam, and 21st-century artists, including Sally Mann, Julie Mehretu, and Dean Byington.
A nearly lifelong resident of Rockbridge County, Virginia, photographer and writer Sally Mann developed her first photograph in April 1969. During the 1970s, Mann took photographs of women, the Virginia countryside, still lives, and nudes. In 1983, Mann turned her camera almost exclusively to adolescent girls and then began taking photographs of her own children in 1984. Beginning in 1993, Mann returned to making landscape photographs, which she has continued to make into the present. In 2018, the National Gallery of Art presents a traveling retrospective, Sally Mann: A Thousand Crossings, which will include new portraits, still lifes, and landscapes. This lecture will provide an overview of Mann’s career by focusing on her photographic processes, influences, and transitions while highlighting her major works.