Our artists, juror, volunteers, and Gallery staff have been hard at work installing the July exhibits: “Quietly Cutting Through” by Shiho Rice and “Gatherings,” the juried group exhibit. Now it’s your turn to attend a “gathering” — tonight at 6:30, you can come to the opening reception to enjoy some refreshments and meet the artists!
“Gatherings” proved an inspirational theme for our artists, who tell stories of the relationships between people, animals, objects, and shapes. Juror Jennifer Lindsay’s curatorial projects are collaborative artworks, and she brought the same sensibility to the jurying process.
“Quietly Cutting Through” is more of a solitary pursuit, the story of an artist, her knife, and lots and lots of patience. Kirié is the art of cutting a single sheet of paper into an image: in Rice’s case, a series of dreamlike scenes inspired by her childhood. Every piece you see here started as just that — a single piece of paper:
If you’re curious how that happens, we’ll have more for you in a future blog post. For now, enjoy these exhibits!
If you happened to be in the gallery around midday last Monday, you might have wondered what was going on in the solo gallery, where eight people were sitting around enjoying a lively discussion. They were members of The Art League book club, which meets about every six weeks and is organized by outgoing gallery director Rose O’Donnell.
chelons of donors, collectors, curators, politicians, etc. who make up the Met elite.
Montebello’s book doesn’t focus on the Met at all, but rather is a compilation of his commentaries on art in various collections — interesting, but lacking structure and narrative flow. Some of us also read Museum: Behind the Scenes at the Metropolitan Museum of Art by Danny Danziger (Viking, 2007), a more down to earth and personal view of the Met through interviews with its employees. All in all we had an interesting conversation about the books, the Met, and art museums in general.
The Scottish Walker, representing the annual parade that celebrates the founding of the city by Scottish merchants in 1749;
The Tobacco Farmer representing the time when Alexandria was a tobacco trading post authorized by the British Crown in the 18th century;
The “Good Wife,” a designation common by the mid-seventeenth century in Virginia as lawmakers began to use ideas about gender and race to codify two distinct roles for Virginia women: the so-called “goodwife”, typically free and white, who performed domestic work in her home and raised her children, and the agricultural laborer, typically enslaved and black;
The Field Hands, representing the slavery that existed in all the British American colonies. Africans were brought to America to work, mainly in agriculture. In Virginia, most slaves worked in tobacco fields. When the tobacco farms started to fail in the mid 19th century, the slaves were exported to the cotton plantations in Louisiana and the deep south;
The Town Crier, with ceremonial duties that included reading proclamations, announcing upcoming events, and acting as master of ceremonies at special events. One of the earliest Alexandria town criers on record is Peter Logan, an African American man who served as the town crier and on holidays as the town piper in the early 19th century;
The Night Watchman, and constables were employed by the city since 1795 up until the Alexandria Police Department was founded in 1870;
The Railway Engineer: Potomac Yard in its heyday was one of the busiest rail yards in the Eastern United States, processing thousands of cars daily. The site reached capacity in 1937. The booming “Pot Yard” attracted thousands of workers, who largely settled in the areas of Del Ray and St. Elmo;
And so on up to the Irish Dancer, a later addition to the King Street parades celebrating St. Patrick’s Day and the Irish contribution to Alexandria’s history.
