Join the ICA at VCU for the opening of The Otolith Group: Xenogenesis and to explore its themes and influences in a talk with artists Anjalika Sagar and Kodwo Eshun of The Otolith Group. The evening concludes with NONplus, a performance by NON Worldwide. This international community of artists from the African diaspora uses music and technology to fight colonial trauma.
The exhibition is organized by the Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, the Netherlands. The ICA is the only United States stop on its international tour.

Join artist Paul Rucker for a discussion of his multidisciplinary practice as a visual artist, composer, and musician. He combines media, live performance, sound, original compositions, and visual art to explore issues related to mass incarceration, racially motivated violence, and the continued impact of policies that sustain inequity.
To describe the video installation Proliferation (pictured here), which VMFA acquired in 2018, Rucker states, "Art can tell stories. For years I would talk about injustice by reciting numbers and statistics. When you say, 'we have over 2.3 million people in prison,' it’s too large a number to comprehend. During a residence around prison issues at the Blue Mountain Center in New York, I found some maps that I felt could help tell the story. This project shows the proliferation of the US prison system from a celestial point of view. Using different colors to indicate different eras, the viewer can clearly see the astonishing growth of this system over time."
Rucker was recently announced as a Ted Fellow and featured on PBS NewsHour.

On Saturday, February 15, 2020, from 7 to 10 pm, 1708 Gallery will present its annual art acution, CABIN FEVER. The annual art auction provides significant support for 1708's exhibitions and programs. Join the party and bid on artwork by the region's best emerging and established artists! 

CABIN FEVER will include Live and Silent Art Auctions with works by an outstanding group of artists. The Live Auction artwork will be on view at 1708 Gallery from Tuesday, January 21 through the night of the auction on Saturday, February 15. The Silent Auction artwork will be displayed in the space next door at our neighbors, Black Iris, and can be viewed by appointment prior to the auction.

Sound artist Marcus Fischer discusses installation and sound composition with a focus on his work in the 2019 Whitney Biennial, followed by an improvised performance using analog and digital processes.

Fischer is a musician and interdisciplinary artist based in Portland, Oregon. His work typically centers around memory, geography and the manipulation of physical audio-recording mediums. He builds soundscapes from field recordings, found objects and chance, along with tape loops and live instrumentation, to create immersive sonic environments. These sounds have found their way into multimedia installations, short films and the award-winning public radio program Radiolab.

This talk by Guadalupe Maravilla is dedicated to his installation Disease Thrower. The ICA’s second Provocations commission, the project is on view through July 1. Maravilla will explore how drawing, sculpture, performance and community engagement become vehicles for exploring his own experiences with illness and migration, as well as the anxieties experienced by undocumented peoples.

Maravilla is an assistant professor at Virginia Commonwealth University’s School of the Arts in the Department of Sculpture and Extended Media. Provocations: Guadalupe Maravilla is his second solo museum show in the United States.

Join 1708 Gallery for its 10th annual Monster Drawing Rally. Originally conceived by Southern Exposure in San Francisco, Monster Drawing Rally is a live art event featuring approximately 60 artists. The event consists of 3 one-hour shifts with up to 20 artists working simultaneously each hour. Once an artist completes a drawing, it will be hung on the wall for viewing. Visitors may purchase completed works of art for $65 each.

Part performance, part art-bazaar, part party, Monster Drawing Rally offers Richmonders the rare opportunity to watch their favorite local artists at work. Monster Drawing Rally is also a fundraiser that raises general operating support for 1708 Gallery. Drawings sold during the event are a full donation to 1708 Gallery.

The ICA, VCUarts Department of Painting and Printmaking, and VCU’s Department of Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies, are proud to partner with Visual AIDS for the thirtieth annual Day With(out) Art by presenting STILL BEGINNING, a program of seven newly commissioned videos responding to the ongoing HIV/AIDS epidemic by Shanti Avirgan, Nguyen Tan Hoang, Carl George, Viva Ruiz, Iman Shervington, Jack Waters/Victor F.M. Torres, and Derrick Woods-Morrow.

OPENING RECEPTION AND ARTISTS TALK: Friday, November 15, 5:30-8pm

VisArts presents "walking with," an exhibition of work by Lily Cox-Richard and Michael Jevon Demps. The art in this exhibition was made in response to, and with materials from, the artists’ walks in Richmond. As part of an ongoing project, the artists and their collaborators confront and honor place through walking, listening and making. Central to walking with is an interactive rock tumbler – an instrument and a time machine – that uses river water, silt and local clay to smooth and polish gravel and riprap.The exhibition grapples with questions of value, pace, attention and care. With urgency and wonder, this show considers what we can carry together, who we walk with and how.

Join the Valentine’s Natalie L. Klaus Curator of Costumes and Textiles, Kristen E. Stewart, and Richmond fiber artist Nastassja Swift for an evening of performance and discussion.

Swift will present a dance performance featuring her larger than life wool masks, followed by a mini-documentary exploring her project “Remembering Her Homecoming,” a collaborative work that features Black women and girls as they dance, sing and shape an experience of storytelling and history, using some of Richmond’s racially historic spaces as a backdrop.

Following the performance and screening, a conversation between the artist and Stewart will explore the themes of claiming, interpreting, and sharing identity in Swift’s work and in the Valentine’s exhibition Dressing Identity: Caring for Collections and Understanding Ourselves.

The Institute for Contemporary Art at Virginia Commonwealth University invites you to an opening ceremony for Provocations: Guadalupe Maravilla. The exhibition begins with an overnight opening performance which includes the activation of ceremonial gongs, soothing teas, and an overnight sound bath. Please join for any part of the event, or immerse yourself in the experience and stay overnight at the ICA.

Reception | 6 pm Tea ceremony | 8 pm Healing Gong Sound Bath | 10 pm–6 am Tea | 6 am

The second commission in the ICA’s Provocations series will be created by Guadalupe Maravilla, an artist who, at age eight, immigrated alone to the United States from El Salvador in order to escape the Salvadoran Civil War. Combining drawing, sculpture, and performance, Maravilla’s installation, Disease Thrower, draws on his own experiences with illness, migration, and the anxieties experienced by undocumented peoples. For this opening ceremony and throughout the exhibition’s run, the ICA’s True Farr Luck Gallery will be transformed into a space of ritual, dialogue, hospitality, and healing.

“Please recycle this bag.”
“Please reuse this bag.”
“Get an enviro-credit of 10 cents by refusing a new plastic bag.”
Feel good about yourself and these actions knowing that you are helping our planet. The devastating truth, however, is far darker and more pessimistic. Under 10% of what is put in recycling bins across this country is actually recycled. "Have A Nice Day" is an investigation of one artists curiosity to collaborate with and ultimately make friends with the insidious yet exceedingly useful material: plastic.

In conjunction with 1708 Gallery’s solo exhibition of Jesse Chun: enunciating silence and
Jesse Chun is an interdisciplinary artist based in New York. Chun works with found language, documents, and bureaucracies to consider new poetics of legibility, diaspora, and the untranslatable.

Sponsored by the VCU department of Sculpture + Extended Media and 1708 Gallery

Dr. Leo Mazow, the Louise B. and J. Harwood Cochrane Curator of American Art for VMFA and curator of Edward Hopper and the American Hotel will provide an overview of the special exhibition.

Check in to Edward Hopper’s hotels, motels, tourist homes, and boarding houses in this first investigation of the celebrated artist’s images of hospitality settings. Culturally probing and formally beguiling, the selected paintings and works on paper explore America’s hotel consciousness and cultural landscape in the early to mid-20th century. At VMFA, the exhibition’s only East Coast venue, simulated spaces and other immersive design elements create a one-of-a-kind art experience. Rarely seen diaries and postcards provide personal travelogues, as told by the artist’s wife, Josephine.

In Fire on World, 2019 Guggenheim Fellowship recipient Carmen Winant creates a space for the emergence of latent meaning(s) within carefully curated archives of historical imagery.

Join the ICA at VCU for a special First Friday, featuring the opening of its newest exhibition, Great Force, curated by Amber Esseiva. Through painting, sculpture, photography, video, and performance, Great Force examines the reality of race in the United States with new commissions and recent work by an intergenerational group of 24 established and emerging artists. Live window painting by artist Tomashi Jackson. Provocations performance by Chino Amobi. DJ Michael Demps, refreshments, and cash bar.

Join Studio Two Three for their annual auction (and party of the year) on Saturday, September 28, 2019 in celebration of Studio Two Three’s tenth year. Come for amazing art made by local rockstars, local drinks and eats and some light debauchery in true Warhol Factory style to raise some money for Studio Two Three and the 100+ Richmond artists who call the studio their creative home.

Alma's featured artist, Kiara Pelissier will be giving an artist talk on Thursday, September 26 from 6-8 pm. Please join this fun and casual evening! Snacks and drinks provided.

Kiara Pelissier is the youngest in a family of four consecutive generations of artists. She earned a Bachelors degree from the Cleveland Institute of Art and her Masters from VCUarts. She has taught glassblowing at VCU, Penland School of Crafts in North Carolina, and Haystack Mountain School of Crafts in Maine. In addition to numerous public and private collections, Kiara's work is in the collection of the Museum of American Glass, in New Jersey.

Join VMFA for an evening of music, art and film with visual and musical artist Lonnie Holley. The program will open with a short film, also Holley’s directorial debut, titled I Snuck Off the Slave Ship (19 min.), which premiered at Sundance Film Festival in 2018. Afterwards, Holley will discuss his life, work and inspiration for the film through conversation and live performance with his band. This program is inspired by the special exhibition, Cosmologies from the Tree of Life: Art from the African American South, which features two of Holley’s sculptural works.

glave kocen gallery presents a group exhibition featuring figurative and portraiture work rendered in a myriad of styles.

glave kocen gallery presents an exhibition of work by Benjamin Frey, uniquely layered drawings over antique book pages whisking together nostalgia, childhood, and curiosity.

Artwork featured in this exhibit was created by students in summer programs across Richmond and showcases their voices through masks, spirit animals, self-portraits and so much more. Join Art 180 to LISTEN to what they are saying.

Shockoe Artspace is pleased to present Pentimento by Frank Phillips, opening September 6, 6-9p.
The same night, Shockoe Artspace Studios, directly across the street from the main gallery, The Don Childress Collection will be on display. This is ONE NIGHT ONLY.

ARTIST TALK AND RECEPTION: Friday, September 6, 5:30-8pm

“Color Cargo” examines the role of wood in historical and contemporary commercial transport—from the mid-Atlantic slave trade to e-commerce—and the subjective power of color as a tool for assigning value, in order to create a deceptively appealing space for confronting bias and dehumanization in contemporary society.
Damien Davis is a New York-based artist who explores historical representations of blackness by unpacking the visual language of various cultures and to question how these societies code and decode representations of race.

Candela Books + Gallery is pleased to present two solo exhibitions of new works by David Emitt Adams and Justin James Reed. Both exhibitions will open on Friday, September 6th and will be on view through Sunday, October 27th. Please join Candela for an opening reception and artist talks on Thursday, September 5th, from 5- 8 pm.