Arts Reviews and Events
The Art of David Rohrer: A Sense of Place
With brush and oils, David Rohrer captures place in an extraordinary way. It is in the slant of light, the play of colors, and the characters, which are houses or other structures—and occasionally human forms, that he is able, with his brushstrokes, to make you feel as if you are there.
By Charles McGuigan 02.2024
Art Classes at Studio Art 1229
Right next door to Little House Green Grocery in the heart of Bellevue there’s Studio Art 1229 which offers classes in painting, from acrylics to oils to watercolors, for beginning, intermediate, and advanced painters. The two instructors at the studio are owner Brenda Stankus, and her fellow artist Elizabeth Eubanks.
By Charles McGuigan 12.2023
Love Makes a Perfect Landing
I once read that if you're asked what made you fall in love with someone, and you immediately list some specific reasons, it's not true love. That sounds about right. True love is ineffable, right? And since it was 2:43 am and I had recently discovered Chat GPT, I had to ask it "write about how you can't write about love." No sooner had I typed that last e, than a list of pretty good reasons populated my screen scarily fast, defying its own premise, sort of.
By Anne Jones 10.2023
Northside Grille: Music to the Ears
After a twelve-year run, Shenanigans on MacArthur Avenue closed its doors for good and all on the last day of 2011, and just like that Bellevue lost its live music venue.
But now, thanks to Brett Cassis, live music has finally returned to the Northside, and in a very big way. Every Thursday through Sunday (times vary) there’s live music of every conceivable genre either inside Northside Grille or out on the Patio.
By Charles McGuigan 05.2023
Live Music at Northside Grille
On Saint Patrick’s Day the band begins playing at the stroke of nine to a house already packed to the seams. Of course this is at Northside Grille, Bellevue’s home of live music since last summer, and the band playing is appropriately enough The Ex-Patriots—Pogue-like in the Celtic punk tradition.
By Charles McGuigan 04.2023
Incanto—Words and Sculptures Coming to Lewis Ginter
“Incanto”, coming to Lewis Ginter Botanical Garden at the end of April, explores human nature, while inviting visitors into a transformational space of self-inquirty. Created from metal and words, two artists—sculptor Kate Raudenbush and poet Sha Michele—combine their creative skills in five monumental sculptures that exploring profound concepts of identity and the higher self.
04.2023
Frederick Douglass Comes To Life at the VMFA
Isaac Julien’s “Lessons of the Hour—Frederick Douglass”, now at the VMFA, could not have arrived at a more opportune moment. Consider the revisionist history Virginia’s current superintendent of public education is foisting on our youth.
By Charles McGuigan 02.2023
Storied Strings: Fascist Killers
She may have been born in Spain, but the guitar, this European immigrant, assimilated so thoroughly into the American tapestry that you’d swear she was a native daughter.
The VMFA’s latest exhibition pays homage to this stringed instrument that for the past two centuries has defined American music in all its permutations.
By Charles McGuigan 10.2022
Whistler to Cassatt: A Revolutionary Movement
It was a time not unlike other times. A time of almost climatic change, as new ideas blew away the archaic prevailing norms. Not much different than the time we now inhabit.
By Charles McGuigan 05.2022
May Art 2022
-Unstill Life At Eric Schindler
-Northside Art Show & Sale At LGRA To Benefit Feed More
-Single-Use Account At 1708 Gallery
April Art Events
-Whistler to Cassatt Opens April 16 at VMFA
-New Works by Mark Pehanich at Eric Schindler Gallery
-April Art Exhibits at the Main Richmond Public Library
04.2022
March Art Events
-Landscapes by Jason Bennett at Eric Schindler
-Artspace Satellite Exhibition at CVA / U-Turn Inc.
-March Art Exhibits at the Main Richmond Public Library
-Tsherin Sherpa: Spirits at the VMFA
-Works by Lilian Kreutzberger at 1708 Gallery
03.2022
January/ February Art Events
-David Narum Exhibit at Eric Schindler
-Recent Works by Steven Roebuck at ADA
-Art Exhibits at the Main Richmond Public Library
-Japanese Woodblock Prints by Kawase Hasui at VMFA
01.2022
Louise Kirchen’s Debut CD “The Waiting Game”
Even though it took Louise Kirchen a lifetime to come out with her first cd, “The Waiting Game”, it would be all wrong to call her a late bloomer. She's been writing and singing good old country songs since her early days at 1960's Berkeley, smack dab in the center of the Summer of Love and witness to the many watershed musical events that defined a generation.
By Anne Jones 12.2021
November Art Events
-The Northside Painters’ 4th Annual Art Show and Sale
-New Works by Blythe King At Eric Schindler Gallery
-Set It Off at 1708 Gallery and ICA
-Art Exhibits at the Main Richmond Public Library
-43rd Street Gallery 36th Annual Holiday Open House
11.2021
Recent Works by Matt Lively and Ed Trask Coming to VisArts
The Visual Arts Center of Richmond and Glave Kocen Consulting present an exhibition of work by Matt Lively and Ed Trask titled “Blip of the Moment”. This joint show will open on September 17, with a public reception from 5 till 8 pm in the outdoor Cabell Courtyard at VisArts. Artist talks begin at 6 pm. The exhibition will be on view at the Visual Arts Center of Richmond’s True F. Luck Gallery until October 24. Masks are required inside the building.
09.2021
Art Returns to the Main Richmond Public Library
Art returns to the Richmond Public library after a 19-month long hiatus. This September, the galleries at the Main Public Library will unveil the works of a number of Richmond artists.
08.2021
World in a Zip Code At Library of Virginia
Columbia Pike: Through the Lens of Community, a unique exhibition of photographs at the Library of Virginia, celebrates the extraordinary cultural diversity found within a single community in Northern Virginia.
08.2021
New Northside Mural: What’s Love Got to Do with It?
What’s not to love about Northside?
Absolutely nothing.
But there’s a lot to love about it.
So much in fact that it’s going to be hard to decide exactly what will make up the Northside Love Mural to be painted on the side of the old dry cleaners building at the southwest corner of Brook Road and Bellevue Avenue.
By Charles McGuigan 07.2021
Through A Glass Clearly: Reflections and Distortions
John Crutchfield, owner of Artemis Gallery, recently purchased a number of new Richard Lee Bland pieces for his gallery’s permanent collection. It’s a totally different direction for Richard who has been an integral part of the Richmond art scene since the 1970s and is known for his representational oil on canvas paintings. “The thing I find unusual is the way the reflected light off these 1800 window panes creates an abstract image as if it were painted by a modernist,” John said.
By Charles McGuigan 06.2021
The Dirty South: Baptism by Sight and Sound
Total immersion is the best sort of baptism: every pore, every follicle, every pathway to your senses, caressed or assaulted, by water, by fire, or, in the case of the VMFA’s latest installation, by sight and by sound.
By Charles McGuigan 06.2021
A New Dawn For Hopewell
Back in early May, Northside artist Nico Cathcart began painting a massive mural on the side of Butterworth Lofts at 245 East Broadway in downtown Hopewell. It would strive to capture the real story of this small city that sits at the confluence of the James and Appomattox Rivers, a city that thrived and then went bust on several occasions, a city at one time called the “Wonder City”.
By Charles McGuigan 06.2021
Virginia Arcadia: The Natural Bridge in American Art
VMFA presents Virginia Arcadia: The Natural Bridge in American Art. Explore the artistic legacy of an iconic natural wonder. Depicted and celebrated for centuries, the Natural Bridge is the Shenandoah Valley’s breathtaking centerpiece—a towering, primeval witness to human history and timeless muse.
New Work by Nicole Renee Randall at Eric Schindler Gallery
Among Women, an exhibit of new works by Nicole Renee Randall, will be featured through April 3 at Eric Schindler Gallery. In an interview with Nicole three years ago, the artist said this: “Art is the intersection of craft and idea.
Recent Paintings by R. Sawan White
R. Sawan was a provost scholar at Virginia Commonwealth University and earned a first degree in printmaking at in the Midlands of England. She has taken her love of process and technique found in etching and applied it to her current painting work.
11.2020
Visual Art Studio is Now Open
Anne’s Visual Art Studio will be open to the public from 1 till 3 pm every Thursday and Friday through December 18.
11.2020
Bringing the War Horse Back to the Front
After standing sentry for more than twenty years near the front entrance of the Virginia Museum of History and Culture (formerly the Virginia Historical Society), “The War Horse”, a bronze sculpture, was unceremoniously removed from its perch last May.
By Charles McGuigan 03.2020
The Kamoinge Workshop: Shooting with your Heart
Justice can be poetic. At times, ironically fitting in the extreme.
By Charles McGuigan 05.2020
Hamilton and Rumors of War: Bending the Arc
HAMILTON, the musical, which played at Altria Theatre through December 8, was the perfect entrée to serve up with the impeachment hearings. It was, after all, Alexander Hamilton who forged, in the fiery furnace of his brain, the tools to remove a wannabe autocrat from office.
01.2020
The Taters' New "Shiny & Brite" CD Captures the Spirit of the Holidays
How do you like your holiday music? Exactly what do you want in a Christmas song, anyway? Do you want it jingly and happy, or pretty and reverent and maybe a little heart-breaking? Or maybe it's rockabilly you crave, with some old-time country. Is Elvis your reason for the season? Do you want it all bluesy and melancholy?
By Anne Jones 12.2019
Kehinde Wiley’s Rumors of War Inspired by Confederate Monument
Come December 10 Richmond will finally have a monument we can all be proud of. Rumors of War, a gargantuan statue unveiled last month in New York’s Times Square, will find its permanent home late this fall in front of the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts on Arthur Ashe Boulevard.
Unlike many of the other equestrian statues in Richmond that celebrate white men who tried to destroy our Republic while preserving the evil enslavement of human beings of color, this new monument describes a contemporary African-American man proudly mounted on a steed.
By Charles McGuigan 12.2019
Edward Hopper and the American Hotel Opens at the VMFA October 26
Edward Harper, unlike any other American artist, captured on canvas the true nature of our national psyche. That rootlessness. That constant search for sense of place. That utter and final aloneness. His backdrops are often as stark and spare as a Raymond Caver short story, and peopled with just a few characters, but, more often than not, just one.
By Charles McGuigan 10.2019
