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A piece from Aimee Joyaux's "City Lots" collection; her new collection, "Red Rover (Red Rover)," will be displayed at Quirk Gallery Sept. 7-Oct. 15. (Image courtesy Aimee Joyaux)
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"Too Big to Fail," 15.5 inches by 21.5 inches, ledger paper, oil stick, pencil, wax crayon, oil pastel, shellac, acrylic paint, 2016-17 (Image courtesy Aimee Joyaux)
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"My My My," 15.5 inches by 21.5 inches, ledger paper, oil stick, pencil, wax crayon, oil pastel, shellac, acrylic paint, 2016-17 (Image courtesy Aimee Joyaux)
Almost 80 years ago, then-General Motors Director John Lee Pratt donated 250 shares of stock in his prized car company to the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. Since then, that money has helped support Virginia artists, and some of the current benefactors will display their work this fall.
Jenny Harding, program director for the VMFA’s lauded fellowship program, says it distributes more than $150,000 a year to professional and student artists. What makes the program unique is its no-strings-attached nature.
“Students don’t have to spend it on tuition, pros don’t have to invest in a special project,” she says, noting that the application progress is one of the least stringent she’s aware of.
The nature of that process has yielded much interest. For the 2017-18 fellowship session, Harding sorted through 815 applications before passing them off to the juror, Christopher Bedford, director of the Baltimore Museum of Art.
While Harding’s involvement has been integral since she took the job three years ago, she says jurors change every year, and their identity is kept secret until the winners of the fellowship are announced. This means applicants have little precedent on which to base their success or failure from year to year.
“We’ve had artists apply for 20 years before getting in,” Harding says.
Aimee Joyaux
Among those who tried, failed and eventually succeeded is Petersburg-based artist Aimee Joyaux.
Originally from Hawaii, Joyaux wasn’t exposed to the arts until her senior year of high school, but from then on she was hooked. She majored in photography and graduated from college before taking 10 years to travel and work on ski slopes across the Americas.
Eventually, though, her urge to create caught up to her. Joyaux decided to return to her art and entered a graduate program in Oregon before eventually packing up her life with her husband and moving into a cotton warehouse in Petersburg.
She “started from the bottom,” got to work refinishing the warehouse and landed a gig at the local newspaper, The Progress-Index, where she, a longtime print photographer, first tested the waters of digital photography. Before long, documenting high school sports, local events and government happenings led to, sometimes, nearly 900 photos a day.
“It was intense, and it was also an amazing way to get to know the area,” Joyaux says.
Always inquisitive, she stumbled upon a collection of discarded ledgers containing property information from the early 1900s. She’d spent seven years working with a nonprofit rehabbing low-income houses for the elderly in the area, and she noticed familiar addresses in the ledger, and names separated into “whites” and “coloreds” categories. These were clues pointing to racist practices in land and home ownership in the area, a trademark of the turn of the century in America, including Southern cities like Petersburg.
“Property … is one of the tools to discriminate,” she says, adding that black people historically have not been able to purchase homes in all neighborhoods, inhibiting their ability to accumulate wealth, “so this was a lens for me to look at those problems.”
Switching away from her usual medium of photography, Joyaux started painting as a new way to express her emotions related to the documents.
“I see the poverty in this town, and the systematic intimidation, and it frustrates me and scares me,” she says of the collection of works which came to be called “City Lots.” “It’s me trying to have a conversation … to reflect what’s going on inside me.”
“City Lots” captured the interest of Bedford, VMFA’s juror, and Joyaux was among those awarded the grant earlier this year. Now she’s looking forward to what’s next, thanks to the $8,000 that comes with the award.
Additionally, Harding says “It really helps artists to get their career going,” she says of the undergraduate-level applicants who win every year. And for the graduate and professional artists? “It opens a lot of doors for them. Galleries will contact them, maybe something even out of state will recognize them, too.”
View Joyaux’s new collection, “Red Rover (Red Rover)” when it shows at Quirk Gallery, 207 W. Broad St., from Sept. 7-Oct. 15.
Applications for the 2018-19 VMFA Fellowship are open through Nov. 3. Visit vmfa.museum/fellowships for more information and to apply.
More Visual Arts Happenings
9/1-10/21 ‘Of a Piece’
Chicago-based artist Bethany Collins melds language, race, color, drawing and translation in her works exploring racial identity and American history and culture. An artist talk and reception will be held Sept. 2, beginning at 11 a.m. 1708 Gallery, 319 W. Broad St. 1708gallery.org
9/8-30 ‘Ten:Thirty’
In celebration of its 10th anniversary, Glavé Kocen Gallery hosts an exhibition of Steven Walker’s artwork. Featuring landscapes and night scenes, the paintings’ locations may be familiar to many Richmonders, and each will incorporate the number 10 in some fashion in honor of the gallery’s birthday. Glavé Kocen Gallery, 1620 W. Main St. glavekocengallery.com
Through 10/21 ‘Four-Color Universe’
A group show curated by painter and illustrator Chris Norris will feature works from Anthony Iacono, Charlotte Rodenberg, Blade Wynne and other artists. The opening reception is Sept. 8, featuring Velocity Comics with LGBTQ graphic novels for sale. Diversity Richmond’s Iridian Gallery, 1407 Sherwood Ave. diversityrichmond.org
11/16-1/21/2018 Antique Textiles & Oriental Rugs
The Cultural Arts Center at Glen Allen will display a variety of rare handmade antique textiles and Oriental rugs featuring a diverse array of colors, materials and evolving designs. The Cultural Arts Center at Glen Allen’s Gumenick Family Gallery, 2880 Mountain Road. artsglenallen.com
—Nicole Cohen
