Wigfall holding a woodblock at Yale University studio, circa 1954, gelatin silver print, Benjamin L. Wigfall Artist Archives
Benjamin Wigfall, born in Richmond and raised in Church Hill, might be one of the best Virginia artists you’ve never heard of. The Virginia Museum of Fine Arts hopes to change that with a new exhibition dedicated to Wigfall’s creations and his desire to encourage art-making centered in community.
“When you look at his work — it’s such a beautiful body of work — you can’t believe he’s not better-known,” says Sarah Eckhardt, associate curator of modern and contemporary art at the museum and a co-curator of the exhibition. “We want Virginia to claim him.”
Born in 1930, Wigfall was celebrated in Virginia in the 1950s, earning a fellowship at the VMFA while he was a student at Hampton Institute (now Hampton University). During that fellowship, he designed posters for the museum’s traveling exhibitions and was asked by former VMFA director Leslie Cheek to design the museum’s 1958 Christmas card — an honor offered to a different Virginia artist every year. He later earned an MFA from Yale University and returned to Hampton to teach. In 1963, Wigfall joined the faculty of the State University of New York at New Paltz as a printmaking professor.
In the 1970s, Wigfall made what Eckhardt calls a “radical shift” from exhibiting his works in galleries to showing others — particularly youth — how to make their own art. Creating a studio in an abandoned mule barn in Kingston, New York, Wigfall welcomed youth from the predominantly Black neighborhood to learn about printmaking, photography, poetry and how to gather oral histories.
“He was making art that was relevant in a particular community and having that community participate by seeing the work and inspiring the work,” Eckhardt says. “Now, we call that social practice art.”
“Untitled” (Christmas card design), 1958, by Benjamin Wigfall, opaque watercolor on wove paper
The exhibition, “Benjamin Wigfall and Communications Village,” opened last month at the VMFA and will remain on display through Sept. 10. It includes nearly 50 of Wigfall’s pieces, many video recordings and a printmaking display that immerses visitors into the life and legacy of the Richmond native. When the exhibition debuted at SUNY-New Paltz’s Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art, Eckhardt was able to interview six adults who had worked with Wigfall in their teen years. “They so eloquently talked about what his mentorship meant,” she says. “He helped them to see differently, to see what was around them differently. [Two men] talked about how much they learned about life as they worked as his printmaking [apprentices].
“Wigfall’s message was that you don’t have to leave your neighborhood to make art,” Eckhardt adds. “It’s all about what you see and what you do, [celebrating] the nobility of ordinary things.”
