Photo courtesy Virginia Museum of Fine Arts
On view at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts through April 26, Annabeth Rosen’s “Fables” came here to complement the anticipated conference of the National Council on Education for the Ceramic Arts. But the 54th iteration scheduled for Richmond in March of last year fell to COVID-19 restrictions, while Rosen’s grand abstract works remain. These are monuments derived from heaps of experience, intermixed with components of the natural world and the detritus of the human-made. They may resemble the guts of an organic machine.
New York Times critic Ken Johnson observed the work’s “weighty, slightly menacing muscularity” as a departure from ceramics’ traditional skilled refinement. If you’ve been putting off a visit, mask up and allow Rosen’s work to give you a world unlike this one.
Free. vmfa.museum