With classes and camps canceled, VisArts sold a variety of "Take + Make" projects, such as this landscape drawing kit.
You don’t always know the right thing to do, but when the Visual Arts Center of Richmond temporarily closed its doors on March 13 to help slow the spread of COVID-19, there was no question that what we were doing was right. We naively expected to be shuttered for a few weeks and thought we would be back in time for summer camp to open our studios to the more than 2,000 kids we were expecting from June through September.
Summer is the best time of the year at VisArts. We devote our entire 30,000-square-foot facility to kids ages 5-14 who work with the best teaching artists in the city. We don’t dumb down our classes for young artists. They are in our wood shop making full-size go-karts on the table saw, in the darkroom developing film and watching clay fly as they learn to center their first pot on the wheel. There is hilarity, frustration, learning and a lot of larger-than-life papier-mache hamburgers that go home in the arms of parents at the end of the week. But this year, our team made the heartbreaking decision to cancel on-site summer camps.
Making art always involves growth, and sharing that work always involves connection.
VisArts hires more than 200 artists each year to teach over 1,000 classes in 17 professional art-making studios. We are the largest nonuniversity arts program in Virginia. Our teachers form an impressive collection of professional artists, and the fact that Richmond can sustain this type of teaching staff makes it an incredible creative community.
When I moved to Richmond from Washington, D.C., almost five years ago, I did it specifically to live in a city that was rich with artists, a city that was building the framework for these artists to have sustainable careers.
VisArts held online family studio classes in the spring.
I know the impact and value creative thinking can have on a community. These past few months of social distancing have become a painful reminder that creative thinking and work don't happen in isolation. Creativity happens in conversation, it happens in proximity to others who are also looking for ways to express their ideas, find new solutions, work out frustrations and sometimes simply meditate on a lump of clay spinning on a wheel in order to heal a bit.
Many of us want to know how something is made so we can go on to make it better, to find a way to express an idea or a feeling. We want to be stronger communicators and to take whatever time we can spare to look long and slow at the world around us so that we don’t miss critical details that are keeping us from understanding one another. That is the work and power of art. Yes, painting and sculptures and clay pots may seem like luxuries when we are grappling with so much these days. But I would argue that in this environment, art is more necessary and critical than ever. I believe the process of making art always involves growth, and sharing that work always involves connection. It’s the latter part of this that VisArts is focused on right now.
This spring, we experienced the unimaginable consequences of living through a global pandemic. As spring turned to summer, we processed the pain of the senseless murders of George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, Elijah McClain and countless other Black Americans. We are retelling the complicated histories of our city, and we are all looking for a way forward that is just and equitable. These challenges aren’t solved alone, nor are they solved without introspection, critical thinking and creative solutions. The way through or beyond this will not be easy, but I am hopeful because we live in a city that supports artists who understand and will help in this difficult work.
For the foreseeable future VisArts has moved a lot of our classes online, as we slowly open our studios and get students and teachers working side by side in the safest ways possible. We are currently offering at-home camps for families. We are finding ways to keep artists working and our students creating. We are also taking this time to look at ourselves as an organization and all the ways we reach the community. We are considering how we can be a more accessible and equitable organization to all Richmonders desiring creative expression and about how best to carry out our vision statement: Art for everyone. Creativity for life.
Stefanie Fedor is the executive director of the Visual Arts Center of Richmond, and she has over 25 years of experience in visual arts programming. She holds a BFA in studio art from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and an MA in visual arts administration from New York University.
