Guided Tour of Torggler Fine Arts Center and time to explore current exhibitions
Presentation Location
Torggler Fine Arts Center
Document Type
Event
Start Date
15-3-2024 3:45 PM
End Date
15-3-2024 4:45 PM
Description
Current exhibitions at the Torggler Fine Arts Center:
Benjamin Wigfall and Communications Village - Explore the life and legacy of Richmond native Benjamin Wigfall (1930–2017) — artist, educator, and champion of arts equity. This exhibition, the first retrospective of Wigfall’s pioneering career, highlights the period from his early years in Virginia in the 1950s to his founding of Communications Village, a community art space in Kingston, New York, in the 1970s. Wigfall’s roots in Richmond and in Hampton, his stellar artistic achievements, and his lifelong commitment to building community are topics addressed in the exhibition, which paints an intimate portrait of his artwork, impact, and legacy. From Richmond, where his passion for artmaking began, to his pursuit of higher education at Hampton University and Yale, to his professorship at State University of New York (SUNY), 12 New Paltz, Wigfall recognized inequities and dedicated his life to providing access and opportunity. Wigfall’s experience at Hampton University, where he enrolled in 1949, was critical to his career. He graduated with a degree in art education in 1953 and went on to earn an MFA from Yale University in 1959. Wigfall returned to Hampton as an assistant professor of art in 1955. He remained there until 1963, when he accepted a position at the State University of New York (SUNY) in New Paltz, the school’s first Black professor of art.
While teaching at SUNY, New Paltz, Wigfall selected a close-knit Black neighborhood in nearby Kingston for the location of his studio because it reminded him of Church Hill in Richmond. Named Communications Village, his studio became a place for making art and mentoring youth. In this inclusive and vibrant setting, Wigfall invited leading African American artists of the era to engage with the local community and to experiment with printmaking as an art form. With work ranging from abstract painting and printmaking to assemblage and social practice, Benjamin Wigfall and Communications Village showcases the development of an artist whose importance spans modern art, arts education, and community activism.
Bio-Myths: Photographs by Nakeya Brown – Nakeya Brown (b. 1988) is a Maryland-based photographer who has engaged the history and material culture of African American beauty products for the last ten years. Her artwork captures the spaces, textures, emotions, and memories of these products and the women that used them, offering insights into African American histories and enduring questions of beauty, memory, and self-definition. With a visual sensibility uniting both the subtle and the striking, Brown draws from rich traditions within the history of photography like the still life and the portrait, and addresses prevailing questions of contemporary art concerning appropriation and authorship, the ethics of visibility and opacity, and the porous lines between art and advertising. These images of vintage products and bygone styles ask the viewer to consider the ideologies of race, class, and gender contained in the design of mass-produced objects, and in turn the ways that beauty is produced on a mass scale but located within individual bodies. Who looks beautiful? How did they get that way?
Born in Santa Maria, CA, Brown received her BA from Rutgers University and her MFA from The George Washington University. She has had solo exhibitions at the Davis Gallery at Hobart and William Smith Colleges (Geneva, NY), Green Grassi (London), Catherine Edelman Gallery (Chicago), the Urban Institute for Contemporary Art (Grand Rapids, MI), and the Hamiltonian Gallery (Washington, DC). Her group exhibitions include the International Center for Photography (New York), the Museum of Contemporary Photography (Chicago), the Silver Eye Center for Photography (Pittsburgh, PA), and The Katonah Museum of Art (Katonah, NY), among others. She has been an instructor of photography at the American University (Washington, DC) and Johns Hopkins University (Baltimore).
Recommended Citation
Attendees, Conference, "Guided Tour of Torggler Fine Arts Center and time to explore current exhibitions" (2024). Annual Meeting of the Southern Anthropological Society. 15.
https://egrove.olemiss.edu/southernanthro_meeting/2024/schedule/15
Guided Tour of Torggler Fine Arts Center and time to explore current exhibitions
Torggler Fine Arts Center
Current exhibitions at the Torggler Fine Arts Center:
Benjamin Wigfall and Communications Village - Explore the life and legacy of Richmond native Benjamin Wigfall (1930–2017) — artist, educator, and champion of arts equity. This exhibition, the first retrospective of Wigfall’s pioneering career, highlights the period from his early years in Virginia in the 1950s to his founding of Communications Village, a community art space in Kingston, New York, in the 1970s. Wigfall’s roots in Richmond and in Hampton, his stellar artistic achievements, and his lifelong commitment to building community are topics addressed in the exhibition, which paints an intimate portrait of his artwork, impact, and legacy. From Richmond, where his passion for artmaking began, to his pursuit of higher education at Hampton University and Yale, to his professorship at State University of New York (SUNY), 12 New Paltz, Wigfall recognized inequities and dedicated his life to providing access and opportunity. Wigfall’s experience at Hampton University, where he enrolled in 1949, was critical to his career. He graduated with a degree in art education in 1953 and went on to earn an MFA from Yale University in 1959. Wigfall returned to Hampton as an assistant professor of art in 1955. He remained there until 1963, when he accepted a position at the State University of New York (SUNY) in New Paltz, the school’s first Black professor of art.
While teaching at SUNY, New Paltz, Wigfall selected a close-knit Black neighborhood in nearby Kingston for the location of his studio because it reminded him of Church Hill in Richmond. Named Communications Village, his studio became a place for making art and mentoring youth. In this inclusive and vibrant setting, Wigfall invited leading African American artists of the era to engage with the local community and to experiment with printmaking as an art form. With work ranging from abstract painting and printmaking to assemblage and social practice, Benjamin Wigfall and Communications Village showcases the development of an artist whose importance spans modern art, arts education, and community activism.
Bio-Myths: Photographs by Nakeya Brown – Nakeya Brown (b. 1988) is a Maryland-based photographer who has engaged the history and material culture of African American beauty products for the last ten years. Her artwork captures the spaces, textures, emotions, and memories of these products and the women that used them, offering insights into African American histories and enduring questions of beauty, memory, and self-definition. With a visual sensibility uniting both the subtle and the striking, Brown draws from rich traditions within the history of photography like the still life and the portrait, and addresses prevailing questions of contemporary art concerning appropriation and authorship, the ethics of visibility and opacity, and the porous lines between art and advertising. These images of vintage products and bygone styles ask the viewer to consider the ideologies of race, class, and gender contained in the design of mass-produced objects, and in turn the ways that beauty is produced on a mass scale but located within individual bodies. Who looks beautiful? How did they get that way?
Born in Santa Maria, CA, Brown received her BA from Rutgers University and her MFA from The George Washington University. She has had solo exhibitions at the Davis Gallery at Hobart and William Smith Colleges (Geneva, NY), Green Grassi (London), Catherine Edelman Gallery (Chicago), the Urban Institute for Contemporary Art (Grand Rapids, MI), and the Hamiltonian Gallery (Washington, DC). Her group exhibitions include the International Center for Photography (New York), the Museum of Contemporary Photography (Chicago), the Silver Eye Center for Photography (Pittsburgh, PA), and The Katonah Museum of Art (Katonah, NY), among others. She has been an instructor of photography at the American University (Washington, DC) and Johns Hopkins University (Baltimore).