Lenfest Center for the Performing Arts

Staniar Gallery at Wilson Hall

Lenfest Center Staniar Gallery

JAZZ PEOPLE, 1974 - 2007
Patrick Hinely: Images from the Jazzprezzo Calendiary

Exhibition
Sept. 3, 2007 to Oct. 10, 2007
Staniar Gallery / Wilson Hall

Lecture/Reception
Sept. 14, 2007 / 5:30 p.m.
Concert Hall / Wilson Hall
Stanair Gallery

Patrick Hinely’s photographs of  jazz musicians are respected, admired, and published internationally, including on hundreds of LP and CD covers since 1973. In Jazz People, 1974-2007, the Washington and Lee University photographer exhibits over three decades of images of jazz musicians in the studio, on stage, and on the road. The in-the-moment alertness and rhythmic responsiveness of Hinely’s photographs match that of his subjects as he captures “those ephemeral moments of life being lived, unfolding at its own pace, when the geometric and the poetic pass through their fleeting…confluence.” Noting that Hinely’s work qualifies “equally as art and documentary,” Tad Hershorn, archivist for Rutgers University’s Institute for Jazz Studies, has written that in Hinely’s images “you can sense the atmosphere, the personalities, and the interaction among the musicians.” 

Many of the works in this exhibition have been included in Jazzprezzo’s 2008 Jazz Calendiary, which will be available for sale at the exhibition.  An improvisational jam session will take place in the gallery during the opening.

DRAWING ITALY
Student Work from the Spring 2007 Abroad

Exhibition
Oct. 17, 2007 to Nov. 7, 2007
Staniar Gallery/Wilson Hall

Lecture/Reception
Oct. 19, 2007 / 5:30 p.m.
Concert Hall / Wilson Hall
Stanair Gallery

The Drawing Italy abroad led by Professor of Art Kathleen Olson is a tradition at Washington and Lee University.  During their study in Italy, students draw daily, exploring creatively the landscape, historical vistas, and light in the Mediterranean country. When they return to campus for the last two weeks of Spring Term, they work intensively to create series of pastel drawings that reflect their artistic immersion in Italian culture. In Drawing Italy, students from the abroad will present the artworks that resulted from this experience.

GERALD DONATO: REINVENTING THE GAME

Exhibition
Nov. 9, 2007 to Dec. 9, 2007
Staniar Gallery/Wilson Hall

Lecture/Reception
Nov. 9, 2007 / 5:30 p.m.
Concert Hall / Wilson Hall
Stanair Gallery

Gerald Donato: Reinventing the Game comes to Staniar Gallery as a cross-section of the work included in a larger retrospective of over forty years of the celebrated Richmond artist’s paintings, drawings, and prints. Amy Moorefield, curator of the exhibit and VCUarts Anderson Gallery Assistant Director, notes that “it is not a conventional retrospective by any means. Instead, it showboats Donato’s savvy and satirical mechanisms drawn from familiar cartoon imagery and nonsensical sources, and it celebrates his unique pictorial language…” Gerald Donato’s work combines two different visual traditions, American pop culture and painterly expressionism, and it yields a mixture of luscious painting, animated gesture, parody, and quirky narrative. 

SCANNER AS CAMERA
MAGGIE TAYLOR, CHRISTA KREEGER BOWDEN, RUTH ADAMS,DARRYL CURRAN, STEPHEN ALTHOUSE, J. SEELEY, VALERIE MENDOZA, RHONA SHAND

Exhibition
Jan. 7, 2008 to Feb. 15, 2008
Staniar Gallery/Wilson Hall

Lecture/Reception
Jan. 10, 2008 / 5:30 p.m.
Concert Hall / Wilson Hall
Stanair Gallery

Curated by Ruth Adams and originating at the University of Kentucky’s Tuska Center for Contemporary Art, Scanner As Camera includes eight contemporary artists who use the flatbed scanner as a means of capturing photographic imagery.  Washington and Lee University Assistant Professor of Art Christa Kreeger Bowden collaborated with Adams on the development of the exhibition, and the two artists will give a lecture about this emerging, experimental photographic medium at the exhibition’s opening. In scanner photography, a flat-bed scanner replaces the camera and offers exciting possibilities for experimentation. Instead of taking the camera to the object to be photographed, three-dimensional objects are placed on the scanner’s bed and their images are captured -- and often manipulated -- digitally.  As Scanner As Camera reveals, this nontraditional approach to photography results in images that range from the surreal to the lyrically metaphorical to the vibrantly, meticulously descriptive.  

WILLIAM HALSEY: MODERNISM IN THE SOUTH
WORKS FROM THE JOHNSON COLLECTION

Curator's Lecture with Harmony Haskins and Lauren Brunk.

Exhibition
Feb. 27, 2008 to April 4, 2008
Staniar Gallery/Wilson Hall

Lecture/Reception
March 7, 2008 / 5:30 p.m.
Concert Hall / Wilson Hall
Stanair Gallery

South Carolina artist William Halsey (1915-1999) was an abstract expressionist painter whose life and career path led him away from the major urban art centers and back to Charleston as a very young man. He created an original and idiosyncratic body of work that has been critically acclaimed yet remained largely unknown. Halsey studied at The School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston in the 1930s, where he was given the Boston Museum School’s prestigious and rarely awarded Paige Fellowship. In 1939, the advent of war in Europe prevented him from using the fellowship to study in Paris, so the young Halsey traveled to Mexico.  He enrolled at the Academy San Carlos in Mexico City and had contact with the muralist Diego Rivera.  Halsey’s immersion in the emergent Modernism of American art, the influence of Mexican art and culture, and his return to a regional milieu combined to create a vigorous and inventive body of work - saturated color, earthy texture, and seemingly hieroglyphic sense of shape. The works in this exhibition are drawn from Halsey’s works in The Johnson Collection, a collection based in Spartanburg, South Carolina and comprised of primarily Southern artists from the late 19th to the mid-20th centuries.

BUSINESS AS USUAL: SCULPTURE BY BOB TROTMAN

Exhibition
April 11, 2008 to May 17, 2008
Staniar Gallery / Wilson Hall

Lecture/Reception
May 15, 2008 / 5:30 p.m.
Concert Hall / Wilson Hall
Stanair Gallery

Combining wood’s visual frankness and warmth with a philosophical sensation of dislocation and alienation, Bob Trotman’s figurative sculptures in Business as Usual bring to Staniar Gallery an intense examination of the psychology of everyday life. The nationally acclaimed sculptor sees his wooden figures “…in relation to the vernacular traditions of…carved religious figures, ships’ figureheads, and the so-called ‘show’ figures…found in the nineteenth century,” yet inhabiting a familiar contemporary world in which “tragedy and comedy constantly vie for the upper hand.” Comically pointed yet empathic, Trotman’s figures suggest an enigma at the core of human experience.  As Mark Scala, Chief Curator for the Frist Center for the Visual Arts, wrote, “they…convey attitudes that typify a particular moment in time…not caricatures, but real people in conflict with themselves.”  

During the exhibition, Bob Trotman will spend a week in the Art Department as a visiting artist.

SENIOR ART THESES EXHIBITIONS

Exhibition
May 19, 2008 to June 5, 2008
Staniar Gallery / Wilson Hall

Lecture/Reception
May 21, 2008 / 5:30 p.m.
Concert Hall / Wilson Hall
Stanair Gallery

Studio Art majors at their opening reception, May 2007.


ART/MUSIC/THEATER AWARDS

Presentations/Reception
Tues., June 3, 2007
Time TBA
Concert Hall/Staniar Gallery
Wilson Hall