Guest curator and art photographer Kyra Schmidt envisions photography as a medium that can uncover truths. In her catalogue essay, Schmidt writes, “... the 10 artists in this exhibition open us up to truths that are personal, historical, and collective by looking at both analog and digital mediums in new and exciting ways. From cyanotype and gumoil portraiture to photographic reliefs and re-photographed collages, each artist has employed their material to consider how a photographic object can transform critical consciousness. By utilizing the power of photographic experience, these artists confront issues surrounding race and gender ideologies, ecological grief, and the passage of time.”

This exhibition is sponsored in part by the City of Roanoke through the Roanoke Arts Commission.

Grounded in photography, Rita Maas blends the disciplines of drawing and printmaking to playfully construct conceptually based imagery. Inspired by the early modernist artists who created photograms and chemograms, Maas examines the materials of the digital darkroom. Using reclaimed ink from empty inkjet printer cartridges, she embraces elements of chance and disrder working within predetermined systems. How we read, filter, and retain information are persistent themes of her practice, examining the spaces where slippage and illegibility occur.

Maas received her B.F.A. in Photographic Studies from the School of Visual Arts, New York. Soon after, she established a successful commercial studio, shooting award-winning campaigns for major advertising and editorial clients. She later earned her M.F.A. in Visual Arts at Lesley University College of Art and Design, Cambrdge, MA.

The Frances Niederer Artist-in-Residence program allows Hollins University to bring a nationally recognized artist to campus every year. In residence during the spring semester, the Artist-in-Residence creates work in a campus studio and teaches a seminar open to all students.

Life presents us with a myriad of objects that we keep: nostalgic items from childhood, objects of family heritage, and symbols of identity. These collections surround us in daily life and are put to use or become decoration in the spaces we frequent. Recent internet sensations, such as minimalism and Marie Kondo, have made people step back and explore the deeper meaning and value of their material possessions, as well as the stories they tell to and for us. Collected from our own Hollins campus community by student curators in the class “Behind the Scenes at the Museum: Principles and Practice,” the objects in this exhibit explore the stories of what we choose to keep, and connect us with each other through their deeper meanings.

In conjunction with the annual Women Working with Clay Symposium held each summer at Hollins University, the Eleanor D. Wilson Museum presents an exhibition of work by these well-known artists in the world of contemporary ceramics: program director Dara Hartman; presenters Margaret Bohls, Chotsani Elaine Dean, Lorna Meaden, and Linda Sormin; and founding director Donna Polseno. This symposium emphasizes the creative process from every level while looking at the particular aspects and points of view that may be unique to women working in clay.

For more information on the symposium, visit hollins.edu.

This exhibition features the work of members of the Hollins University class of 2022 majoring in studio art: Victoria Q. An’janique, Abigail Parker Hegwood, Samantha Jin, Ashley King, Sylvia Lane, Jahmesha McLemore, and Maddie Zanie. The exhibition is the final requirement for art students earning their Bachelor of Arts at Hollins, and is the capstone experience of their yearlong senior project.

Hollins is proud to offer an inspiring and immersive art program. Throughout its history, the department’s faculty have been nationally recognized but also remembered with respect and fondness by their students. This exhibition shares artwork from the permanent collection of the Eleanor D. Wilson Museum by selected former art lecturers and professors including John Ballator, Leigh Ann Beavers, John Canaday, Christine Carr, Nancy Dahlstrom, Alison Hall, Susan Jamison, Jan Knipe, Frances J. Niederer, Jennifer Printz, Bob Sulkin, Lewis Thompson, and Bill White.

Each summer, the Eleanor D. Wilson Museum partners with the Hollins University M.F.A. Dance program to host selected student graduate dance thesis presentations in the Main Gallery, melding live dance, performance, and visual art. This summer, the museum will present the work of two graduating students.

Humlao Evans (June 9-19) works in movement studies, poetry, installation, video, and performance. With dreams of a more just future, they make work that contends with the political histories and inherited violence our bodies carry while honoring both ancestral and contemporary lineages.

Alice Svetic (June 23 - July 3) looks at the concept of ephemera--what is left after performances "end." Svetic's research situates their own past, present, and future choreographies as a site for the extraction of queer embodied experience.

First introduced in 1642, mezzotint printing employs a copper plate and a tool (now known as a rocker) to create a close cluster of gouged dots or burrs. The painstaking, intricate technique allows for subtle gradations of tonal values - almost a halftone, and deep solid colors - especially a rich, velvety black. After a decline in popularity in the late nineteenth century as new printing technologies became available, artists rediscovered and embraced the mezzotint process in recent decades.

Through her involvement in six international mezzotint exchanges organized by the International Mezzotint Society, Fincastle-based artist and Hollins University professor emerita Nancy Dahlstrom has shared her artwork as well as obtained a collection of mezzotints from artists around the world. This exhibition includes selections from the exchanges in which Dahlstrom has participated.

Grace Lin is a New York Times bestselling author and illustrator of children’s books. She has won the Newbery Honor, Caldecott Honor, and Theodor Geisel Honor as well as being a National Book Award finalist. As a small child and a voracious reader, Lin could not identify with any of the characters in the books she was reading. Her dream in life was to write and illustrate children’s books and in doing so she has also become an advocate for diversity. This exhibition will feature 36 of Lin's illustrations from the following books: A Big Mooncake for Little Star; Where the Mountain Meets the Moon; Starry River of the Sky; When the Sea Turned to Silver; Thanking the Moon: Celebrating the Mid-Autumn Moon Festival; and Round is a Mooncake: A Book of Shapes.

This exhibit examines the recent work of a cohort of women artists living in the Shenandoah Valley: they are united by location, a lifelong pursuit of seeking through art, and an artist/teacher/mentor to learn beside. Ron Boehmer, Lynchburg-based artist, teacher, and co-founder of the Beverley Street Studio School (Staunton, VA) is the catalyst who brings these disparate artists together.

Each of these artists have juggled life as professionals, daughters, sisters, wives, mothers, grandmothers, teachers, and caregivers. Despite their many roles and responsibilities, they always created space in their lives to make art. Lindsay Freedman, Janly Jaggard, June Jordan, Joan Ranzini, Krista Townsend, and Christine Watts still convene regularly for a critique session to discuss their latest work and get feedback. Deliece Blanchard studied independently with Boehmer and recently moved from the Shenandoah Valley to Winston-Salem, NC.

Best known for their paintings, a few of these artists also create collages, vitreous enamels, or ceramics. They all experiment in the liminal space between realism and abstraction. Many of them also teach art in the region. All participate in solo and group exhibits regionally and across the country; their work can be found in public, corporate, and private collections in the United States and abroad.

A.D. Herzel is an internationally recognized artist, educator, designer, and writer currently living in Blue Ridge, Virginia. She is also a Korean adoptee who explores her identity and creates community through her art. Herzel was adopted in 1970 by a religious family which adopted three Korean children and sponsored about 50 other children. This exhibit presents graphite portraits of Korean adoptees accompanied by silhouettes executed in gold ink and drawings of flowers, seeds, spirals, and other imagery specific to each portrait. Herzel offers her art as a way to help process grief and trauma, as well as to join the larger conversation about place and belonging in immigrant communities across the globe.

Herzel writes, "It has taken me 50 years to give light to the shadow of my adoption story. This current flowering moment, rooted and wrapped in the tendrils of history is seeded by the currents of global, religious and political history. My story though textured with facets, divets and spikes is just one story in the Korean diaspora and one of the many American immigrant stories worth examining."

Find more of Herzel's work on her website.

This exhibit and its associated programs are sponsored in part by the City of Roanoke through the Roanoke Arts Commission.

The occupation of a body is one of the very few universal experiences, the portrayal of which often attempts to convey or subvert imagined ideals of society at any given time and place. (DE)CONSTRUCTING: Figurative Works from the Permanent Collection explores the gendered construction and deconstruction of the body and its representations. From figurative studies and intimate self-portraiture to fictional narratives, the exhibition offers a survey of multiple media and artistic strategies that span from abstract expressionism to contemporary photography. In dialogue, the artworks consider questions of possession in relation to scientific inquiry, societal constructs, pleasure and the act of looking. The way in which artists portray their subjects, themselves, and humanity more broadly can both uphold and redefine societal ideals of the body and its many forms.

(DE)CONSTRUCTING: Figurative Works from the Permanent Collection is curated by Eleanor D. Wilson Museum programs coordinator Kyra Schmidt and intern Madeleine Etheridge, Hollins University class of 2023.

In 1950, Hollins art department chair John Ballator purchased two Flemish Renaissance tapestries from a traveling exhibition presented at Hollins and organized by French & Co. From 1907-1959, French & Co. was known as the largest dealer in tapestries worldwide. For decades, these two tapestries graced the walls of Hollins’ Little Theatre and were deeply beloved by generations of students. In 2012, the tapestries were removed during the theatre’s renovation; while in storage, they received water damage which caused localized surface mold and staining on the tapestry surfaces and outer linings. In September 2020, the tapestries were sent to the not-for-profit Intermuseum Conservation Association (ICA) in Cleveland, Ohio. At ICA, textiles conservator Jane Hammond worked on both tapestries and undertook surface cleaning, mold remediation, lining replacement, stabilization of open seams and areas of pronounced weakness, removal of disfiguring mends (from pre-1950s conservation), reduction of stains, and photodocumentation of these procedures.

In Renewing Threads: Tapestries and the Art of Textile Conservation, the tapestries are on view for the first time in ten years, accompanied by photos of the conservation treatment at ICA. With information uncovered through the treatment process, Eleanor D. Wilson Museum director Jenine Culligan has started new research on the tapestries’ makers and provenance as we reintroduce these textiles to Hollins and beyond.

You can watch textile conservator Jane Hammond's presentation on the conservation process on the Eleanor D. Wilson Museum's YouTube channel.

This exhibit and its related programs are sponsored in part by the City of Roanoke through the Roanoke Arts Commission.