Expressions 2023

Reception sponsored by King's Grant • Best in Show sponsored by Virginia Glass & Mirror

Expressions is an annual exhibition of work by artists from southern Virginia and the surrounding regions. This showcase of regional talent features an eclectic mix of work from hundreds of artists working in watercolor, oil and acrylic, mixed media, drawing, photography and sculpture.

Visit the museum to vote for the People's Choice Award. Winner will be announced after the close of the exhibit.

Compulsory Measures

In response to a culture saturated with devices that distance, digitize and disembody, the artists in COMPULSORY MEASURES embrace repetition and ritual as mindful strategies to ascertain meaning.

Bordering on the obsessive, Jorge Benitez, Kristy Deetz, Al Denyer, Joan Elliott, Reni Gower, Steven Pearson, Jennifer Printz, and Tanja Softi provide lifelines for “making sense” out of the chaos entrenched in contemporary society. By utilizing complex systems, intricate patterning, repetitive marking, or minute detail; COMPULSORY MEASURES offers revelatory and celebratory works slowly crafted by hand.

Venus Inferred

Featuring work by award-winning Roanoke-based artist Annie Waldrop, this collection is an outcome of her decades-long quest to use bookmaking, painting, assemblage, collage and other mediums to explore femininity through themes like spirituality, Buddhism, motherhood and creativity. Waldrop's work represents the culmination of a process she likens to tending a garden or raising a child — a labor of love which has its own organic course to follow, including unpredicted detours and clearly defined destinations.

“Living day-in-and-day-out attending to works of art, one begins to tune into the needs of each individual piece like a child who will ask for what he or she needs in order to evolve. ” — Annie Waldrop

Z.L. Feng

Z.L. Feng's watercolor portraits, landscapes and illustrations have been exhibited in juried shows around the world. An artist-signature member of the American Watercolor Society, the National Watercolor Society and the Pastel Society of America, Feng has won more than 200 national and international awards and been recognized at numerous watercolor exhibitions.

Growing up in Shanghai, China, Feng began painting at age seven and never stopped, experimenting with different mediums, including pastel, oil and egg tempera, before choosing his favorite, watercolor. Before coming to the United States in 1986, Feng received his BFA from Shanghai Teacher’s University and taught in its art department for four years. He completed his MFA in 1989 at Radford University, where today he is a professor of art.

Antiquity Second Hand

Jonathan Lee is an artist and librarian living and working in Richmond, Virginia. His studio practice explores ephemeral memory, secret histories and social constructions; often through abstracting activated materials. His social practice utilizes multi-modal approaches to engage individuals, small groups, and communities with ideas through discussion, art making and display.

Lee's work is made predominantly from used, discarded or repurposed materials. Charged by exchanges and interactions of often unknown consequence, these materials have the power to reveal things about our past, present and future, not just because of what they are, but who we are. By altering their original form and function, Lee investigates how information is created, interpreted and renewed through individuals, communities and systems. By engaging in both art making and the research process, he solves problems of his own design while reflecting on problems in the world.

In the studio, Lee is engaged in at least two conversations. One is with himself (What am I feeling and thinking?) The other is with the materials (What are they doing and saying?) Where these dialogs overlap is where the work takes shape; a product of following small details to unexpected places.

Lee's work responds to both the materials and the maker, a collection of personal and communal experiences where patterns and connections are both made and broken. These abstractions offer an alternative apparatus for taking in and questioning information. An opportunity to consider things differently.

Salvador Dali Etchings

Featuring 44 etchings that the Spanish Surrealist artist Salvador Dalí created in Paris in 1934, as well as a portrait of the artist by Carl Van Vechten from the same year, this exhibition presents the unique proof set for the complete series of etchings that make up the first edition of Les Chants de Maldoror – the infamous 1869 prose poem by Isidore Ducasse. Curated by Dr. Michael R. Taylor, Chief Curator and Deputy Director for Art and Education, Virginia Museum of Fine Arts.

Citizens and Soldiers: The Mostly World War II Paintings

A compilation of mostly World War II illustrations created by Ken Smith for the Advanced Squad Leader board game, originally reproduced on game boxes, magazines and folders. The exhibit contains 15 paintings spanning the era of 1939 (Kollaa Holds) to 1950 (Frozen). 

Smith is an associate professor of graphic design at Radford University. He is a current or former member of the Society of Illustrators, the Society of Publication Designers, the AIGA, the Salmagundi Club and the Coast Guard Art Program, where he has won the prestigious George Grey Award of Artistic Excellence on three separate occasions. His paintings and illustrations are featured at both the East Tennessee Historical Society and the McClung Museum in Knoxville, Tennessee, as well as at Fort Loudoun State Historic Area museum in Vonore, Tennessee.