The Gallery in the Viar-Christ Center for the Arts houses one major exhibition each semester of the academic year and supports the educational goals of the Visual Art program, the Fine Arts Department, and Hampden-Sydney College. Exhibitions include work of visiting artists, faculty, and students. The Gallery is located in Brinkley Hall.
Gallery size: 370 square feet
Monday-Friday, 10 a.m. to 4:00 p.m. and by appointment
April 29-May 11, 2024
Opening Reception, Monday, April 29 | 5:30-7:00
February 5 - April , 2024
The photographer Richard Bensen, whose work is on view, once commented that "printing, photography, and digital technology, as applied to pictures, are all aspects of a single ancient process: that of creating fixed visual forms in multiple copies. I believe that pictures are as important as language, and that together they form the glue that holds society together." His images on display images capture a wide panorama of American life through portraiture, documentation, publicity, and intimate recording.
October 25-December, 2023
9 AM-4:30 PM or by appointment
Gallery Reception: Oct 25 | 4:30 PM
Since the rise of modernism, visual artists have incorporated language into their work for a myriad of reasons—text in art can serve as a bridge between the artist and the viewer, offering a point of entry and interpretation. This exhibition includes artworks from the 1970s through the present in which artists moblize language to these ends.
April 5-18, 2023
9 AM-4:30 PM or by appointment
Gallery Reception: April 5 | 4:00 PM
Izac Olatunja's senior thesis photography exhibit documents his month spent with the Yupiit people in the village of Quinhagak, Alaska.
October 18-December 2, 2022
9 AM-4:30 PM or by appointment
Gallery Reception: Tuesday, October 18 | 4:30 PM
Professor Ray Kleinlein is currently teaching art at Hampden-Sydney College. His award-winning paintings are in hundreds of corporate and private collections throughout the world and in several museum collections in the United States. His work has been exhibited in galleries and museums throughout the country and at art fairs such as Art Chicago and Art Miami.
https://raykleinlein.com/
Glimpses—Photographic Processes and Techniques February 17 - April 1, 2022
The show coincides with American Photography, a course taught by Pam Fox. It includes examples of photograms, cyanotypes, daguerreotypes, ambrotypes, tintypes, albumen prints, silver prints, lanternslides, cameras, halftones, and photogravures. Artists include Edward Steichen, Alfred Stieglitz, Frank Gohlke, Willie Anne Wright, Pam Fox, alumni, and students.
December 6-11, 2021
Opening: Monday, December 6 | 4:30 pm followed by
Student research talk: Joseph Kelly ’22
Queer Art in the Contemporary World | 6 pm
With works from Art and Ecology, S eeing with the Camera, and Digital Photography classes
October 14 – November 23, 2021
For more than thirty years, Brian Grogan '73 has engaged in photographic documentation of historic sites and landscapes independently and for the National Parks Service and has over 10,000 images deposited in the U.S. Library of Congress. The exhibit features a representative sample of his work including views of Hampden-Sydney College, humble buildings in our immediate community that merit more study and documentation, as well as major built works and landscapes that have received formal register as significant sites of our national patrimony.
To Make a Mark October 1-5, 2021
Organized to provide examples of drawing techniques for students in art studios, the show includes works by David Dodge Lewis, Sandy Willcox, Maruta Racenis, Roger Sayre, and Diana Dettamore, among others.
Student Art Pop-up Exhibit May 5-8, 2021
The work includes Blake Page’s proposals for outdoor teaching spaces on campus, Miles Lowman’s tintypes of his football teammates, Charlee Fore’s photographs about the issue of domestic abuse, and Cade Davidson’s mapping of the many different birds that share campus with us.
Asterisks in the Grand Narrative of History January 15 - April 4, 2021
A collaborative exhibit with the LCVA, H-SC, and eight artists, diverse strategies are used to address questions of how artists interrogate history, and resist and remake historical narratives in pursuit of a more just world.
February 25-March 24, 2020
Photographs from the War Relocation Authority, 1942.
Arthur White '20 assisted in the curation of this art exhibit.
Wall Garden— a work in progress by Emma Steinkraus January 13-February 11, 2020
In Wall Garden, artist Emma Steinkraus, has created an immersive wallpaper that combines her work with that of over 100 women who worked at the intersection of art and science before the 20th century.
Fall Student ExhibitionDecember 4-13, 2019
Featuring student art work produced in Fall 2019 studio classes including an installation by Art and Ecology.
Exodus Home —a photographic installation by Jay SimpleSeptember 18- November 8, 2019
Jay Simple's recent photographic installation work. Simple is a visiting assistant professor at Longwood University.
Water, a Second Lens —videography of Alexandria SearlsAugust 19-September 6, 2019
Continuous screening of Searls' film and audio installation, "Immersion/Inversion," which brings the viewer beneath the river surface to move through the current and gaze up through the water at the sky.
Student Art Exhibit April 18–May 6, 2019
Student works selected from 2019 studio classes including: Drawing 1, Painting 1, Color and 2-D Design, Photography 1, Multiple Images, and Art and Archive: Curatorial Practice.
Light Strikes Paper–lens-less photographs by Roger Sayre March 21 – April 19, 2019
Sayre’s practice uses hands-on invention and discovery unified by chance and play. The works are made by illuminating photosensitive paper with filtered colored light in a dark room, forgoing both the camera and the film negative. Works are taken from the following projects: Halos, Ticks of Time, Vinyl Color Theory, and Spinning on Air.
Florilegium–paintings by Emma Steinkraus February 6 – March 8, 2019
Unifying Steinkraus’ works is an attentiveness to tenderness and vulnerability. Inspired by the Arkansas Ozarks where she grew up, she combines intimate portraits with photo transfers of the landscape around her home. The paintings are informed by ecological research and Renaissance painters, especially Dürer, Bellini, and Botticelli. Often she references the Garden of Eden, which provides a compelling archetype for the entwining of ecological and emotional upheaval.
Josef Albers –Interaction of ColorOctober 31 – December 7, 2018
A selection of the silkscreen prints from the first edition of Josef Albers’ Interaction of Color (1963) exhibited in the order they were introduced in Albers’ color theory course, which he taught first at the Bauhaus in Germany, later at the Black Mountain College in North Carolina, and, finally, at Yale University. Courtesy of Greenwood Library Special Collections, Longwood University
Trace–recent photographs by Pam Fox September 19 – October 20, 2018
“I am interested in still life imagery that combines the fluidity of drawing and painting with the optical specificity and technical control offered by photography. In this series of images, I am photographing backlit glass and other still life items through printed linen. Lit from behind, the still life casts shadows forward onto the linen. These shadows and the objects behind the loosely woven fabric distort and fuse. Cubist-like, the shapes break down as foreground and background merge. The resulting images are ambiguous, yet “straight” and un-manipulated photographs.”
Home is the Key: documentary photographs June 10 – September 5, 2018
Hampden-Sydney photography students under the direction of Professor Pam Fox collaborated with Farmville Area Habitat for Humanity to explore the relationship between education and housing inequality through the medium of documentary photography.
Student Art ExhibitApril 18 – May 6, 2018
Senior thesis work by Harrison Lawrence, Conor McCabe, and Conner Williams with selected works from visual arts studios in portraiture, digital photography, and independent study.
Friends, Family, Students, and Colleagues–portraits by David Dodge Lewis March 14 – April 20, 2018
A retrospective exhibit of Professor Lewis’ portrait paintings on the occasion of his retirement from the College after thirty-one years.
player piano/lullaby—recent photographic work by Alex Grabiec January – February 23, 2018
