Ecologies, Practices, Communities Opening Reception

 

 

Ecologies, Practices, Communities brings together artists across generations and geographies to explore the diverse ways by which artists cultivate the social, communal, and often intergenerational ecosystems that make sustained practice possible. Bringing together a diverse body of works, several of which were made specifically for this exhibition, it considers how art is not only produced, but lived – how it is supported, shared, and transmitted. As such, the exhibition invites a broader understanding of what it means to build a life in and through creative ecosystems, communities, and practices. 

 

The conception and curation of this project grew out of conversations between Christa Noel Robbins and Neal Rock, professors of Art History and Studio Art at the University of Virginia. Their collaboration began with a shared recognition: artists today are working within intensifying political and socio-economic pressures that shape, and often inhibit, what they make and how they survive. In their teaching and research, they return repeatedly to questions of agency, sustainability, and creative autonomy –particularly in climates that increasingly require artists to establish their own structures of support, circulation, and endurance. This exhibition takes those concerns as its point of departure. It is conceived as dialogic and responsive, shaped in collaboration with the participating artists. Its format remains intentionally flexible, open to alternative modes of dissemination and visibility, which move beyond more traditional curatorial models centered primarily on production and display. Instead, it asks what it means to foreground the conditions of practice itself. 

 

Neal Rock is a Welsh-born visual artist and UVA Associate Professor of Studio Art Painting. He holds a BFA in painting from the University of Gloucestershire, UK; an MFA from Central Saint Martins School of Art & Design, London and a practice-based Ph.D. in painting from London’s Royal College of Art. His visual art practice encompasses exhibition-making and interdisciplinary approaches to painting informed by histories of prosthetics, abstraction, embodiment and post-Humanism. His work has been featured in commercial solo exhibitions and museum survey exhibitions internationally, including; the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY; the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, TX; New York’s Storefront for Art & Architecture; London’s Royal Academy of Art and ICA amongst others. He was the 2015-16 Grant Wood Painting Fellow at the University of Iowa, alongside other residencies and fellowships including, MASS MoCA, Yaddo, VCCA and South Dakota State University. He is the founder and director of Athens-based gallery, Cynefin Athens, and Freeman Artist Residences (FAR) in Charlottesville, Virginia. 

 

Christa Noel Robbins is an Associate Professor of twentieth- and twenty-first-century art and criticism at the University of Virginia and was the 2024-2025 Getty Scholar for the African American Art History Initiative at the Getty Research Institute. Her book Artist as Author: Action and Intent in Late- Modernist American Painting was published by the University of Chicago Press in 2021. Her essays and reviews can be found in several journals including American Art, The Oxford Art Journal, Criticism, Art in America, Art History, Art Journal, and Critical Inquiry. She was the advisory editor of North American modernism for the Routledge Encyclopedia of Modernism and is a book reviews editor for Panorama: Journal of the Association of Historians of American Art. She is currently writing a book on the abstract painter William T. Williams.

 

Exhibiting artists include: Caitlin Cherry, Angela Dufresne, Helen O’Leary, Neal Rock, Angelo Plessas, Anthony Shapland, Alexandria Smith, HK Zamani, Gina Osterloh with Annelise Duque & Samuel Lo.