Ode to Richmond Exhibition
Exhibition Open House Weekend: Friday, May 17 5pm - 8pm, Saturday May 18, 10am – 5pm & Sunday, May 19, 2024, Noon - 4pm
Featured Exhibition Dates: Friday, May 17, 2024 - Sunday, June 30, 2024
Featured Exhibition Hours: Tuesdays– Saturdays, 10:00am – 5:00pm, Noon – 4pm Sundays
This Themed Members-Only show is inspired by the poem "Ode to Richmond" by Roscoe Burnems, RVA’s First Poet Laureate, 2021
One of the first poems Powell/Burnems published about his hometown was “Ode to Richmond.” “This was around the time when we were starting to see that Richmond had really turned into an art city. They redid the Arts District, and they were opening all these galleries down there, and there were all these beautiful murals that were being placed all across the city,” he says. “I love art. And that’s one of the things that really struck me about the city: how it embraces artists.”
Rainbows cascading across the ribs of Boulevard.
Lost lives on lips of 17th and Main.
Honey bees cycle upon the back of Cary
and Davis Ave dances in rain.
The skin of Jackson Ward’s buildings
tell the story of legacy.
When the mind does not fit upon the canvas
and thirsts for reach,
it is not James River that quenches an artist,
it is the hunger for feat.
Brick and mortar battle with bustling brushes,
hues slain across wall
This becomes a civil war for creative unrest,
another canvas falls.
A body of tattoos in abstraction and technicolor, of joy, of memories, of hurt.
Richmond is home to some of the greatest art on earth.
A reflection of its people. A tell-tale of its ghosts,
found in the heart of the music,
in poetry, and most
never truly appreciate the frame of thought,
when imagination cannot be caught in woven
cotton and needs space for anarchy
and chaos and craft and desires to be free.
That is when Richmond becomes a gallery.
Read more in Richmond Magazine: Click Here
