”Rumors of War” is currently on display in Times Square. In December, it will move to its permanent location on Arthur Ashe Boulevard
in front of the VMFA. (Photo: Kylie Corwin)
A few weeks ago, while driving past West Main and McIntire Road, my 5-year-old daughter peered out the car window and asked who those people were on the statue.
“That’s Lewis and Clark and Sacagawea,” I replied.
No, she insisted. “There’s only two.”
Lamely, I offered the party line: “Well, you can’t see Sacagawea very well because she’s low down, but that’s because she’s tracking, because she was their guide.”
My daughter stared at me doubtfully. “Anyway, statues, usually, are mens” she concluded, definitively (she’s still working on her grammar).
While I attempted to explain, I found it striking, and a little funny, that what’s so obvious to a kindergartener should be the source of years-long debate among the grown-ups.
In short, who we choose to venerate in our public places sends a very clear message about who matters. Historical plaques cannot compete with heroic, life-sized figures mounted on enormous pedestals and elevated dozens of feet off the ground. Pretty obvious.
To that end, Kehinde Wiley, the artist best known for his presidential portrait of Barack Obama, unveiled a new bronze sculpture, “Rumors of War,” in New York last week. The 27-foot-tall statue is modeled on one of J.E.B. Stuart, in Richmond, but replaces the Confederate general with a modern-day African American figure, in streetwear and dread-locks—as Architectural Digest put it, “the contemporary anti-image of a Robert E. Lee.”
It will eventually move to the lawn of the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, bringing it into conversation with Richmond’s infamous line of Confederate monuments. As a work of art, it’s provocative and visually arresting, even in photographs. And as a public statement it is hugely powerful.
Charlottesville is a much smaller city, and adding more monuments rather than removing the old ones isn’t necessarily the best answer here. But how delightful it would be to think this creatively, and expansively, about what we want to say in our public spaces.
Including kids in the process of navigating museums leads to exciting discoveries like 4,050-year-old Tjeby, Count and Sealbearer of the King of Lower Egypt, at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. Photo courtesy of VMFA
It’s worth it to drive to Richmond on a rainy day. It might actually be the best time to make the trip—instead of moping around home or doing errands, you defy the weather and make a bold strike for the capital city. After all, there’s lots to do there. Like, mummy-viewing—which was enough to get me and my kids, ages 5 and 8, on the road to Richmond one recent drizzly day.
Yes, the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts has a mummy on display. Does a mummy qualify as fine art? No matter. We had other business to attend to before we approached the ancient one.
First on the agenda was the factory store of Red Rocker Candy in the town of Troy—a handy stop that breaks up the Richmond drive. Red Rocker is not only a woman-owned local business, it’s a tourist attraction with a production facility open to visitors, and a shop offering Red Rocker treats you can’t get anywhere else.
Standing at a large window in the shop, we watched as employees weighed out portions of Red Rocker’s signature pretzel mix, scooping from a big mound on a stainless-steel table, then sealing and labeling the containers. In a different area, a worker was spreading chocolate over a baking sheet and sprinkling copious amounts of nonpareils over it—then another sheet, then another. Several employees welcomed us warmly with samples and friendly chatting, and then we nibbled even more delights from jars in the shop.
On that big Mother Report Card in the sky, I wasn’t exactly earning an A in the feed-them-healthy-food column, but they sure were happy.
Continuing on, we arrived in Richmond hungry for lunch, sugary calories notwithstanding, so I steered toward Carytown. Our recent obsession with Greek mythology prompted me to seek out Greek food, which might not make a lot of rational sense, but jived perfectly with the logic of children. They were delighted to sit down to lunch at Greek On Cary, and though the meal was served by an ordinary mortal rather than an Olympian god, it proved plenty exciting—a sizable octopus tentacle served over grilled veggies (delicious), fried calamari mixed with piquant peppers, and a hunk of kefalograviera cheese, which our waitress set aflame before our astonished eyes. And: good old bread.
We ran through the rain back to our car and made the short drive to the VMFA. I love this museum for so many reasons, starting with its convenience and accessibility for families—admission is free, the coat check is free, and though the garage isn’t free, you can usually find street parking (free).
And the size is just right—small enough to be navigable, big enough to harbor many surprises. We headed first for the Egyptian artifacts, housed mainly in one room. The mummy waits in a darkened corner as visitors make their way past canopic jars, casts of relief carvings from ancient temples, and elaborate sarcophagi.
As you near the mummy, lights automatically illuminate its coffin. Tjeby, Count and Sealbearer of the King of Lower Egypt, died around 4,050 years ago. He wasn’t given quite the King Tut treatment—rather, he lies on his side in a narrow wooden box decorated with a single line of hieroglyphs and a pair of eyes meant to allow Tjeby to see out into the world. A tilted mirror affords a view down onto his linen-wrapped body. The girls were suitably impressed.
In nearby rooms, we were excited to see some of the Greek myths and epics we’ve been learning about represented on urns and other antiquities. There was Athena, springing from the skull of Zeus! There was the Trojan War!
Both girls were interested in a large mosaic depicting the four seasons, and crowns made of gold myrtle leaves, but my younger daughter started to drag a little as her sister and I checked out a statue of the evil Roman emperor Caligula. “Art museums are boring,” she said—a statement which, though it defied the enjoyment she’d shown just minutes earlier, did speak a certain truth. Art museums are not really made for kids; a lot of the artworks are just plain too high off the ground, for one thing, and the sheer volume of the collection means that a family shouldn’t even try to see it all in one visit.
So how to keep things rolling? I settled on this approach: 1. Give everybody a turn to decide what to look at next (including the grownup; I chose African masks). 2. Intersperse gallery time with stops in the gift shop and café. 3. Freely give piggyback rides.
In short, museum-with-kids is not the same experience as museum-with-adults. Hoofing my 5-year-old through a hall of tapestries, I felt a long way from those past days when I’d wander for hours, uninterrupted, through marble galleries, having one aesthetic revelation after another. But this was another kind of wonderful.
If you go
The Red Rocker Candy factory storeis located at 170 Industrial Way in Troy. It’s open Tuesday-Sunday.
Greek On Cary is at 3107 W. Cary St. in Richmond and serves lunch and dinner daily. See .
The Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, 200 N. Boulevard, is open every day of the year and offers free general admission. The museum also offers Family Days and other kid-friendly activities.
“Bleached” (above), is a reaction to Clemons’ experience when visiting a birthing center in Uganda, inspiring a deeper exploration of identity for the artist. The emerging artist will participate in SSG’s “Teeny Tiny Trifecta” show in September, and was recently awarded an Incubator Studio residency at McGuffey Art Center for 2018-2019. Courtesy of the artist
Like most teenagers, Sahara Clemons is figuring out who she is.
She describes herself as “quirky” and “introverted,” a bit shy and quiet. She wears bright lipstick and expresses herself via clothing. She likes to read, travel and look at art. And she’s a Charlottesville High School rising senior who only recently started thinking of herself as an artist.
Clemons can’t remember a time when she wasn’t drawing or sketching, and was often told that she had talent, but she wasn’t entirely sure what that meant. “Talent can motivate you, but it’s hard to distinguish” between enjoyment and talent, especially when you’re young, says Clemons.
She developed a distinct visual voice through both pop art pen-and-ink self-portraits and fashion design—Clemons has participated in the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts Teen Stylin’ program more than once and won “most creative construction” accolades. She has always created for herself, as a means of self-reflection, but about a year ago, she noticed that people weren’t just looking at her work—they were reacting to it, connecting with it. That’s when she felt like she could call herself an artist.
Clemons’ exploration of her identity as a black woman is a central theme in her collection of paint-and-textile works of abstract portraiture on view in the Backroom at Second Street Gallery—how she sees herself, how she imagines others see her and how she can’t help but incorporate the world’s perception of her into her inner self.
Selections from Sahara Clemons’ collection of new work are on view in Second Street Gallery’s Backroom through July 27.
At the top of a long, vertical piece, Clemons’ face is drawn in pop-art style, with thick, expressive black lines outlining her features, hair, arms and hands, all rendered in yellow against a deep cobalt. The viewer has caught her mid-dance pose, and below Clemons’ face is a pattern comprised of four pairs of feet, all on tiptoe, in yellow and black, dancing across a striped plane. In each black shadow cast by the feet is a dancing figure.
This particular piece represents Clemons’ love of dance, an aspect of herself she generally keeps under wraps. Not that she doesn’t want people to know, but because she likes to surprise people by dancing when the moment is right. By publicly declaring her sub-secret love for dance in a slightly abstract way, she says she is able to “reiterate my means of feeling different, but also feeling somewhat empowered by keeping it in.”
The pattern is reminiscent of Dutch wax fabric (also called ankara), which Clemons first saw during a trip to Uganda where she connected with the bold, unique fabrics in a way she didn’t connect with other things in the country. The fabric has a long history, but in brief, the Dutch adopted a centuries-old Indonesian wax resist-dyeing technique and brought it, along with the bright, batik-style patterns, to Dutch colonies in southern and western Africa in the 19th century. Ever since, the brightly colored bold patterns have been widely associated with West African garb.
One of Clemons’ favorite artists, Yinka Shonibare, uses Dutch wax fabric in his sculptural works to comment on “expansionism and colonialism…and how the world was tapered with that kind of imperialistic mindset,” Clemons explains.
She says the fabrics have allowed her to reflect upon her identity “as a black person, feeling like I was taking something that was part of myself and putting it out there [in a way] I hadn’t done so before.”
Another piece in the collection, “Bleached,” is inspired by the same trip to Uganda, where Clemons and her mother, Eboni Bugg, stayed in a birth center. In the piece, a light brown figure appears to either consume, or be consumed by, white liquid bleach, while a smaller, darker brown figure looks on; they’re cradled by bright green pieces of a Dutch wax fabric pattern.
At the birth center, one woman had much lighter skin than the other women and children there, including her own child, Clemons says. She later learned that this woman bleached her skin “probably for years and months” in order to lighten it.
Clemons felt extraordinary sadness at the idea that this woman was reacting to pressure to look a certain way, and she also “felt some sort of guilt” in her own (naturally) light skin: “I felt like I was perpetuating something for her,” says Clemons, adding that she intends the piece to “show the generational trauma” that can persist among black women when the idea that light skin is more beautiful than dark skin permeates a society. And she wonders how it has affected her perception of, and the perception of her within, black culture.
In creating these pieces, Clemons has come to understand how many things converge to form her identity. “As I became more developed and more aware of things that would be reflective upon me as a black person, my character, my self-expression, it sometimes became easier to walk life more freely, and it became harder, too.” Such is the paradox of self-awareness.
But Clemons continues to search, (she’s still in high school!), and that’s the function of art, after all, she says. It’s “a language to find something in others, find something in yourself, that you didn’t see before.”
The “Animal Inside Out” exhibit at the Science Museum of Virginia can be shocking for some, but offers a unique look at the bodies of mammals and sea creatures. Courtesy Science Museum of Virginia
We’re lucky to have Richmond. As a mid-size city, it can offer certain things that Charlottesville doesn’t, but it’s small enough that it’s simple to navigate. And when I took my kids there recently, I was surprised—as I often am—at how easy it is to get there.
That’s not even counting I-64, which might be fast but—I’ll go out on a limb here—is also the most boring stretch of interstate in the nation. Instead, I drove most of the way on 250. Up and down we went over rolling hills, with always something new to look at. For me, that’s well worth a few extra minutes of travel.
Our destinations that day were the Science Museum of Virginia and the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, though I wasn’t certain we’d make it to both. My girls, ages 7 and 5, voted to start with science, maybe because I’d told them about the Body Worlds exhibit, “Animal Inside Out,” on view there this summer. That was a must-see.
But first, we paused in the museum lobby to take in what turned out to be one of our favorite elements of the day: a 96-foot-long pendulum, suspended from the dome of this former train station, traveling back and forth at a stately speed. The 235-pound weight knocks down a circle of pegs, one by one, as the Earth turns beneath it. Witnessing a peg fall feels like an event, and the girls were suitably impressed.
We glanced over an exhibit on speed, finding much of it to be a bit contrived, and pressed on to “Animal Inside Out.” If you’re not familiar with the idea of plastination, it’s a method of preserving bodies by replacing water and fat with plastics, leaving specimens odorless, durable and amazingly intact. Body Worlds exhibits have toured the world since 1995, sometimes stirring controversy. This one, with its focus on animals, offers many different ways to understand anatomy.
Beginning with sea creatures like squid and scallops, then progressing to mammals, we gaped at bodies and body parts in various forms. There are specimens that show the incredible density of blood vessels in a body; others highlight internal organs, or muscles and bones. Plastinated bodies can be shown with skin and fur still on, or partially or totally removed. They can be sliced thinner than paper or opened up like a book.
If you’re wrinkling your nose, this exhibit may not be for you. The bodies are fascinating and sometimes startling—for me, the first mammal I encountered, a horse with its head in three vertical slices, was a minor shock.
But I found the exhibit enlightening, not disturbing, even where it included human bodies. I think my kids agreed. They used words like “creepy” and “wow” and “the perfect thing to be for Halloween.”
They also zoomed through it about twice as quickly as I would have liked to—fair warning for contemplative adults.
Leaving “Animal Inside Out,” we found ourselves learning about the nest-building behavior of the cutlips minnow. This is characteristic of the SMV: A lot of information comes at you, sometimes without much context. It’s up to you whether to interpret for your kids, or just let it all wash over them. An exhibit called “Boost” was, for us, an exercise in confusion.
But we all liked sitting in a small theater to watch “rat basketball”—a short live program designed to teach the basics of behavioral psychology. The girls also enjoyed seeing a working beehive, turtles in terrariums and—again—that beautiful pendulum, always in motion.
We could have walked, as it turned out, to our other two destinations. Then again, parking was so easy (and free) that it caused no stress to drive. We found lunch in Carytown at the Can Can Brasserie. It’s a French place with a pressed-tin ceiling and great service, and the girls loved their “Eloise” drinks—like a Shirley Temple with a sliced orange.
Although the hour grew late, we made a stop at the VMFA anyway, encouraged to do so by the fact that the museum is free. Stopping by for a short time, then, is entirely reasonable. (Maybe, with kids, it’s even preferable.)
On a friend’s recommendation, we headed straight for the display of Fabergé eggs. I lifted each girl up to let her view the intricate creations, whose fineness I’d never appreciated before. We each chose a favorite, and we were enchanted by videos showing how the eggs ingeniously open and unfold.
As at the science museum, the building itself is half the fun—in this case, a modernist gem with a truly lovely, water-filled courtyard. We decided that next time, we’ll reverse our itinerary, starting at the VMFA and topping off the day with a film at the science museum’s Dome theater. After all, we’ll always have Richmond.
