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You’ve got to have art, and Suffolk will provide it in the form of a student show, an exhibition calling for world peace and a lecture on American monuments.
To offer a variation on a time-honored old saying, out of the hands of young people come creative genius. That sums up the Suffolk Art League’s annual Exhibit of Excellence: Suffolk Student Art 2020.
The exhibit of works created by Suffolk high school students in grades 10 through 12 will hold its open reception and awards presentation from 11:30 a.m. until 12:30 p.m. Feb. 4 at the Suffolk Art Gallery, 118 Bosley Ave.
The event is free and open to the public. The exhibit can then be viewed for free until Feb. 28.
The public will examine all manner of works created by homeschooled and public and private high school students who reside in Suffolk. The exhibit will include drawings, prints, paintings, photography, graphic design, mixed media, pottery, crafts and sculpture.
The pieces are judged this year by juror Sharon Swift, an art professor and chair of the Virginia Wesleyan University Art Department.
For more details on the student exhibit, call 925-0448 or visit suffolkartleague.com.
Public monuments mean different things to various people. They may mean one thing to the artist and another to the public depending on political, social and aesthetic bias.
That concept will be examined in detail when guest speaker Jeffrey Ruggles presents the topic “Intended and Unintended Meanings of the American Monument.”
Ruggles is an art historian and Virginia Museum of Fine Arts Speaker on the Arts. He works at Virginia Commonwealth University’s Virginia Center on Aging and earned his Master of Fine Arts in design and photography from VCU.
“Whatever the intended meaning, once in the public eye an installation acquires its own history,” Ruggles said in a press release. “The interpretation of its symbolic expression evolves and the original intent of the monument becomes only one of its meanings.”
Ruggles will discuss how artists in the 18th and 19th centuries designed American monuments using classical themes such as French sculptor Jean-Antoine Houdon’s 1780s marble monument of George Washington and American sculptor Thomas Crawford’s female warrior monument that sits atop the U.S. Capitol. He will also discuss how various Civil War monuments are perceived.
The program is free and will be held from 7 to 9 p.m. Feb. 11 at Lake Prince Woods, 100 Anna Goode Way.
For more information, call 923-5500.
How about art and words to further world peace and understanding?
That will be on display at the Suffolk Sister Cities International exhibit, using the theme One World: Out of Many, We Are One.
This annual young artists and authors juried exhibit will “help foster a sense of global citizenship and goodwill,” according to the exhibit’s press release. The show will feature original artwork and essays created by Suffolk students.
The exhibit will hold an opening reception from 6 until 8 p.m. Feb. 6 at the Suffolk Center for Cultural Arts, 110 W. Finney Ave. After that, the exhibit can be viewed from 11 a.m. until 4 p.m. Tuesdays through Saturdays at the center’s BB&T and Norfolk galleries until Feb. 14. The exhibit is free and open to the public.
The winning Suffolk entries will then go on to compete against works from students across the country.
The artistic and literary showcase is sponsored by Suffolk Sister Cities International, a local division of Sister Cities International, created in 1956 by President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s White House summit on citizen diplomacy, according to SisterCities.org. The initiative was formed to create "bonds between people from different communities around the world,” the website said. Suffolk’s sister cities are Suffolk County, England and Oderzo, Italy.
For more details, call the center at 923-0003 or visit suffolkcenter.org.
GRANDY’S FREEDOM
As part of its Black History Now celebration, Portsmouth will present the program “Let My People Go: Moses Grandy’s Financial Fight for Freedom” from noon until 1:30 p.m. Feb. 8 at the Portsmouth Art & Cultural Center, 400 High St.
The free program will feature Eric Anthony Sheppard, president and founder of the Hampton-based Diversity Restoration Solutions Inc., an international project development and business tourism firm.
Sheppard will discuss, using videos and photographs, the journey of his ancestor, author and abolitionist Moses Grandy, from West Africa to the Dismal Swamp Canal. He will explain how Grandy — using business acumen, hard work and frugality — bought his way out of bondage in the early 19th century.
Sheppard founded Diversity Restoration Solutions to “conduct homecomings and project development activities in America and Africa to reconnect families and communities, previously separated by the institutions of slavery, for mutually beneficial social-economic restoration,” according to DiversityRestoration.com.
The program is free and open to the public. Call 251-3948 for more information.
Weekend Scoop
PARADING AND TOURING INTO BLACK HISTORY
Dress as one of your favorite or most inspirational black heroes and take a tour of Portsmouth’s African American history.
The parade and tour is from 10:30 a.m. until about 1 p.m. Feb. 15. It begins at High and Green streets.
The event will kick off with the parade, which will assemble at 10:30 a.m. Participants are asked to come dressed as an African American hero, past or present, local, regional, national or international.
After that, the public will walk or take a shuttle bus to explore various sites significant to Portsmouth’s rich black history
The registration fee is $10 per person or $50 for 10 or more individuals. Call 202-812-2804 to register or for more information.
Eric W. Feber, ewjfeber@gmail.com