"What's Your Story?" - Richmond Art Center Residency

“What’s Your Story?” Music by Gabriela Lena Frank, Lembit Beecher and Huang Ruo: person, identity, creation.

As the Richmond Art Center reaches the milestone of its 80th anniversary in 2016 it will be assembling an exhibition looking at some of the artists who have shown in the Art Center over the decades. These artists will have been asked to also invite artists whom they have taught, encouraged, mentored, or simply admired. With these relationships we see certain affinities between artists, a commonality of interest, attitude, mood, agenda, even humor. In regarding these works it becomes possible to discern patterns of palette, shapes and textures, rhythms and tempe, volume and space.

Taking these elements as keys to understanding the foundation and structure of the art or the music, three sessions will focus on three approaches to expression. Finding parallels in art in the exhibition and the music performed, the students will have the opportunity to make art engaging some of the same elements in projects geared to the musical manifestations of these elements.

In the Second Session we will take the work of Hung Liu as a point of departure for an unfolding of personal history, ideas of portrait and identity, and the power of art and music to create the beauty, hold memory, and draw on that energy to inspire. The music of the second concert will open a world in which students can enter and expand to render their own vision of home, dream, family, or self. In contrast to a linear narrative, students will be guided to think in layers, multiple perspectives, and spiraling space. A symbolic use of color and the development of symbols will be presented as building blocks for a personal codex. Students will first work individually on a small-scale personal piece and then collaboratively with an associated prompt.

The Residency by the Del Sol String Quartet, organized in partnership with the Richmond Art Center, has been made possible with support from Chamber Music America through its Residency Endowment Fund.