The Living Room Gallery provides another gallery for student use

Samantha McCartney
Staff Writer

Among the creative minds of VCU art students, there’s always a thirst for new, fresh ways to do things. The Living Room Arts Initiative is one of those unique ideas.

This past Thursday, through The Center at VCU and the Baptist Collegiate Ministry at VCU, was the opening of a new art gallery for VCU art students. A historic house on Floyd Avenue, near the Student Commons and the Sacred Heart Cathedral, serves as the space for this “Living Room Gallery,” which is accessible for VCU students and the Richmond community.

VCU arts sophomore Ginny Rush, along with director of The Center at VCU, Nathan Elmore, conceived the idea for this space and described it as “a non-conventional art gallery, where you can feel more at home and comfortable viewing art (and as) a way to begin a collaboration between our center and VCUarts”.

The theme for the gallery’s opening was “Hospitality and Reconciliation” and featured artwork of various mediums like glass-casting and wood, to acrylic paint on canvas. For the night’s theme,the purpose was to combine the ideas of faith and art.

Despite the religious undertones of the night, not all of the pieces had visuals that related. VCUart student Patrick Carter’s sculptural representation took a different approach. Displayed on a mantle were three ducks, lined up in a row with the final duck laying another egg to add to the line of eggs that had already begun.

“I wanted to convey the idea of animate objects becoming inanimate. It’s meant to show life, death and rebirth. Everything is a cycle,” Carter said.

Rush has a piece titled “Mercy” at the gallery which is the first thing seen when entering the gallery.

“One image that can be associated with hospitality and reconciliation is the hand. When reaching out and providing kindness in any form of hospitality, one extends a hand. When one is repenting on their knees, they are pulled up off their face by a loving hand of reconciliation,” said a plaque underneath her piece, which showed several reaching hands intertwined with white ribbons.

With some of the works also for sale, the Living Room Gallery is a way for students to make a profit on the artwork they have created.

“The Gallery is just another opportunity for student art to be shown because there aren’t very many places that students can showcase their art,” Rush said, who also said she thought that there is a lack of an art gallery for students work to be shown.

This is only the beginning for the “Living Room Gallery.” In the future they hope to host not only VCUarts events, but special exhibitions, performances, house music concerts, literary events, lectures and fundraisers for other departments and the VCU Community.