GCCR reopens gallery for student work
The Gay Community Center of Richmond is reopening their art gallery.
Nick Bonadies
Contributing Writer
Young Hwan Yoo and Shawn Saharko are among countless students working overtime this semester to bring their artwork to an audience outside class critiques. For them specifically, though – and seven of their classmates – that means sharing quarters with one of Richmond’s secondhand boutiques.
Their self-run and self-curated show, “Color!,” is set to open April 19 under the same roof as Diversity Thrift – central Virginia’s beloved mecca of all things secondhand, complete with vivid rainbow exterior.
The show’s artistic statement describes a group of artists creating a “visual conversation” through “the language of color.”
crocheted doilies surrounding their edges. Photos courtesy of Shawn Saharko
“Color!” is Yoo and Saharko’s second project together as curators. It will also be among the first of several shows to set up in the Gay Community Center of Richmond’s recently re-opened gallery space, which has been out of use for the past three years.
“Diversity Thrift brings all types of people there,” Saharko said, who graduated from VCU’s painting and printmaking department in 2011, and who has worked at Diversity Thrift for the past seven months. “College students, poor people or even rich people who like to find awesome things.”
“Essentially, we want to do the same thing with the gallery,” he said. “We want to try and bring that energy into (the gallery space).”
Since working at Diversity, Saharko has been looking for opportunities to restore activity to GCCR’s then-inactive gallery space. Initially, he proposed a show that exclusively featured work from Diversity Thrift employees, many of whom are VCUarts graduates.
That show, titled “Clocked Out,” will open in May, immediately following “Color!,” for which Saharko joined forces with Yoo this semester.
“I had known a bunch of artists (who use) a bunch of color … and I thought, it’s interesting that I’m proposing a show to Diversity Thrift, because their symbol is a rainbow,” Yoo, a junior double-major in sculpture and painting and printmaking, said. “And that rainbow is not just about ‘colors,’ but about diversity and our relationship with the community.”
Jerry Walters, a junior sculpture major working on several pieces for the show, described the concept of color as “the common ground between all of (the artists featured in ‘Color!’) … Obviously, color is a really important thing that we all think about when making our work.”
Besides functioning as a great resume builder, Walters said, being able to show work outside of a school environment carries other rewards not to be found in an in-class critique.
“Once you’ve gotten to the point where you’re really comfortable doing your own thing … it’s nice to be able to make your own work and have people view it objectively, outside of an assignment,” he said. “The cool thing about this is no one’s thinking of it like an assignment.”
Color!, featuring work by Clayton Smith, Danya Smith, Erica Kitamura, Jerry Dilan Walters, Joe Paulk, Julie Hinzmann, Nastasja Ok Martel, and Young Hwan Yoo, opens in the GCCR Gallery at 1407 Sherwood Avenue on Friday, April 19.
