Painting and Printmaking students display ‘Blind Date’

Sarah King
Contributing Writer

VCU’s first-year painting and printmaking graduate students worked together to create and curate a show titled “Blind Date,” which is on display at the Fine Arts Building Gallery until the end of the week.

Each of the students selected work from their first semester of grad school to display in the exhibit. The show features single pieces of artwork, as well as pairings of two pieces by the same or by different artists throughout the gallery.

Lee Piechocki, one of the six painting and printmaking MFA students who helped put the show together, said he liked how it looked when they paired two pieces together by different artists.

“There are pairings throughout the show, the way the work is hung,” Piechocki said. “Creating little pairings and matchings was also kind of like a blind date — so it’s just fun ways that the title ties in.”

Piechocki said the title, “Blind Date,” was something that all six students gravitated toward because of its unspecific nature and tongue-in-cheek quality.

“We weren’t sure what was going to be put in, it would be kind of like a blind date,” he said. “We knew some of the work might still be being made up until the date of the installment.”

The idea of a “blind date” continues to operate and make sense throughout the show through the arrangement and characteristics of the included pieces.

“There are relationships between all the pieces in a logical and illogical manner,” said Harris Johnson, another one of the MFA students who contributed to the show.

Johnson said he is happy with the show’s reception so far. VCU was his first choice for grad school, over schools such as Yale and Columbia, because he said he was most impressed and interested with the work the VCU MFA students were doing in Richmond.

Aliza Holdbrook, a photography major who saw the exhibit, said she enjoyed its fun nature.

“I really enjoyed the show,” Holdbrook said. “I think all the pieces were quirky and spoke to me in different ways — it was a fun show and I think it’s great that VCU gives its students the opportunity to actually exhibit their work for an outside audience.”

Johnson said the first-year MFA students will put on another show in the spring called “The Candidacy Show,” which is the equivalent to their final, but the students are allowed to put on as many shows as they would like to if they so choose. The location for “The Candidacy Show” is yet to be determined, but will be taking place in May.

Piechocki said he was very pleased with how the six first-year MFA students worked together as a team to install the show.

“It’s nice to get the work out of the studio in this context and in this way, things kind of take on a solid, finished quality that when you look at them in the studio is hard to see,” he said. “I also see a lot of room for improvement in the next semester though.”

The Fine Arts Building is located on 1000 W. Broad St. and admission to the exhibit is free to all students and faculty.