vol. 288 / Art of PlaceExploring and celebrating the place we all love to call home.
VOL. 288 / Art of Place
Meet this week’s guest editor, S. Ross Browne, a celebrated Richmond artist whose work has enriched the River City with depth and color for decades. Born in Mount Vernon, New York, Ross studied Communication Art and Design at VCU and The Corcoran School of Art. His paintings have been featured in more than 75 exhibitions across the U.S. and abroad, with works in the permanent collections of the VMFA, the Valentine Museum, the Black History Museum of Virginia, Virginia Commonwealth University, the Duke Ellington School of the Arts, and The JXN Project.
Ross has received honors from the VMFA, the Black History Museum of Virginia, the Virginia Commission for the Arts, CultureWorks, and the Gottlieb Foundation, among others. You can spot murals by Ross across Virginia—from the Children’s Hospital at VCU Health to Virginia State University and beyond. He was also an inaugural artist in the acclaimed Mending Walls Mural Project.
As an educator, Ross has shared his passion through therapeutic art programs at VCU Health and through youth initiatives such as Art 180 and the Fresh Air Fund.
This week, Ross joins us for a special issue of Here Weekly with his tips for exploring and celebrating this place we all love to call home. Take it away, Ross...
Richmond’s Arboreal Treasures
Compared to many of the cities I have visited around the world and those I have lived in across the U.S., Richmond is wonderfully walkable, with many urban neighborhoods just a short sojourn away from the almost bucolic. I think the proximity to nature that living in Manchester provides is truly a moment of zen amid what can be the miasma of city living. I love to raft, fish, and take long hikes and bike rides along the many wooded paths while identifying flora and fauna with friends. It always amazes me how quickly the sounds of the city melt away. One of my favorite shorter walks is along the floodwall to the west of Manchester, under the Manchester Bridge, across the Potterfield Bridge, and onto Brown’s Island—past the amphitheater at Tredegar, under the Lee Bridge, where the suspended footbridge provides breathtaking panoramas of the river (especially at sunset)—then onto Belle Isle, where the many trails can lead to sylvan tranquility, sparsely interrupted by fellow hikers and bikers and the distant, muted trumpeting of a lumbering locomotive.
A gem-blue robin’s egg nestled in a brown dry thatch is the Visual Arts Center of Richmond. I often find myself depleted from the day-after-day hard hustle of being a working artist. It is one of the few jobs that requires grueling manual labor, mental perspicacity, and unflinching vulnerability as a prerequisite. So it would almost seem anathema to logic that when I teach two painting classes in a row for three hours each, such an endeavor is energizing and soul freshening.
My students come from all backgrounds and age groups with one overarching thing in common. They want to paint. They want to create. They want to be artists. The obvious caveat emptor aside, our shared enthusiasm for the craft is energizing in an unfathomable way. I forget all of my troubles and aches and pains and try my best to ignite a spark of inspiration in my students. They often return session after session for years so we come to understand one another and the complex mathematics of art.
Now this is just my introduction to intermediate/advanced acrylic painting classes. VisArts has so many art, design, writing, woodworking, jewelry making, pottery, and photography classes I couldn’t possibly name them all without continuing to violate the guest editor word count. It’s a wonderful place with supportive and kind staff and opportunities for professional artists. Treat yourself. Go there.
The continuing exhibition Bodies of Labor, Hands That Built a Nation at the Black History Museum and Cultural Center of Virginia is a must-experience. It is a group show featuring Virginia artists’ interpretations of what labor means to them and African Americans’ contributions to that effort. The BHM is a thought-provoking, whirlwind tour of cultural enrichment and enlightenment on any day. This particular exhibition, however, is a tour de force of self-reflection, skillful creative elasticity, and cultural introspection.
In this political climate, we are often regaled with the greatness of American ingenuity and industry without giving due credit to all of the American peoples who helped lay the foundation and were co-architects of the edifice shaping its history. As an artist who is featured in this exhibition, I can truly say—without bias or hubris—that the work in this show is, as my brother Kent would say, outstanding.
Curated by Mary Lauderdale, Director of Curatorial Services, it would probably behoove anyone to ask her for a tour of the exhibition, although with her busy schedule that’s probably a long shot. Shameless plug: the painting I have in this museum exhibition is In Defiance of Caste, 2024, 60” x 60”, oil on linen.
Catch the latest mural by Ross, recently completed on the corner of 10th and Hull Streets as part of a new series of enhancements to the Manchester neighborhood. The project, made possible through a partnership with Venture Richmond, Manchester Alliance, and the Hull Street Merchants Association, is part of a community effort to celebrate creativity and spark momentum in one of Richmond’s most historic corridors. Ross says his mural, measuring 20’ x 30’, is his ode to Afrofuturism.
