After Charlottesville focuses on paintings, prints and drawings done in the time period between 2017 and the present. This period is bookended by two artist’s residencies at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts.

The first residency took place in the fall of 2017, just after the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, that took the life of counter protestor Heather Heyer, at the hands of a while supremist. During that residency, I visited the site of the riot as well as a number of other sites involving the history of slavery in Virginia. Prints made at VCCA made use of historical handbills announcing the sale of people, property and animals, resulting in the For Sale by Owner series.

A residency awarded by the California Society of Printmakers at The W.O.R.K.S in Vallejo, California in 2018, resulted in a series of large scale screen prints exploring the shrouding in black plastic of the Robert E. Lee statue after the Charlottesville riot. The statue has recently been melted down.

Returning to my studio in California, I created the large painting Sweet Briar, which combines imagery from the Enslaved People’s Burial Ground at Sweet Briar College, with images of Cambodian Buddhas.

Much work has been done in this period, that involves my travels to places of historical and psychological impact, Over the years I have collected a vast library of images that I use to travel between the present and the past, connecting the dots of humanity’s magnificent opportunities and repeated mistakes.

During Covid lockdown, I substituted travel imagery with images I was exposed to at home and in the news. Personal images that involved my health, the loss of family and friends, and the unraveling sanity of our country.  

Travel has returned to my life, and the work reflects that. A recent trip to Morocco resulted in Endlessly, a new painting that has a direct connection to the For Sale by Owner pieces of 2017.  Most recently, I returned to the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and found meaning in the bleak winter landscape, resulting in the Thicket series of monotype prints.

As always in my work, moments of beauty and tenderness are presented alongside and within the darkness. Contrasting images are used to create detailed comparisons of the wretched and the sublime. Lines blur and connections are made.  A surprising visual language is created, one that reaches places of tender familiarity, shocking trauma, submerged memory and subconscious reality.

-Robynn Smith