Today’s Google Doodle (seen above) celebrates a Virginian (by birth): Ella Fitzgerald. The great jazz singer was born ninety-six years ago today in Newport News, but soon after her birth her parents separated and her mother moved the family to Yonkers, New York. Virginia’s loss but the world’s gain. If you’ve never seen it before, this [...]

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Springtime in Virginia, oil on canvas, Nicolai Cikovsky (Charleston Renaissance Gallery)

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Because we’re slow, we missed the work of Australian artist Judy Watson that until earlier this year was on display at the University of Virginia. [See update.] This set of six color etchings features Thomas Jefferson’s architectural drawings of the University of Virginia overlaid with images collected and produced by the artist. The work deals [...]

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Ruins of Rotunda, painting of the University of Virginia Rotunda ruins after fire, on a Rotunda roof tile, by Minnie Jones, ca. 1895–1896 (University of Virginia Special Collections); after the jump, a photograph of the ruins. PREVIOUSLY: A Beautiful Day for a Fire

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As long as we’re posting wonderful Virginia photographs today (and this week), we should mention that the Vietnamese-born photographer An-My Lê just won a so-called MacArthur “Genius” grant. Her series Small Wars “depicted men who spend their weekends reenacting battles from the Vietnam War in the forests of Virginia.” Here she talks about her approach and influences: [...]

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Nancy and Dwayne, Danville, Virginia, 1970 by Emmet Gowin (1941– ), of Danville. Says the photographer: The two children, the boy and the girl, are so simple and so complicated. I remember in the micromoment, I was aware that her hand was whiter than everything else. They were fighting, and they fought long enough that they [...]

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In honor of Natasha Trethewey‘s appointment as poet laureate of the United States, VQR has commissioned from the Virginia Arts of the Book Center (a sister program of the encyclopedia) the above broadside. Printed by our own poet in residence, Kevin McFadden, it contains an original woodcut by Josef Beery, all in service of Trethewey’s poem [...]

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As we noted earlier, today is the anniversary of Nat Turner’s rebellion. Whether this uprising of slaves, which took place over two days in 1831, was “successful” and whether I fairly quoted Thomas Jefferson is an issue raised in the comments. Our reader appears uncomfortable with the notion that Turner, and his acts, have become [...]

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A Visit from the Old Mistress by Winslow Homer, 1878. The Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C., provides some background: A Visit from the Old Mistress captures a tentative encounter in the postwar South. The freed slaves are no longer obliged to greet their former mistress with welcoming gestures, and one remains seated as she would [...]

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A Dog Swap by Richard Norris Brooke, 1881. Housed at the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C., this painting of Brooke’s was created at the same time as A Pastoral Visit. Some background: His ‘Pastoral Visit’ of 1880 was for many years one of the most popular paintings at the Corcoran Gallery in Washington. ‘Dog Swap’ [...]

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A Pastoral Visit by Richard Norris Brooke, 1881. The Corcoran Gallery in Washington, D.C., provides some background: A Pastoral Visit depicts an elderly minister seated at a table with a family of parishioners. Of the numerous paintings by Brooke that represent African American life in rural northern Virginia, this is the most celebrated. The artist portrayed the [...]

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From Kevin Levin’s Remembering the Battle of the Crater: War as Murder (2012): Three years later [in 1869], John Elder—who was present in Petersburg at the time of the battle working as an aide in the field and as a mapmaker—released his dramatic oil painting of the battle, which highlighted the importance of [William] Mahone’s [...]

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A new exhibit at the Virginia Museum for Fine Arts, which takes its title from Whitman’s poem “As Toilsome I Wander’d Virginia’s Wood[s],” showcases one of VMFA’s seminal works—Eastman Johnson’s A Ride for Liberty—The Fugitive Slaves, March 2, 1862—in addition to 29 paintings, sculpture, and rare books from noted public and private collections across the [...]

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You might already know the Charlottesville photographer John Grant from this image, which I think you could say has gotten a fair amount of play, but it’s the photograph at top, of ink in water and titled Jazz, that I most love. Ella Fitzgerald, a native of Newport News, is shown in the middle photograph [...]

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Washington City Paper reports on the 5×5 project in Washington, D.C., in which five curators invite five artists each to install temporary public artworks around the capital. The only local curator among the bunch, Laura Roulet, has tapped, as one of her five, Wilmer Wilson IV, a bright new D.C. light who, covered in postage stamps, [...]

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As our entry makes clear, rain was a huge factor at the Civil War battle of Spotsylvania Court House in May 1864: The worst of [the fighting] occurred at an exposed portion of the line Confederates dubbed the “Mule Shoe” and a nearby a curve that came to be known as the “Bloody Angle.” Bodies [...]

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We neglected on Wednesday to celebrate the birthday of Newport News–native Ella Fitzgerald. And what an elegant and gorgeous singer she was. She embodied the archetype of the virtuosic singer; nothing was beyond her technically. And yet, as I wrote several years ago on the occasion of Oscar Peterson’s death, this is not everyone’s cup [...]

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