Marymount University’s Barry Gallery, located on the school’s main campus, will open its “Lay of the Land” exhibition with a Friday, Feb. 2, reception from 6 to 8 p.m. Co-sponsored by Marymount’s History & Politics and Fine Arts departments, both the reception and ensuing exhibition are free and open to the public.
The art of Victor Ekpuk, Shané K. Gooding and Rujunko Pugh will be featured, along with the historical exhibit of James Parks and calligraphy from the series “Your State of Mind” by Felecia Brice McFail.
A related Black History Month event is a talk by George Derek Musgrove on the book he co-authored, “Chocolate City: A History of Race and Democracy in the Nation’s Capital,” at 7 p.m. on Thursday, Feb. 8 in Reinsch Auditorium. Musgrove is an associate professor of history at University of Maryland, Baltimore County. Sponsored by MU’s Department of History & Politics and the Arlington Historical Society, the free event is open to the public.
Parks was a freed slave who served as a gravedigger and maintenance man at Arlington National Cemetery for more than 60 years. He is the only person buried there who was born on the grounds. The Parks exhibit is on loan from Tamara Moore and the Parks Family.
The area artists exhibiting at the Barry Gallery have eclectic backgrounds.
• Ekpuk is a Nigerian-American artist whose work began as an exploration of traditional Nigerian graphics and writing systems and has evolved to embrace symbols from diverse cultures to form his personal style of mark-making. He received a bachelor of fine & applied art from Nigeria’s Obafemi Awolowo University. He has had solo shows throughout the United States, in the Netherlands, the United Kingdom and his native country.
• Gooding works in video, photography, audio, writings and installation and her art has been exhibited in Colorado, Chicago and New York. She also co-produced a documentary for PBS. Her bachelor’s degree is in film and television from New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts. She earned a master’s degree from Howard University in mass communications and media studies and a master of fine arts degree in studio photography from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
• McFail started as a self-taught hand-lettering artist before attending the Corcoran School of the Art. After completing several calligraphy courses, she started From One Hand To Another —The FOHTA Collection, a calligraphy business that turns the spoken word into visual art and promotes good handwriting. She expanded her company by opening The FOHTA Gallery in 2007 in Arlington. She is a graduate of Norfolk State University and a two-time recipient of the Hermann Zapf Scholarship and currently serves as an Arts Commissioner for Arlington County.
• Pugh was born to a Japanese mother and African-American father and works across various media, including photography, printmaking, installation, illustration, paste-ups and murals. She draws on Japanese, African and African-American imagery and explores themes such as self, history, culture, environment and race as well as global movements of people, ideas, and technologies. She has a master of fine arts from the University of Sydney and has exhibited in Australia, the United States, Italy, New Zealand and Kenya.
The exhibition runs from Jan. 26 through Feb. 26.
The Barry Gallery, located in the Reinsch Library at Marymount, 2807 North Glebe Road, is open from 10 a.m. to 8 p.m. Monday through Thursday, and 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. on Friday and Saturday. Admission is free. Access for individuals with disabilities is available.
For more information on the gallery, go to marymount.edu/barrygallery.
Photo caption
Keiko, 2017, by Rujunko Pugh. Screen print with acrylic detail, 28 x 40 inches
