Award-winning Roanoke-based multimedia artist Annie Waldrop will display a new exhibition titled “Venus Inferred” at Mary Baldwin’s Hunt Gallery from Nov. 7–Dec. 2.
The exhibition is open to the public. It will launch with an artist’s talk and opening reception from 4:30–6 p.m.
Waldrop calls the collection an outcome of her decades-long quest to use bookmaking, painting, assemblage, collage, and other mediums to explore femininity through themes like spirituality, Buddhism, motherhood, and creativity.
“This body of work represents the culmination of a process akin to tending a garden or raising a child,” wrote Waldrop in a statement. “It has always been a labor of love which has its own organic course to follow — including both unpredicted detours and clearly defined destinations.”
The exhibition is rooted in — and dedicated to — the time Waldrop spent studying under late MBU art professor Mary Echols while attending Mary Baldwin in the mid-1970s, and, later, at Staunton’s Beverly Street Studio School. (Echols passed in December of 2020.)
From left: One of Waldrop’s life-size book sculptures on display in Roanoke; from her solo exhibition at the Appalachian State University Turchin Center.
“Mary was a friend, colleague, and mentor for many, many years,” said Waldrop, who is fresh off a major solo exhibition at Appalachian State University’s Turchin Center. “It was through her instruction, love of art history, and interest in the figure that I developed an affinity for the female form and all of its meaning.”
Waldrop has dedicated the show to Echols because, “she exemplified a life of service for the higher good, was the most innate mother, artist, and nurturer, who, through her good works, laid the foundation for so many arts-related endeavors in the Staunton community and beyond.”
Waldrop’s talk will feature remembrances of her time at MBU, what it was like to live and participate in the New York City art scene of the early-1980s, working as a high school art teacher to make ends meet, showing her art up and down the East Coast, and becoming a full-time artist in 2012.
“Living day-in-and-day-out attending to works of art, one begins to tune into the needs of each individual piece like a child who will ask for what he or she needs in order to evolve. ”
Multimedia Artist Annie Waldrop
The Hunt Gallery is dedicated to the exhibition of contemporary work in all media by regionally and nationally recognized artists.