Award-winning multimedia artist Annie Waldrop launches major Hunt Gallery exhibition

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.) 

“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. 

The Hunt Gallery is dedicated to the exhibition of contemporary work in all media by regionally and nationally recognized artists.

The gallery is open Monday through Friday from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. throughout the academic year. CLICK HERE for our 2022–23 schedule of events.