Reynolds Gallery is pleased to announce the opening of Making Waves, a group exhibition of recent work by Hampton Boyer, Roberta Gentry, Erika Huddleston, Meg Lipke, Bailey Santaguida, Amanda Valdez & SARUNGANO WEMESO (Tendai Mupita). The exhibition opens on Friday, March 1, 2024 at our Main Street location with a public reception from 5 – 7 pm. The show runs through April 19, 2024.
This exhibition showcases an exciting group of established and emerging artists, all bringing fresh perspectives and innovation to our space. With the majority of these artists showing with Reynolds Gallery for the first time, this show seeks to push existing boundaries and present a wide range of media, techniques, and themes. Texas-based artist Erika Huddleston and LA-based artist Roberta Gentry both bring their own interpretations of the natural world into the gallery, while recent University of Richmond graduate Bailey Santaguida uses her paintings as a form of personal journaling. Zimbabwe-born artist SARUNGANO WEMESO explores mythology and hybrid figures in vivid color palettes, while the well-known New York-based artist Meg Lipke uses her colorful, curved pieces to question spatial depth within the canvas. Making Waves is a celebratory collection of individual creativity and thought-provoking contemporary art that leaves the viewer engaged and reflective.
Amanda Valdez
Amanda Valdez is a mid-career studio and research-based artist best known for mixed-media paintings which incorporate sewing, embroidery, fabric, oil stick, and other paint materials. Her process begins through sketching compositions, and her stylized forms reference landscape, physical experiences, archaeological objects and sites that she encounters in day-to-day life, research, and travel. Her paintings reflect the history and memory that the body holds in its somatic makeup: scars, sags, wrinkles, marks, symmetries, and asymmetries. She uncovers these through the act of drawing, accessing a deep body of stored shapes, and personal experiences in the process of developing her work. Her recent paintings utilize new techniques and materials from intricately woven threads to textured, layered oil stick which adds to the viscid acrylic drip forms and smooth velvety gouache. Amanda Valdez was born in Seattle, Washington in 1982 and lives in New York, New York. She earned an MFA from Hunter College, New York, New York and a BFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois.
Bailey Santaguida
Bailey Santaguida primarily uses painting, video, and installation to examine the process of journaling, a means for recording memories of her friendships and home. She leans on personal symbols—typically five-pointed stars and five-pointed houses—to represent people in her life, the self, or a dream. Santaguida claims that “ultimately, a ‘good’ painting means that it visually looks a little strange, and that I have processed what has happened in my life honestly, and without judgment.” She graduated with a B.A. in Visual Art and Media Practices and Psychology from the University of Richmond in May of 2023. In July 2023 she participated in the Reynolds Gallery group exhibition “Boundless,” an all-female group show that featured new and recent work from eighteen artists. She was also an artist in residence at Vermont Studio Center in August 2023. She was born in Kennett Square, PA and currently lives in Manhattan, NYC.
SARUNGANO WEMESO
SARUNGANO WEMESO (Tendai Mupita) was born in 1990 in Harare, Zimbabwe, and graduated from Chinhoyi University of Technology in 2015. In 2017 he received an artist residency award at the Bag Factory in Johannesburg, South Africa, and in 2019 he was a participant in the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine, USA. SARUNGANO has been included in numerous exhibitions in Zimbabwe, Kenya, Italy, London, USA, and South Africa. He graduated with a Master’s degree in Sculpture from Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond, Virginia, USA. His artistic practice explores imagination, feeling and mythology through colorful and vibrant compositions. Inspired by Shona culture, SURANGANO’s works reside on a boundary of abstract and figurative art, depicting hybrid beings through a unique combination of color, light, line and circular forms.
Meg Lipke
Meg Lipke paints colorful and experimental compositions onto canvases with subtle curvature which is the artist’s quiet subversion of the modern convention that “serious” painting must be rectangular. Further, the artist studies prehistoric cave drawings and brings this interest in fundamental mark-making into the vocabulary of her paintings. Lipke was born in 1969 in Portland, Oregon and was raised in Burlington, Vermont and Cheshire, England. She received her MFA from Cornell University and has taught at The University of Northern Iowa, Cornell University, and Pratt Institute in Brooklyn. Lipke paints colorful and experimental compositions onto canvases with subtle curvature. Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally and has been reviewed in Art in America, the Village Voice, the New York Times and many online publications.
Hampton Boyer
Born in Pittsburgh, PA and raised in Hampton Roads, Hampton Boyer layers bright, geometric forms to create his figurative paintings and collages. He juxtaposes inspiration pulled from African folklore and literature with his own experience as a contemporary artist. The flow that he achieves through his artistic practice fills his work with reverberating energy and intimate emotion. He has exhibited in numerous group shows and solo exhibitions, including a solo show at Omni Gallery in London (2023), and two upcoming shows one at the Chrysler Museum of Art (2024) and a solo show at the Reynolds Gallery (2024).
Erika Huddleston
Erika Huddleston lives and works in Dallas, Texas and received a BA in Fine Arts from Vanderbilt University and a Masters in Landscape Architecture from the University of Texas at Austin. She is a contributor to Aether Art Journal and Texas Architect Magazine—writing about the connections of urban design and craftsmanship and public art. She was the Artist-in-Residence with the park non-profit Shoal Creek Conservancy in Austin in 2014 and in 2017 her oil paintings and original maps of Waco Creek were shown at the Mayborn Museum at Baylor University, with the Art Center of Waco. She has painted major bodies of work onsite in public parks: along Waco Creek in Waco, Texas, Shoal Creek in Austin, Texas, the Trinity River in Dallas, Texas, the Ramble in Central Park in New York City in 2019; and she was invited to paint and exhibit a series of paintings recording the restored Blackland Prairie behind the Botanical Research Institute of Texas [BRIT] in Ft Worth in Fall 2021. Texas Monthly in Spring 2017 named her as part of their list of the “Top Ten Texas Artists to Collect Now” and she was selected as a 2015 Hunting Prize finalist. Erika’s oil paintings record at 1:1 scale in “urban wilderness” locations the temporal natural phenomena that are not easily documented with typical landscape data-collection tactics. “I paint to record what cannot be seen on a static map and which is fleeting and hard to document, but which exists.”
Roberta Gentry
Roberta Gentry is a Los Angeles based artist whose work is inspired by the natural world and the balance of order and chaos that exists within it. Using her painting, she explores the connections and conflicts that occur between architecture and biology, and questions the divide between natural and artificial. She earned an MFA from The State University of New York, Albany, New York, and a BFA from University of Arizona, Tucson, Arizona.
