Influential Richmond artist celebrated in multi-site exhibition

Richard Carlyon was a dynamic artist, an influential teacher and a force in the Richmond arts scene. Now he's also the subject of a retrospective examining his long and compelling career.

Carlyon (pronounced "car-line"), who was born in 1930, attended Richmond Professional Institute (now Virginia Commonwealth University), where he earned undergraduate and graduate degrees before joining the faculty. He was named VCU Professor Emeritus in 1996 and received VCU's Presidential Medallion, the university's highest honor, in 2005.

He died in 2006, "ending an extraordinary life in art," Howard Risatti, VCU Professor Emeritus of Art History, wrote in an essay about Carlyon.

Four downtown Richmond art galleries are exhibiting a portion of Carlyon's work, each show with a different theme. Richmonders can see an extensive body of work from a 50-year career including paintings, drawings, videos, collages and constructions, many of which are being shown to the public for the first time.

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Anderson Gallery of the VCU School of the Arts is presenting "Choice." As part of the show, the gallery reassembled Carlyon's studio, which was on West Broad Street near VCU. "His studio was a very meticulously configured space with everything in its proper place," said Ashley Kistler, the gallery's director. There's a wonderful inventory of tools -- countless paintbrushes, all perfectly aligned, for example -- as well as sources of inspiration and images he had around the studio."

The show also includes a selection of self-portraits from the 1950s to the 1990s, and a survey of paintings spanning a 25-year period, ranging from those created in the mid-1970s to two of the last he painted before his death.

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The Visual Arts Center of Richmond is showing "Chance." Katherine Huntoon, director of exhibition programming, explained the meaning behind the title. She said that John Cage -- a dancer, choreographer and composer who died in 1992 -- helped shape Carlyon's work. "Cage was a big influence in that he believed it was important to allow chance to be part of the creative process and to let go of trying to be in control of everything," she said.

"Chance" consists of collage and assemblage created from a variety of materials including found objects. "When using found objects, there's a great deal of chance involved in looking for the materials. Chance also plays a role in putting them together," Huntoon added.

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1708 Gallery is presenting "Interval," which was curated by two former Carlyon students, Gregg Carbo and Brad Birchett. Carlyon taught Carbo in the late 1970s and Birchett, beginning in 2004. The two installed Carlyon's final one-man show at the Reynolds Gallery in 2005.

Birchett said that he and Carbo spent a lot of time reviewing Carlyon's work and realized that much of it is about "the space in between. We in the universe are always concerned with Point A and Point B, where we've been and where we're going. Richard examined the extra space in between, and the journey in between things." He said the title, "Interval," also references Carlyon's movement from one artistic style to another during his career.

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Finally, Reynolds Gallery is showing two exhibitions. "Eleanor" focuses on Carlyon's works featuring his wife, Eleanor Rufty, while "Early and Late" spotlights his early and late paintings and drawings.

Of the paintings in "Eleanor," gallery director Bev Reynolds said that Carlyon's wife was "really a muse within a lot of his work. We're also showing 13 drawings, so beautiful and exciting."

With "Early and Late," Reynolds said, "we wanted to show some of the first paintings he did while in New York in 1952, when he was a very dynamic painter with a more figurative focus to his work." "Early and Late" shows the progression of Carlyon's work over a 50-year period, during which it evolved to become minimal and highly conceptual.