Virginia Barnes (1895-1984) was a student, teacher, and artist whose career spanned over six decades. She studied and taught at five colleges and universities, including the University of Montevallo. Her work is held in numerous private and museum collections. This exhibition explores ways that Barnes was connected to the community and environment of Montevallo, as well as to mid-century theories of abstraction and color in modern art. In this small group of prints, the vibrant colors and abstracted forms remind us of Barnes’ connection New York in the 1940s and 1950s and of her studies with the prominent New York School artist and teacher Hans Hofmann (1880-1966). According to the renowned twentieth-century art critic Clement Greenberg (1909-1994), Hofmann was “in all probability the most important art teacher of our time.” Hoffman’s ideas of abstraction and color informed Barnes’ style, and some of his influence may be observed within this exhibition.
Although Barnes’ handling of form was comparable to her New York School contemporaries, many of her prints reflect unprecedented handling of technique. In her prints, Barnes regularly employed multiple processes in one image, layering screen print on top of woodcut, inventing the aqua-graph technique, and hand-coloring many prints. Many of these images reference the natural environment of Montevallo. Barnes frequently depicted plant life in her pioneering prints, oftentimes representing species native to Alabama or even plants recognizable in the Montevallo environment. These dynamic artworks represent not only Barnes’ own experimentation, but also the beginning of a long-standing tradition of innovative printmaking in the Art Department at the University of Montevallo. The prints presented here exemplify these intertwined threads within Barnes’ life and works.
As you experience this exhibition, we hope that you will form your own, new connections to Barnes’ artworks, and we encourage you to help us trace the connective threads of the exhibition beyond this physical space. Please contribute to the discussion and share your own connections to Virginia Barnes and her prints by engaging with the #challenge prompts posted throughout the exhibition.
Virginia Barnes: Connected 