HOME: Eleven Artists on Heritage, Belonging, and Place

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Les Yeux du Monde is pleased to present its next exhibition, HOME: Eleven Artists on Heritage, Belonging, and Place. Bringing together eleven accomplished contemporary artists, the exhibition explores the multifaceted concept of home as a physical sanctuary, an internal landscape, and a constructed environment. 

In this show, the notion of home is examined through works that touch on themes of heritage, family, migration, identity, memory, meaning, and the natural environment. Rather than offering a singular definition, the exhibition invites a variety of perspectives, allowing each artist’s distinct practice to negotiate the boundaries of displacement, inheritance, and connection to place.

The breadth of these inquiries is mirrored in the range of work on display. The exhibition features painting, sculpture, and works on paper that emphasize rich texture and physical presence. Visitors will encounter pieces created with traditional oil, textile, plaster, clay, pastel, and handmade natural oil paint, among other materials. Together, these physical substances ground the concepts of memory and belonging, offering a sensory and contemplative exploration of what we carry with us, what we leave behind, and what we build.

Participating Artists: 

Heather Beardsley, Pam Black, Barbara Campbell Thomas, Michelle Gagliano, Meg Hitchcock, Sanda Iliescu, Megan Marlatt, Ana Rendich, Dorothy Robinson, LaRissa Rogers, and Millicent Young.

Heather Beardsley

Artist Statement

Strange Plants explores the fragile boundary between domestic life and the natural world through found household objects, embroidery, and sculpture. The series began after a visit to Pripyat, the abandoned city near the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant, where nature has gradually reclaimed homes, schools, and public spaces left vacant after the disaster. That experience led me to imagine plants not simply returning, but quietly overtaking the spaces we build for ourselves.

Working with found domestic objects including dollhouses, antique linens, and souvenir plates, I explore ideas of home, memory, and belonging. The word souvenir comes from the French word meaning “to remember,” making these plates objects that preserve an idealized memory of place. Dollhouses similarly distill home into miniature form, inviting domestic life to be imagined and performed through play. By allowing vines, flowers, and fungi to gradually reclaim these familiar objects, I disrupt their sense of permanence and nostalgia. Nature becomes an unexpected participant, suggesting that the places we remember and the homes we build are never as fixed or enduring as they seem.

Although the work is presented through intimate materials and a sense of nostalgia, the absent inhabitants leave viewers to wonder what has occurred and whether nature’s return signals collapse, renewal, or something in between. Rather than depicting destruction alone, Strange Plants occupies a space between loss and regeneration, inviting reflection on the fragility of our built environments and the impermanence of the places we call home.

Bio

Heather Beardsley is an American visual artist that creates mixed-media projects at the intersection of art, science, and environmental issues. She works primarily with embroidery, cyanotype, and air-dry clay, mixing the aesthetics of scientific illustration with craft and children’s art materials to play with display conventions and visual hierarchies. Beardsley received her MFA in fiber and material studies from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2015, and her BA in studio art from the University of Virginia in 2009. After completing her master’s, she spent a year in Vienna, Austria on a Fulbright Scholarship for Installation Art, and in 2017, she was awarded a year-long Braunschweig Projects International Artist Fellowship by the Ministry of Science and Culture for Lower Saxony, Germany. Some of her residencies include KulturKontakt Austria in Vienna; Shangyuan Art Museum in Beijing, China; IZOLYATSIA in Kyiv, Ukraine; Rogers Art Loft in Las Vegas; Sirius Arts Centre in Ireland; and La Box in Bourges, France.  Beardsley has shown her work both nationally and internationally, including group exhibitions at Science Gallery Dublin, Museo del Traje in Madrid, the Virginia Museum of Contemporary Art, and Museum Rijswijk in the Netherlands. She had her first solo museum exhibition in 2023 at the Chrysler Museum in Norfolk, VA. In 2024, she had solo exhibitions at the Virginia Museum of Contemporary Art and Pier-2 Art Center in Kaohsiung, Taiwan.

Pam Black

Artist Statement

Javier’s Crew, is an observation of the men who tend the farmland where I live—digging, weeding, planting, trimming, pruning, seeding, watering. They work in harmony, humming, joking and rhythmically performing repetitive tasks. It is a well-rehearsed routine, performed numerous times in a day.

They appear and disappear—often overlooked, but relied upon. They are quiet keepers of the land.

I am intrigued by their forms as they bend, reach, haul, lift, rest. Underneath my ongoing interest in capturing the human figure at work is a desire to uplift and draw attention to the ephemeral quality of the laborer.

Bio

Pam Black is Gordonsville, Virginia-based artist who work spans painting and drawing. She received her MFA from Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, NY in 1979, and her BFA from Washington University in St. Louis, MO in 1976. Black spent over two decades teaching at the University of Virginia, including twenty-one years in the School of Architecture and twenty years in the Department of Drama, as well as an earlier tenure at Piedmont Virginia Community College from 1985 to 2008. She has also led drawing workshops at institutions including the Beverley Street Studio School in Staunton, VA and UVA’s Creature Project, a cross-disciplinary collaboration between the Department of Drama, School of Architecture, and Studio Art program. Black is the recipient of several awards, including honors at the 34th Irene Leach Memorial Exhibition at the Chrysler Museum of Fine Arts and a Merit Award at the Peninsula Fine Arts Center’s Annual Juried Exhibition. Her work is held in collections including the Virginia Public Art Commission at Charlottesville City Hall, Capital One in Richmond, VA, and both Martha Jefferson Hospital Sentara and UVA Children’s Hospital in Charlottesville.

Barbara Campbell Thomas

Artist Statement

Housetop quilts are so named because of the repeated motif of concentric squares, as if one were viewing a shingled rooftop from above. The quilter chooses a medallion of fabric for the center and constructs the rest of the quilt outward in a radiating fashion.

From a High Museum of Art collection description of Annie Mae Young’s quilt, “Housetop Variation”

For Home, Barbara Campbell Thomas shows two textile pieces and a painting, all variations on the Housetop quilt pattern, and all critical moments in the artist’s inquiry into the conversation between quilting and abstract painting. Each started as all housetop quilts begin–with a center medallion of fabric. The artist used a sewing machine to attach strips of fabric around that center, gradually constructing an ever growing and radiating composition. But instead of using whole strips of textile to push the composition outward, the artist cut and pieced strips made up of a multitude of colored fabric scraps. A shifting field of staccato fragmentation is the result, calling up microchips, aerial mapping and the big bang all at once.

Of the three works, the two large textile pieces came first. For Campbell Thomas, the decision to focus on image-making via pieced and sewn fabric was a way to move deeper into the material reality of textile, to see and understand it with more complexity, and to delight in its possibility. That understanding fueled a new series of paintings, and Yes One is an example. Here, the artist pieced, sewed and stretched a painting ground, to which paint and collage were added.

Bio

Barbara Campbell Thomas is a North Carolina based painter who has exhibited in museums and galleries across the United States, including the Weatherspoon Art Museum (NC), the Virginia Museum of Contemporary Art, The Painting Center (NY), the Atlanta Center for Contemporary Art, the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art (NC), the North Carolina Museum of Art, Ortega Y Gasset Projects (NY), Maake Projects (PA), Wavelength Space (TN) and Hidell Brooks Gallery (NC).  Barbara Campbell Thomas is currently preparing for her first museum solo exhibition, to be exhibited at the Susquehanna Museum of Art in 2026.

Her work has been written about in Two Coats of Paint, Art Papers, The Coastal Post and BURNAWAY. She has been interviewed on the following podcasts: Sound & Vision, Seamside, Studio Break and Visual Quitters.

Barbara Campbell Thomas attended Skowhegan, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, the Elizabeth Murray Artist Residency and Hambidge Center for Creative Arts.  She is a Professor of Art and the Director of the School of Art at the University of North Carolina Greensboro.

Michelle Gagliano

Artist Statement

Home examines the idea of home as both a physical structure and a psychological space. It considers belonging, memory, displacement, refuge, and the ways personal and collective histories become embedded in domestic environments. Home is never a fixed idea; it is shaped by expectation, nostalgia, security, loss, and the continual process of making and remaking a place.

My practice emerged within the home itself. As a single mother, my studio has always occupied borrowed and improvised spaces throughout the house, allowing my practice to develop alongside family life. The domestic environment was never separate from the work—it became both its subject and its methodology. The idea of home as a place of protection, care, and stability continues to underpin my practice.

Material is central to this investigation. I work with reclaimed architectural elements—discarded doors, cabinet panels, salvaged timber, and other domestic remnants. These surfaces carry the physical evidence of previous lives, functioning as repositories of memory rather than neutral supports. By painting onto materials that have already existed within homes, I extend their histories while questioning ideas of permanence, value, and belonging.

My work reflects broader narratives of migration and inheritance. I think about the experiences of those who left their homes in search of safety and opportunity, and how the meaning of home is continually reconstructed across generations.  Reclaimed materials become quiet witnesses to these histories, holding traces of both absence and resilience.

The home I designed for my family informs this body of work. I planted a circle of trees around the property to establish a sense of enclosure and a stable horizon—a gesture of protection and continuity. This idea of creating refuge, both physical and psychological, continues to guide my approach to material, process, and image. Evocative of the arms of St.Peter’s.
Through painting, I explore home as an evolving construct: a place shaped as much by memory and lived experience as by architecture itself. The work invites viewers to consider how ordinary domestic materials can hold complex narratives of care, identity, migration, and belonging.

Bio

Michelle Gagliano is an American visual artist recognized for her environmentally responsible studio practice, handcrafting her own paints from natural, non-toxic materials — earth and mineral pigments, walnut and lavender oils, egg tempera, milk, and foraged sources such as Albemarle County clay and grapevine charcoal. Through this practice, humble matter becomes luminous compositions exploring the cyclical relationship between making, dwelling, and caring for the earth.

Gagliano is also known for her study of Renaissance paint recipes, particularly those of Raphael. In 2024, she presented a solo exhibition at Casa Natale di Raffaello, the museum in Raphael’s home in Urbino, Italy, showing contemporary works made with Raphael’s original recipes; one painting from the exhibition was acquired into the museum’s permanent collection. She was also granted official sponsorship from the Accademia Raffaello to establish an international artist residency focused on sustainability in creative practice, launching in spring 2026.

Gagliano received her MFA from American University in Washington, D.C. and is a VMFA Fellow. She has exhibited throughout the U.S., Europe, and Asia, and her work is held in public and private collections including the Burchfield Penney, the University of Virginia, and the Virginia Museum of Fine Art.

Meg Hitchcock

Artist Statement

In my text piece Declaration of Independence, I focus attention on the founding document of the United States, the home of indigenous peoples and immigrants alike. America has always strived to be a place of freedom and equality, and although many have been ill-treated, we’ve always been a democratic society. By cutting the letters from The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon, I point to the political failings of the current administration, whose disregard for human rights is leading to the decline of all that we cherish, and threatening our sense of home.

Bio

Meg Hitchcock is a New York-based artist and writer. Her work with sacred texts is an expression of her lifelong engagement in religion, psychology, and literature. She received her B.F.A. in Painting from the San Francisco Art Institute and studied classical painting in Florence, Italy.

Working across text, sculpture, and installation, Hitchcock meticulously cuts and reconfigures sacred and literary texts to create intricate compositions that examine the shared narratives and tensions between faith traditions. Her recent three-dimensional works expand this practice into layered sculptural forms that shift with the viewer’s perspective. Drawing on principles of Renaissance painting and architectural space, these works balance structure with subtle optical effects, inviting sustained engagement and quiet reflection.

Hitchcock is a 2023 Adolph & Esther Gottlieb Foundation Individual Support Grant recipient and is the author of the art blog IN THEIR STUDIOS: Conversations with Women Artists.

Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally at institutions including MASS MoCA, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, the Currier Museum of Art, Virginia MOCA, and CODA Museum in the Netherlands. Her work is held in numerous public and private collections, including the University of Virginia, where it was recently acquired as part of the University’s permanent collection. Hitchcock’s work has been reviewed in publications including Art in America, Hyperallergic, ArtCritical, The New Criterion, and The Huffington Post.

Sanda Iliescu

Artist Statement

Born in 1934 in Romania, Zorica Vasiloiu—my mother—worked all her life as a civil engineer. She was also a dissident: she criticized her country’s totalitarian regime, which was a dangerous and brave thing to do in the 1960’s and ‘70’s. She and I escaped Romania (a country behind the Iron Curtain) in 1975 and were granted political asylum in what was then West Germany. One year later we emigrated to the United States, eventually becoming US citizens. Many years later, in 2019, I created the watercolor Melancholy Angel: The Engineer, which became a kind of gift for my mother: a remembrancer and love note. The melancholy of the angel—a hopefulness amid sadness—reflects the fact that when I made the piece my mother was no longer alive, though she is still very much a part of my life.

Throughout her life, my mother sewed, embroidered, and made needlepoint tapestries. I too love hand-sewing, embroidery, quilts, and blankets. Blanket no. 3 grew from my memories of my son Gabriel’s baby blanket, which we affectionately called “blankie.” The painting is, for me, an exploration of soft colors and subtle textures. It is also about comfort, warmth, and gentleness, all qualities that I hope for in my home.

Bio

Sanda Iliescu is a Charlottesville, Virginia-based artist who makes paintings, drawings, and collages in a variety of media ranging from watercolor on paper and acrylics on canvas, to recycled paper and other found materials. Outside the studio, she makes murals and public art installations, often with students at the University of Virginia, where she is Professor of Architecture and Art.

Born in Romania, Iliescu emigrated to the United States when she was 17 years old. She received her BSE in Civil Engineering and her M.Arch in Architecture, both from Princeton University. Among her professional awards are The Rome Prize, a McDowell fellowship in painting, and The Distinguished Artist Award of the New Jersey State Council of the Arts. Scholarly writing on Iliescu’s artwork includes essays by Paul Barolsky, Commonwealth Professor of Art History at the University of Virginia, and Carmen Bambach, curator of drawings and prints at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Iliescu also writes on art, architecture, and aesthetics. She has published two books: the edited volume The Hand and the Soul: Aesthetics and Ethics in Architecture and Art (The University of Virginia Press, 2009) and Experiencing Art and Architecture: Lessons on Looking (Routledge, 2022). Numerous journals and conference proceedings have published her writing. Most recently, LA+, an interdisciplinary journal of landscape architecture, published her essay “Drawing Landscape” and her artwork Poem Drawing in its 2023 issue.

Megan Marlatt

Artist Statement

My recent work has developed a focus on weather patterns and the variety of sun and moon light as it moves through the landscape. My landscapes are not sublime, pastoral, or spatial. Rather, they are stages for narratives to unfold, usually mythical ones. This particular painting was a vision from my own backyard on a snowy, winter’s night.

Bio

Megan Marlatt was a recipient of a Fulbright Scholar Research Fellowship to Belgium in 2018, where she studied Belgian carnival culture and painters. She has won a Fellowship in Painting from the National Endowment for the Arts (1995), two Professional Artist Grants from the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts (2013 and 2006), one from the Virginia Commission on the Arts (1996), and The New Jersey State Council on the Arts (1985). She has had numerous national and international solo exhibitions and group shows. Since 2013, Marlatt has been the founder and director of the artist collective, “The Big Head Brigade”, a group that builds and performs in large papier-mâché heads. She resides in Virginia and is Professor Emerita of the University of Virginia.

Ana Rendich

Artist Statement

I try to work with the most necessary elements.

My work is based on the everyday living, in the complexity of our own nature and ruptures in memory and perceptions.
My presentation for this exhibition shows rectangles, squares…like fronts of homes, far away from the literal three dimensional optical/illusion effect.

These pieces than can look like “houses “are very spectral, almost like floating in the air, no people around, it doesn’t seem to be any turmoil or discord… almost it looks all is quiet and perfect.  That is a perception, and that is what we assumed from…

I have been interested in observing from our relationships with our own inner and external life, how memory and  perception can extend to pure or true ideas/concepts or rule without middle ground or exceptions,  and no relient on anything else.

At the end , I believe that the viewer unfolds the meaning…

Bio

Ana Rendich is a visual artist born in Buenos Aires, Argentina, whose practice spans painting, works on paper, and three dimensional works. Rendich studied Scenic Design at Universidad del Salvador in Buenos Aires and Costume Design at the Instituto Superior de Arte at the Teatro Colón, gaining a strong grounding in painting, artistic anatomy, color, design, art history, philosophy, and materiality.

Rendich’s work has been featured in solo, juried, and selective exhibitions throughout the U.S. and internationally, including at Lincoln Center in New York, the Butler Institute of American Art in Youngstown, OH, the Bellevue Arts Museum in Bellevue, WA, the Siena Art Institute in Siena, Italy, and, most recently, The Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C. Her work is also represented in important private and public collections, including that of the University of Virginia’s new Contemplative Sciences Center.

Rendich lives and works in Spotsylvania, Virginia.

Dorothy Robinson

Artist Statement

Home for me is somewhere close to trees and other vegetation. I want to plant myself wherever I see a forest or garden, and just grow into my surroundings. This being somewhat impractical, I’ve turned to oil painting as a source of inspiration. Mixing colors and adding/subtracting layers of paint to a surface tap into the constant motion of an interior life, and evoke themes of growth, change, and instability. I don’t plan my paintings or work on them from sketches. Compositions emerge from accumulating fragments and passages that grow, collide, shrink, and finally settle into what feels like ‘place’. They hover between abstraction and figuration, leaving room for subjectivity, contradiction, and multiple meanings to emerge. Rather than a single view, they suggest movement and the passage of time – and in practice, often take many months to complete

Bio

Dorothy Robinson is an American visual artist known for imaginative oil landscape paintings that invite viewers to see the natural world in new ways. Characterized by swirling brushwork, rich texture, and vibrant colors — some made from powdered pigments of earth and rock — her mesmerizing compositions suggest a world coming into being. Robinson’s approach is intuitive and open-ended, resulting in fantastical imagery that echoes, in her words, the “larger, invisible forces constantly at work in the world.”

Robinson received her MFA in Painting from UC Berkeley in 1993, along with the Eisner Prize in the Creative Arts and the J. Ruth Kelsey Travel Award. She has undertaken numerous artist residencies, including at MASS MoCA, the Marie Walsh Sharpe Art Foundation Space Program, the Constance Saltonstall Foundation, VCCA, Monson Arts, and Soaring Gardens, and has received grants and awards from the Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation, the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, Artists’ Fellowship Inc., and the Lillian Orlowsky and Louis Freed Foundation, among others.

Robinson has held solo exhibitions at venues including the Garrison Art Center in Garrison, NY and Slate Gallery in Brooklyn, NY, and her work has been included in numerous group exhibitions throughout the United States, including at the Weatherspoon Art Museum in Greensboro, NC, the Provincetown Art Association and Museum, and at Les Yeux du Monde in Charlottesville, VA. Her work has been featured in publications including Art Spiel and the Talking Pictures Blog.

LaRissa Rogers

Artist Statement

The target and the weapon, 2025
Archival inkjet print, acrylic, porcelain, velvet, and walnut frame

The image used a photo of my great great grandfather who was enlisted in WWI in the infantry. The photographs are painted, with protruding metallic roses coming off the surface. What interests me about the language of target and weapon is that it operates simultaneously on historical, political, and spiritual registers.

Historically, I have been thinking about Black soldiers during World War I, particularly those from Virginia and the American South. Many returned from fighting abroad only to realize they still had to wage another battle at home for freedom, dignity, and equality. They were enlisted as weapons in service of democracy while remaining targets of the
very racial violence and exclusion that democracy claimed to oppose. That paradox continues to resonate today.

At the same time, I am interested in these terms through a theological lens. Humanity itself is the target of God’s redemptive work, yet humans are also the vessel through which God’s redemption enters the world. Likewise, the enemy has no authority apart from what can be manipulated through human beings. The battle has always been for the body. Since the Garden, humanity has occupied the contested space between heaven and earth. Formed from the dust and animated by the breath of God, we alone were given rightful dominion over creation. Because we bear the image and likeness of God, the struggle is ultimately not simply over land, institutions, or governments, but over the human body itself. If the image can be distorted and the likeness corrupted, then the dominion entrusted to humanity can be surrendered through deception.

Within this framework, race becomes one of the most effective instruments of division rather than its ultimate cause. Race creates an unnecessary target, a structure through which fear, hierarchy, and violence are organized. The racialized body becomes the site upon which larger spiritual and political struggles are enacted. What appears as racial conflict is also the manifestation of a deeper contest over identity, relationship, and authority.

This is why I am interested in repivoting the conversation. Rather than understanding race as the origin of division, I want to examine how it has been repeatedly mobilized in service of broader projects of domination, including war, empire, nationalism, and the rhetoric of democracy itself. Military service becomes especially revealing in this regard, exposing how bodies are simultaneously celebrated, sacrificed, and discarded in the name of freedom.

Against this logic, I want the work to move toward beauty and repair. Beauty as a weapon of warfare. Throughout history, war has depended upon narratives that justify violence by reducing bodies to instruments. My work resists that reduction. Through material transformation, beauty becomes a form of restoration rather than decoration, through the keloid or raised rose from the skin of the work, insisting that bodies are not merely targets to be acted upon, but weapons deployed as sites of redemption, memory, and renewal.

Ultimately, I see “target” and “weapon” not as opposites but as conditions or positions that can be hosted within the same body. The work asks what happens when the body becomes the terrain upon which competing visions of dominion, identity, and freedom struggle for authority, and whether beauty and repair can reclaim that body as a place of covenant rather than conquest.

Keloid XI, let us begin then, not with flesh, but with light (shine), 2024
Cannibalized tchotchke figurines, Porcelain, glaze.

mighty lot of branches. Leaves too… Tiny little cherry blossoms. Your back got a whole tree on it.”
— Toni Morrison, Beloved

The Keloid series cannibalizes racialized porcelain tchotchkes through adornment. Each figurine is covered in porcelain slip and overgrown with hand sculpted porcelain roses that function simultaneously as decoration and tumor. The slip fractures during firing like flaking skin, exposing moments of the original glaze beneath. The resulting surface recalls a keloid, a raised scar formed when the body produces excess collagen after injury.

Keloids hold a dual meaning. They are scars, but they also evoke traditions of Black Atlantic scarification, where the body is intentionally marked as ornament and beauty. The works inhabit this tension, asking whether injury itself can become a site of transformation rather than merely evidence of violence.

The figurines themselves carry the histories of porcelain, sugar, empire, and racial capitalism. Their lineage reaches back to seventeenth and eighteenth century European banquets, where elaborate sugar sculptures depicting racialized figures performed wealth, power, and colonial desire before being consumed. As porcelain replaced sugar, these decorative objects retained the racial fantasies embedded within them, becoming the bourgeois tchotchkes that continue to circulate today.

Rather than preserving these objects, I obscure them. Roses spread across their surfaces like coagulations, scars, and blossoms simultaneously. Here I return to Toni Morrison’s description of Sethe’s scarred back as a chokecherry tree. As Anne Anlin Cheng observes, this comparison transforms the marks of violence into ornament without erasing their pain. I propose that by obscuring these racialized figurines through rose embellishments that act as a keloid, I offer adornment as a method of healing. Grotesque beauty becomes a keloid, reminding us of the beauty that can grow from injury.

The Keloid sculptures resist this reduction. By mutating racialized objects through ornament, they redirect attention from culturally prescribed identities toward a deeper understanding of personhood. Beauty becomes an act of repair, not because it conceals violence, but because it refuses violence’s claim to have the final word.

This theological framework also informs the material language of the work. Instead of using glazes drawn from Korean and Chinese ceramic traditions, including celadon and cobalt blue, the work is metallic capitalizing off of the way light reflects off of it. Shine not only becomes a source of light formed through the darkness of the material, but, shine as an adornment strategy within the black community has become a strategy of portraying dignity.

The title of Keloid XI, let us begin then, not with flesh, but with light (shine), invokes Genesis 1, returning to the moment before human differentiation, before race, nation, or cultural classifications. The work asks what it might mean to encounter identity first through divine image rather than social construction, and whether beauty, like light, can reveal a path back to covenant rather than conquest.

Bio

Rogers is a multidisciplinary artist whose work investigates how personal and shared memory and history impact the perpetual evolution of cultural identity formation and placemaking. Research and material become the entry point of broader social-political interrogations, often asking the question, who and what survives?

Rogers was named to the Forbes’ 2024 “30 under 30” list in the Art and Style category. She has exhibited at Documenta 15 (Germany), Weserburg Museum (Germany), Lilley Museum (NV), the Wattis Institute of Contemporary Art (CA), the California Museum of Photography (CA), the Virginia Museum of Contemporary Art (VA), Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (CA), California State University, Fullerton, The Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts (MA), Torrence Art Musuem (CA), and the Fuller Craft Museum (MA).

She received the Visual Arts fellowship at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts (2022) and the Fine Arts Work Center Fellowship (2023-2024). Rogers also held residencies at the Bemis Center of Contemporary Art (2022), the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture (2024), and MASS MoCA (2025). She is a recipient of the Hearthland Foundation Grant (2025), Anonymous Was a Woman (2025), National Endowment of the Arts (NEA) Grant (2026), and Mike Kelley Foundations for the Arts Grant (2026), among others. She has been featured in The New York Times, Harper’s Bazaar Japan, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, ARTnews, ARTSY, New American Paintings, Boston Art Review, and The Boston Globe.

Rogers received her Master of Fine Arts from the University of California, Los Angeles, and her bachelor’s degree in fine arts from Virginia Commonwealth University.

Rogers is a Tenure-Track Assistant Professor and Head of Sculpture at the University of Virginia. She is currently represented by Super Dakota.

Millicent Young

Artist Statement

My way of working with flat/frontal yet dimensional forms originally referenced pages or folios and architectural features such as niches and windows. The forms are a means to hold, to frame what is at edge of my grasp. These works care about the way things are held. I refer to what holds the plaster tableau as a bezel. In jewelry making, it is the setting that holds the gem.

Language is one of the things these works probe. What does it record? What happens when words are split from the substance of their meaning? When they become marks holding place for something no longer known, where does the story go? Who hears what has become inaudible?

The marks I make in the plaster are an asemic script, a no longer known language. Or a language seeking a meaning. The tableaux also bear the marks of a telluric language that remembers liquidity, dust, vapor, and the cosmos.

These pieces are the descendants of my first steel and plaster that Les Yeux du Monde exhibited in my 2018 solo after I had moved from my long time home in Albemarle to New York.

Bio

Millicent Young is a studio artist currently focusing on installations that integrate handmade sculpture, projection, verse, and sound. Young (b.1958, NYC) attended the Dalton School on scholarship (1962-1976) where her study of visual art, craft, music, and poetry were foundational. She went on to study at Wesleyan University, University of Virginia (BA 1984), University of Denver, and James Madison University (MFA 1997).

Since 2018 Young has received multiple grants through the New York State Council on the Arts and Foundation for Contemporary Art and has had 12 solo exhibitions regionally and abroad.
Her 2026 multimedia immersive installation, Holding Light Sutra, received grants from the Henry Moore Foundation, New York State Council on the Arts, and Arts Mid Hudson.

In 2025, Young’s multimedia work and performance was featured at The Hyde Collection, NY.
Her work was exhibited alongside William Kentridge’s at the Dox Centre for Contemporary Art, Prague, 2023 and is included in the National Museum of Women in the Arts collection. It has been featured on the cover of Sculpture Magazine (March/April 2020). In 2022, Young received the Distinguished Alumni Award from the School of Art, Design, and Art History at James Madison University in 2022.

Shortly after receiving her MFA, Young’s work was recognized with her first of two fellowship grants from the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. Between 1996-2016, it was awarded special recognition from curators affiliated with the Smithsonian, Hirshhorn, Dia, New, Guggenheim, and Whitney Museums in juried exhibitions and received top recognition at the Florence Biennale in 2005.

From 1986-2003, Young was an art educator teaching studio art and art appreciation at the secondary and college levels and hybrid forms of movement practices in a community dance studio. Since 1993 she has worked as a freelance master gardener and landscape designer focusing on permaculture and healing.

Young relocated from piedmont Virginia in 2017 to New York. She resides in the foothills of the Shawangunks where she designed and built her current live/work space.