Featured Art Exhibits
İbrahim Mustafa Vuslat Noyan Güven
1930’s Foyer
İbrahim Mustafa Vuslat Noyan Güven is a Turkish artist with a strong academic background in Traditional Turkish Arts. Before moving to the United States, he worked as an academic in Türkiye and developed his artistic practice through Traditional Turkish Handicrafts, Art, and Design. His work focuses on Ebru, the Turkish art of marbling, which he approaches not only as a historical technique, but also as a contemporary visual language shaped by water, memory, time, and cultural continuity. Drawing from Turkish mythology and Anatolian motifs, Güven explores themes of memory, transformation, protection, and the sacred feminine. He moved to the United States in 2024 and currently lives in Richmond, Virginia, where he is re-evaluating his artistic practice and exploring how his visual language can evolve within his new cultural environment.
Laura Helene Sebastian
Gellman Room
“In the Cindery Darkness”
The title of the show is an excerpt of the following quote from Philip Roth’s “Goodbye,
Columbus” said by the story’s narrator;
“I thought of my Aunt Gladys and Uncle Max sharing a Mounds bar in the cindery darkness of their alley, on beach chairs, each cool breeze sweet to them as the promise of after life…”
Since my first reading of the book, this quote has stayed with me, and like my very own summers throughout my life, has shaped my artistic practice. Seemingly forgettable moments, often relegated to the footnotes of our lives, are actually the foundation of our existence and far more significant than the typical milestones.
The pieces in this show are monuments to memories; Stealing rolls of quarters from my family’s laundry room to use for snacks at a gas station up the road, afternoons spent reading in my backyard dipping my toes in a kiddie pool, weeks spent going up and down the boardwalk with a friend in Virginia Beach, time spent with the loves of my salad days, and noon swims that melted into night in the James River. None of these are graduations, weddings, birthdays, or funerals and yet they’ve made all the difference.
The title of the show is an excerpt of the following quote from Philip Roth’s “Goodbye,
Columbus” said by the story’s narrator;
“I thought of my Aunt Gladys and Uncle Max sharing a Mounds bar in the cindery darkness of their alley, on beach chairs, each cool breeze sweet to them as the promise of after life…”
Since my first reading of the book, this quote has stayed with me, and like my very own summers throughout my life, has shaped my artistic practice. Seemingly forgettable moments, often relegated to the footnotes of our lives, are actually the foundation of our existence and far more significant than the typical milestones.
The pieces in this show are monuments to memories; Stealing rolls of quarters from my family’s laundry room to use for snacks at a gas station up the road, afternoons spent reading in my backyard dipping my toes in a kiddie pool, weeks spent going up and down the boardwalk with a friend in Virginia Beach, time spent with the loves of my salad days, and noon swims that melted into night in the James River. None of these are graduations, weddings, birthdays, or funerals and yet they’ve made all the difference.
