My work uses animal images as a method for exploring modern life in a way that illuminates the intimate connection between the human and animal kingdoms, with animals often acting as alter egos for humanity. The horse especially has always been an essential image for me. Similar to a number of women artists, the horse appears as a self-image, a device to see the world and one’s experience from both an intimate perspective and that of an objective observer. Like a modern Aesop’s Fables, these beasts transform human experience into the natural world and reflect our own existence back to us. Along with horses, I’m especially interested in those animals who secretly reside in our own backyards—wild but suburban. Living lives parallel to our own, they exist almost invisibly both inside and outside of mankind’s domain—a wild, mysterious presence amidst the barbecue grills and patio furniture. There is an awareness always of the presence of the animal, especially equine and vulnerable (a vulnerability which may be human as well).

Norfolk native Virginia Van Horn is a longtime member of the southeastern Virginia art community. She received her BFA in printmaking from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill and her MFA in sculpture from the Visual Studies Program of Old Dominion and Norfolk State Universities. She also studied and exhibited in Urbino, Italy as part of a program sponsored by New York’s School of Visual Arts, and most recently was a Visiting Artist at the American Academy in Rome. Virginia currently teaches at the Governor’s School for the Arts. Inspired by her childhood as a champion rider, she is fascinated by animal imagery, especially horses. Her work has branched out from equestrian images to explore new and different combinations of animals, both wild and domestic, only to return to images of the horse in her most recent work.

The under-imagined stories of everyday Black women, kinship, place, and history drive my curiosity to understand the way things were. Through prose, poetry, collage, and mid-19th century forms of silhouette, dressmaking, and quilting, I (re)member lost narratives. When looking at historic photographs, I aim to touch behind the gaze to know a Black mother’s whisper, witness, and memory. Therefore, female figures center my narratives like portraits, and I stand beside them to envision their longings. The cloths of lived experience resonate with memory. I call this practice Heirlooms because the passed down personal artifacts serve as touchpoints to inner lives. Using traditions I learned from the women in my family, the layers of texture and pattern I stitch onto paper form a hybrid that counters the silences in archives.

Darlene R. Taylor is a multidisciplinary artist. History is her muse, and her creative works explore memory in fiction and mixed media collage silhouettes that recuperate unheard narratives of Black life. Fellowships at the American Antiquarian Society, D.C. Commission on the Arts and Humanities, Virginia Center for Creative Arts, and Kimibilio nurtured the creation of the visual works and the prose and poetry in her Heirlooms practice. During the Aminah Robinson Writer Residency at the Columbus Museum of Art, she began this multidisciplinary form of archiving vintage and antique textiles in mixed media narratives of visual art and verse. Her works have been exhibited in group and solo exhibitions and acquired by museums and private collectors, and her writings appear in journals and anthologies.

Growing up in West Texas in a secular family, I found religious paintings of the Renaissance and Baroque periods both fascinating and eerie. As a descendant of Europeans, I felt I was supposed to understand the works as part of my heritage, but they seemed so alien. As a painter I continued to feel pulled to engage these images which I’d only ever seen on a computer screen. I digitally distort and layer images of the paintings until I find a composition that resonates with how the original(s) strike me. My works of oil on canvas and wood are influenced by the art theorist Aby Warburg, who posited that visual culture is bound up with ritual and how humans orient themselves to a world that was initially unmistakably non-human. In my paintings I make space for the nonhuman otherness “contained” in the originals to express itself anew.

Devin Ratheal (b. 1983, Lubbock, TX) lives and works in West Texas and holds an MFA degree in Painting from Texas Tech University, where he graduated in 2021. He has exhibited across the United States and is best known for his oil paintings on wood that blend Renaissance and Baroque paintings with digital distortion to create works that appear to melt or explode onto the wall. His work explores the function and limitation of representation to form connections with the nonhuman world, emphasizing the tensions between material flows and symbols.