Liquid Commonwealth

This exhibition will explore the essential importance, richness, and beauty of water as a defining element of Virginia for all its residents. Co-sponsored by the Department of Art & Art History and the Muscarelle Museum of Art as the culminating outcome of the Fall 2025 Curatorial Project course (ARTH 331), the exhibition will be titled Liquid Commonwealth: The Art and Life of Water in Virginia. Water has become a familiar topic in recent contemporary art, but exhibitions have tended to emphasize national and international issues or very local concerns. Liquid Commonwealth takes a different approach by making the state of Virginia — and Virginia artists — its theme. Through an invitational approach to selection and curation, the exhibition will encourage artists of any community and locale in Virginia to express a range of perceptions, concerns, and joys about water as an essential element of life.

Although water certainly has both urgent political significance and abstract conceptual interest, the project proposed here deliberately celebrates the variety of ways in which the inhabitants of our commonwealth experience water as a tangible source of inspiration – materially, emotionally, spiritually, aesthetically, and more. This is not to say politics or criticality are unwelcome, especially at a time when climate change and pollution pose daunting challenges, but the exhibition seeks to be truly inclusive of a broad scope of perspectives in order to reflect the richly diverse aquatic dimensions of Virginia as a place shaped by various liquid environments: the Atlantic Ocean, the Chesapeake Bay, and more than seventy rivers and lakes from the Shenandoah to the Eastern Shore, not to mention atmospheric water, underground aquifers, and the many human-made reservoirs and systems that sustain life for all species.