U.Va. Art Museum Hosts Saturday Tour by Melissa Ragain on Sept. 24

Listen to the UVA Today Radio Show report on this story by Jane Ford:



September 8, 2011 — Guest curator Melissa Ragain will give a Saturday Special Tour of the University of Virginia Art Museum's new exhibition, "Figure Study: The Fourteenth Street School and the Woman in Public," on Sept. 24 at 2 p.m.

The exhibition features paintings, prints and drawings by a group of American realists known as the "Fourteenth Street School." This group, including artists Kenneth Hayes Miller, Isabel Bishop, Guy Pène du Bois and Reginald Marsh, all lived and worked in New York's Union Square neighborhood and studied or taught at the Art Students League between the world wars.

In New York during the 1920s and 1930s, women experienced upward mobility in the form of white‐collar careers and marriage, and they became a part of a new consumer and leisure culture. Ragain will discuss how the painters of the Fourteenth Street School situated their modernity in the fluctuating social landscape of the first half of the 20th century, even though their painterly ideal was grounded in the art of the 16th century.

Ragain is a Ph.D. candidate in the U.Va. Graduate School of Arts & Sciences' McIntire Department of Art, where she earned her master's in art history in 2006. She has written for ARTLIES, Criticism and Inform magazines. She has been an intern for the Zimmerli Art Museum, the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts and the National Gallery of Art. She was the 2009-10 Luzak-Lindner Curatorial Fellow at the U.Va. Art Museum and a 2010-11 Core Critical Studies Fellow at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.

The U.Va. Art Museum offers its Saturday Special Tours on the third or fourth Saturday of every month, offering the opportunity to join faculty, curators and scholars as they explore a variety of focused topics related to museum collections and exhibitions.

Saturday Special Tours are free and open to the public. For information, call 434-243-2050 or e-mail museumoutreach@virginia.edu. The museum is located at 155 Rugby Road, one block from the Rotunda.

— By Jane Ford

Media Contact

Jane Ford

U.Va. Media Relations