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Artographic Essay the Old Neighborhood in Art and Word

The Valentine Museum in Richmond, Virginia, recently assembled an innovative exhibition on the city’s neighborhoods. Painting the Town: Richmond Neighborhoods, Past and Present is the brainchild of artist Brett Busang. He worked with general collections curator Jonathan Zachman, who, together with his staff, developed a unique panorama of urban development in the Richmond metropolis over the course of the twentieth century and the effect of such development on the city’s neighborhoods. The message of the exhibit is unmistakable. Urban development has not been kind to neighborhoods (see Figure 1, Leigh Street Panorama). Included in the exhibition is a narrative explaining Richmond’s growth and the move to the suburbs. In addition to the brief histories of several city neighborhoods and the artifacts from torn-down houses and businesses in many of those neighborhoods, there are videotaped interviews of old-timers and newcomers about the neighborhoods where they live. The exhibition also includes a large partition covered with one-sentence comments by children about their neighborhoods and what they like about them; another section is an interactive experience that invites visitors to match a photograph of a particular location in Richmond with a photograph of the same location taken years later. The most prominent features of the exhibition, however, are the paintings of Busang and those of Melissa Burgess, another artist captivated by the community represented by old neighborhoods. It is Busang’s work, though, that constitutes the focal point of Painting the Town. Painting in the tradition of Edward Hopper, Winslow Homer, and the Ashcan School, Brett Busang has captured in acrylic what Ray Suarez, a noted National Public Radio journalist, recently captured in word (see Figure 2, Construction Site, Cary Street). Ray Suarez is the host of National Public Radio’s Talk of the Nation and author of The Old Neighborhood: What We Lost in the Great Suburban Migration: 1966-1999. Both Busang and Suarez draw our