{ News }

LOCATION AND CONTACT INFORMATION

Sweet Briar College
Development House

Sweet Briar College
College Relations
P.O. Box 1056
Sweet Briar, VA 24595

{P} 434.381.6262
{F} 434.381.6263

Driving Directions
Campus Map

The Sweet Briar Promise outlines our distinctive approach for providing meaningful, enduring education for women. It includes:

10.7.04
Va. Artist to Discuss Lifetime of Painting in SBC Presentations
Artist Nancy Witt will present a gallery talk and reception at an exhibition of her paintings at Sweet Briar's Babcock Fine Arts Gallery on Friday, Oct. 8 from 4:30 to 6 p.m. Her presentation is part of an Oct. 6-12 campus visit for a fellowship sponsored by the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts and the SBC Studio Art Department.

A resident of Hanover County, Va., Witt has completed more than 600 paintings in a 40-year career. She has a bachelor of arts degree in art from Old Dominion University and also attended the former Richmond Professional Institute (now Virginia Commonwealth University) and Randolph-Macon Woman's College. Her widely collected paintings are found in many corporate and museum collections including Wheat First Securities, Circuit City, the University of Virginia, and the Mint Museum of Art.

Witt is a towering presence in the Richmond artistic community and beyond. Although her MFA degree is in sculpture at Virginia Commonwealth University, she has devoted herself almost exclusively to painting. The daughter of a minister, Witt grapples with complex metaphysics in her paintings, and while art critics term her a surrealist, she describes herself as a "meta-realist."

"Because of the complexity of many of my paintings," Witt says in her Artist's Statement, "I'm sure that it might be supposed that they are meticulously thought out beforehand. The opposite is true. A small thumbnail sketch … is usually all that precedes putting brush to canvas. At that point some ‘thing' has excited my libido visually and I'm off."

Witt's paintings will be on display through Oct. 17. Here are her scheduled presentations at Sweet Briar:
  • Friday, Oct. 8, 4:30-6 p.m. - Gallery Talk and Reception, Babcock Fine Arts Gallery

  • Monday, Oct. 11, 1:30 p.m. - Slide talk with painting students, analysis of a single painting from start to finish

  • Tuesday, Oct. 12, 5:30 p.m. - Dinner and slide talk of Witt's artistic career, Johnson Dining Room, Prothro Dining Hall
Art exhibitions are supported by the SBC Lectures and Events Committee. For more information, please contact Rebecca Massie Lane, director of SBC galleries, at (434) 381-6248 or rmlane@sbc.edu, or Shannon Wells, media relations coordinator, at 381-6388 or swells@sbc.edu.