InLight 2024: Grounds for Clearing
Call for Proposals
November 8 - 9, 2024
Pine Camp Cultural Arts and Community Center
4901 Old Brook Road, Richmond, VA 23227
Deadline to apply: May 22, 2024
1708 Gallery is pleased to announce its call for proposals for InLight: Grounds for Clearing, an annual exhibition of contemporary art that takes place at night and is in a different location each year in Richmond, Virginia. Now in its 17th year, InLight features new media, sound art, light-based media, sculpture, installation, performance, community-based works, and interactive and virtual projects that are experienced in the dark. This year’s InLight curators are Tiffany E. Barber and Nicole Pollard.
Every year, InLight examines the complex and sometimes conflicted histories of Richmond's public spaces, reflecting community dialogues about which stories are shared and how they are told. Locations, themes, and projects are selected with this goal in mind. Past sites include Bryan Park; Great Shiplock Park; the streets, facades, and alleyways of Richmond’s downtown Arts District; and the sculpture garden and grounds of the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts.
InLight: Grounds for Clearing will take place November 8-9, 2024 at Pine Camp Cultural Arts and Community Center in Richmond’s Northside. Taking Pine Camp’s history and topography as inspiration, Grounds for Clearing will explore the material and metaphorical facets of open space. The Oxford Dictionary defines a clearing as “an open space in a forest, especially one cleared for cultivation;” in Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved, the clearing is a space for healing and for Black revival, a place for Black folks to love and care for themselves outside of the white gaze. When Pine Camp first came to be, it was a clearing – a space carved out of the pine woods, far outside of the city where people went to heal. A former farm and site of both a whites-only and separate Black Tuberculosis Hospital listed on the National Register of Historic Places, Pine Camp today is a multidisciplinary, multiracial community space that offers a theater, dance studio, art classes, darkroom, playground, basketball court, soccer field, walking trails, nature reserves, and public artworks.
For this year’s exhibition, 1708 invites regional, national, and international artists, collectives, and community organizations working in all media and disciplines to submit entries that engage with and respond to the histories that comprise Pine Camp and its surrounding terrain.
Pine Camp’s history stretches back to Virginia’s colonial settlements of the early 1600s, and the site was part of the agricultural land north of the city of Richmond during the periods leading up to the end of the Civil War. After, Pine Camp became City Farm (1866-1909), producing food for city institutions, such as the jail and the city almshouse. The city also utilized the farm in the early twentieth century as an isolation ward for those with highly contagious diseases, especially smallpox, and it was popularly known as “the pest house.” At this time, Pine Camp became a private, whites-only Tuberculosis hospital where isolation, rest, and fresh air in pleasant surroundings were the first lines of disease treatment. This site’s impressive pine trees added to this treatment as they have been shown to have antimicrobial properties. Pine trees are also important because of their durable timber and fast growth. In 1936 the city established a separate Black infirmary. Space in the infirmary was very limited, and it was demolished in 1957 after the main hospital closed. Remains from the hospital, such as bottles and bedpans, can still be found on the site to this day.
For InLight: Grounds for Clearing, artists are invited to propose projects that engage with and expand upon Pine Camp’s histories as well as the site’s current activities and uses. Successful projects will incorporate the site’s topography; its history surrounding race and public health; its wildlife as well as its native flora and fauna; weather and climate patterns as well as ecological and environmental change in the U.S. upper south; and Pine Camp’s current significance to its surrounding communities. Artists are encouraged to consult and incorporate extant digital archival photographs, site maps, and other materials into their proposals. The curatorial team is especially interested in proposals that address ideas around rest and healing, isolation and exile, preservation and reclamation, and fresh air and nature as forms of respite and remedy.
1708 will host two virtual meetings via Zoom to provide an opportunity for potential applicants to ask direct questions about the application and selection process for InLight 2024. The meetings will be Tuesday, May 6th and Wednesday, May 7th, at 5:00 pm. Please register in advance to attend.
For more information, please contact ubuster@1708gallery.org
IMAGES OF PINE CAMP
Examples of sites include: walkways, woods, paths, and open park areas.
Note: Images provided above are examples of these kinds of spaces, rather than exact locations at this time.
Banner Image: nonhumanities, point to touch, to touchpoint fall low up lands, low fall lands up you resemble the wall, you resemble the garden, InLight 2023.
Photo courtesy of David Hale