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Introduction
“I like a state of continued becoming, with a goal in front and not behind.”
Among the many quotations chosen by Myron Helfgott for his piece The Feel of the Thing, Not the Think of It, this brief remark by George Bernard Shaw particularly describes the arc of the artist’s life and artistic focus. The recent retrospective of Helfgott’s work at VCU’s Anderson Gallery followed this arc through more than four decades of art making, a practice that is ongoing and still evolving. As the exhibition invitation states: “A native Chicagoan, Myron Helfgott joined the faculty of the VCUarts Department of Sculpture in 1968. He has since been a creative mainstay of the Richmond arts community, while also exhibiting at numerous venues beyond the region. In the aftermath of his retirement from teaching in 2003, Helfgott’s ever-inventive activity in the studio has continued unabated.”
Opening on January 16 and running through March 8, the show, which was titled Myron Helfgott: An Inventory of My Thoughts, presented more than fifty sculptures, works on paper, and multimedia installations and was accompanied by a catalogue with essays and additional images that did not appear in the show.
Blackbird’s presentation follows the gallery installation, where the work was organized thematically and combined new and recent work with significant pieces selected from over several decades. We also include the catalog commentary by Joseph Seipel, Ashley Kistler, Howard Risatti, Elizabeth King, Dinah Ryan, and Lester Van Winkle.
To navigate this suite of materials, select any item from the menu on the “Introduction and Table of Contents” page. The pages listed under Anderson Gallery are representations of the gallery’s installations. Click on any thumbnail to expand and view the image in high resolution. The information about each work can be found below the image in this lightbox container; simply click on the left and right buttons that appear when you hover over the image to move through the images in sequence. For mobile devices, pressing the right or left side of the image will navigate through the slideshow as well.
The articles found under Catalog Commentary also feature embedded images. Click on the “Introduction and Table of Contents” link at the bottom of each page to return to the navigation of the suite. This presentation departs our usual look in an experiment to address scalable design.
Myron Helfgott: An Inventory of My Thoughts was organized by the Anderson Gallery and curated by director Ashley Kistler. The catalog was funded by individual contributions and the VCUarts Office of the Dean..