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ALFONSO PÉREZ ACOSTA
Art Installation & Exhibition

Art Installation 
Saturday, July 31,  1-4:30 pm

Artist in Residence Exhibition
July 31 – Oct 31, on view daily in the Anderson Meadow
Included with regular Garden admission girl making rock art paintings with ALFONSO PÉREZ ACOSTA Art

Join us to watch the artist in residence, Alfonso Pérez Acosta, create his art installation of your rock paintings!  Earlier this summer, visitors select and painted a rock that spoke to them. Now, Alfonso Pérez Acosta will create a large circular art installation with those rocks at the base of the Anderson Meadow. Come see him make this large-scale community art piece!

Artist Statement

This project is about reconnecting with nature, and I have found that the main way of doing this happens by exploring our deep internal nature.  What is it? What does it look like? How does it feel?  In this exploration, I’ve been particularly drawn to rocks as a natural element, an artistic medium and a spiritual anchor to navigate these questions personally and with others.  For me, the most meaningful answers come from an emergent need to recognize and investigate my Indigenous heritage, and on a collective level, the whole experience has found a home in the principles of the Medicine Wheel, an ancient rock formation created by Indigenous Peoples of North America as a sacred space for healing and spiritual practices.

My art installation is the result of a creative conversation between these elements is meaningfully inspired by the Medicine Wheel, with over 300 rocks painted by people of different ages, genders, races and cultural backgrounds who participated in our four workshops at the Garden, each of us reconnecting with nature externally and internally by exploring our own internal natures. This installation gathers all the rocks in a circular area where visitors can see every drawing, painting, word or scribble and interact with the space by walking to the central circle, as an invitation to be present with the healing intentions and inclusive energy of many of us wanting to restore our connection to nature.

 

 

Start:
Saturday, July 31, 2021
End:
Sunday, October 31, 2021
Event Details

More About Alfonso Pérez Acosta:

Richmond is a place where my artistic practice has grown significantly, connecting me to different people, communities, organizations and institutions to work on creative healing projects and ways of visualizing a change of narrative into our different cultural identities. In 2019 my work was recognized as the cover story for the Top 40 Under 40 in Style Weekly Magazine, highlighting my role as an Art Program Director with Sacred Heart Center. That same year I organized and presented the first celebration of National Immigrants Day in Virginia, with a dance and drawing project called Migration Flow and gave a TEDxYouth@RVA talk on the different ways we can use Creative Languages to transform barriers into opportunities.
In 2020, my creative response to the beginning of the pandemic was a portrait project called Green Portraits, with daily virtually posted portraits of people who had recovered from COVID-19 around the world. Also this year my mural practice grew significantly and I was part of the Mending Walls project about social justice through public art. Again we celebrated National Immigrants Day with a project named Portraits Of Immigrant Voices, partnering with the Office of Multicultural Affairs to highlight language diversity and open a wider perspective on immigration stories in RVA.