This experience features a guided tour for five with curator Valerie Cassel Oliver of The Dirty South: Contemporary Art, Material Culture, and the Sonic Impulse at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts as well as a private dinner with Cassel Oliver and five guests at Laura Lee’s with guest chef Tiara Smith, the founder and creator of THE DROP OFF CHEF. To remember this experience and dive deeper into the exhibition’s themes, the winner will also go home with a box of items curated by Cassel Oliver that represent The Dirty South and some of its inspirations. The Dirty South: Contemporary Art, Material Culture, and the Sonic Impulse chronicles the pervasive sonic and visual parallels that have served to shape the contemporary landscape, and looks deeply into the frameworks of landscape, religion, and the Black body—deep meditative repositories of thought and expression.
Curated by Valerie Cassel Oliver, the groundbreaking exhibition explores the legacies of traditional southern aesthetics in contemporary culture and features multiple generations of artists working in a variety of genres.
Valerie Cassel Oliver is the Sydney and Frances Lewis Family Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. Prior to this position, she spent sixteen years at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, Texas, where she was senior curator. She was director of the Visiting Artist Program at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a program specialist at the National Endowment for the Arts. In 2000, she was one of six curators selected to organize the Biennial for the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York.
Looking to put her own culinary stamp on Richmond, Virginia, Tiara Smith wanted to start her own business cooking the food she loved. Her food doesn’t just reflect on the depth of her culture, it also reaches your heart and soul. She plans on transforming The Dirty South experience from a visual one to actually tasting the roots, culture, and hip hop. She will be featuring some of her favorite cuisine, which most call Southern style and Smith calls her heart beat. She will intertwine items from Africa, New Orleans, Atlanta, and none other than Richmond. Her experience will not just leave you full but also inspire you to love the culture just a little differently.
This experience/box is made possible by generous donations from Valerie Cassel Oliver, Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, and Laura Lee’s.
