Message from the Executive Director: Spring 2023

The 34th Conference of the Folk Art Society of America is scheduled for Richmond, Va., on October 26-29, 2023, and you will find the conference brochure in this issue of the Folk Art Messenger. The headquarters hotel is the Omni Richmond, where the 24th FASA conference was quartered in 2011. It is modern, well-located and welcoming, with plenty of space for the annual auction. The Symposium will be in the newly renovated and redesigned Virginia Museum of History and Culture, and we are thrilled to introduce this special museum to our members! Mark your calendar and make your plans, as October is a wonderful season to be in Richmond.

Four new members have been added to the National Advisory Board this year, and we hope you will have the pleasure of meeting then at the Richmond conference.

1. Dr. Colleen Kraft, from Mission Viego, Calif. She was the 2018 President of the American Academy of Pediatrics and is the Professor of Pediatrics at Keck School of Medicine, University of Southern California. She practices General Pediatrics at Children’s Hospital in Los Angeles. She has written an article about her late son and his art for Folk Art Messenger, #106, Summer 2022. Colleen grew up in Richmond and has two adult children living here She and her children plan to attend the conference in October.

2. and 3. Winton and Rosa Eugene, from Cowpens, S. C. They are celebrated folk art ceramicists, who work jointly. Winton creates each piece and draws or paints images on the pottery. Rosa, who is a former nurse, develops the glazes they use and also manages the sales and arrangements for their shows and other business activities. They won FASA’s 2022 Award of Distinction for artists at the Charleston conference last year. A piece of their pottery, “Generations,” was donated to the South Carolina State Museum by FASA as the 2022 Hemphill Memorial Gift. An article about the Charleston awards is in the recent Folk Art Messenger, #107, and the Eugenes’ pottery is featured on the cover.

4. Eldridge Bagley, from Victoria, Va., is a well known artist, whose work most of you probably are familiar with. He currently has a 50-year retrospective exhibition at Longwood Center for the Visual Arts, and his painting in the exhibition “Visionary Virginians” was chosen as the Virginia Museum of History and Culture’s 2022 Christmas card. He received the Award of Distinction for artists in 2011, and he was one of the speakers at the 2011 Richmond conference. We are happy to have another Virginia artist represented on the National Advisory Board.

We have been thinking that we needed to have more artists as members of the National Advisory Board, and all three of these artists are active and enthusiastic members of FASA. Colleen would be the second West Coast member of the NAB, and with her Richmond connection, we believe she would be a valuable and productive member as well.