InLight 2024: Grounds for Clearing

From the official InLight 2024 website.

November 8 + 9, 2024 | 7-11pM

Pine Camp Cultural Arts and Community Center | 4901 Old Brook Road, Richmond, VA 23227

InLight is 1708’s annual public exhibition of contemporary art that takes place at night, and is presented in a different location in Richmond each year. It features multimedia works, sculptures, installations, performances, community-based works, and virtual projects that utilize light-based platforms experienced in the dark. Past sites include the Arts District, Bryan Park, Chimborazo Park, Scott’s Addition, and the sculpture garden and grounds of the VMFA. This year’s InLight curators are Dr.  Tiffany E. Barber and Nicole Pollard.

Taking Pine Camp’s history and topography as inspiration, InLight: Grounds for Clearing will explore the material and metaphorical facets of open space. 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.

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.

Participating Artists

• Flooded Sun

• Dietrich Teschner

• Monique Lorden

• Beth Anne Booth + Ellyn Parker

• Izz Anabtawi

• Laura Teele + Ethan Hansen + Abby Brymer

• Mel Myskowski

• Jean Shin

• Yannick Lowery + Qiaira Riley

• Vitche-Boul Ra 

InLight Community Partners

• Pine Camp Cultural Arts and Community Center

• Visual Arts Center of Richmond

• Art on Wheels

• Justice Dwight, artist

1708 is a nonprofit arts organization founded by artists in 1978. Our mission is to empower artists’ ideas and voices so they can create works that matter to our communities. We believe that artists are catalysts for new ways of thinking, connectors of different perspectives, and conveners of the curious. We facilitate  opportunities with Richmond-based, national, and international artists to offer our communities diverse ideas and visions from across the field of contemporary art.