Join Veronica Jackson (Visual Artist), Allison James (Memorialization Project Director, James Madison’s Montpelier), and Anna Pillow (Executive Director, The Arts Center in Orange) for an informal conversation about the intersections of contemporary art and historic places. How do our pasts influence our futures, and what is the role of art (and those who make it) in helping us move forward?
This event is FREE and all are welcome, but RSVP is encouraged. Use the form below OR send us an email.
Veronica Jackson’s background encompasses the critical examination of visual culture. As an artist, she records, interprets, and makes aware the complexities in which humans exist and affect their social surroundings. As an architect and interpretive designer, she creatively solves problems within virtual and built environments. Her visual art practice is a combination of past professional disciplines, present lived experiences, and the cache of contemporary and historic research accumulated. Jackson’s initial and ongoing project—The Burden of Invisibility—physically manifests her evolution from designer to conceptual artist. Her body of work is text-based, autobiographical, and in response to her gendered and racialized existence in America—with a special focus on the portrayal, perception, and legacy of Black women in popular media.
Veronica Jackson’s exhibition, The Burden of Invisibility, is on display in the Morin Gallery at The Arts Center in Orange through March 25th.
Allison James is Memorialization Project Director for the Montpelier Descendants Committee (MDC) at James Madison’s Montpelier. Her role is to work on behalf of the MDC to ensure that their vision for honoring their ancestors is incorporated into a parallel vision by the Montpelier Foundation in the form of a national monument at Montpelier. Allison earned a Master’s in Landscape Architecture from Cornell University, followed by a Master's of Science in Architecture Studies from the Aga Khan Program in Islamic Architecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), with an emphasis on cultural landscapes in Turkey and India. She also holds a BFA in sculpture. Allison’s research is focused on documenting the cultural, structural and experiential elements of landscapes and place-based memorialization.
As a researcher with the Aga Khan Trust for Culture in Hyderabad, India, Allison worked with local architects, archaeologists and preservationists to trace political and spiritual processional pathways between the Qutb Shahi necropolis gardens and Golconda Fortress (1518-1647), in the development of the city of Hyderabad. Her interest in cultural landscape studies stems from two years as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Turkmenistan, where she worked with a community to build greenhouses using vernacular building techniques.
Allison’s experience ranges from project managing civic scale public art installations for contemporary artists in the Program of Art Cultural and Technology at MIT, managing NIH grants for scientists at Harvard, and participating in a wide range of local and international community development projects over the past several years. She recently worked as Project Manager for the Landscape Studies Initiative in the UVA School of Architecture’s Center for Cultural Landscapes (2018-2022). Allison has been Project Lead Consultant for the World Monuments Fund’s Preservation of Providence Island in Monrovia, Liberia since 2019.