Artist Virginia Bradley’s Yellowstone and Playa Santa paintings featured in collaboration with Interior Designer Dennese Guadalope Rojas in the The Kaleidoscope Project:
Great Barrington, MA –
The Kaleidoscope Project, a thought-provoking design project to amplify Black, Indigenous and People of Color within the design community partnered with TV Talk show host and pioneering social activist Ellen DeGeneres, Elle Decor magazine, and over 30 top design brands to launch the first in-person designer showhouse of 2021, featuring 23 top BIPOC interior designers. https://www.thekaleidoscopeproject.com
This event was the first to celebrate the diversity that exists within the creative interior design industry. The extraordinary talents of the 23 BIPOC designers had their visual voices tapped for this innovative showcase. It is the first designer showhouse that will remain in perpetuity and become part of the legacy of the 18th century Cornell Inn, in Lenox, Ma. The showcase was held May 16 – June 6. Interior designer Dennese Guadalope Rojas invited Virginia Bradley to collaborate with her in creating her “Doreen Suite”. The Suite was a homage to her mother and was complimented by Bradley’s paintings from the Yellowstone and Playa Santa series.
The Yellowstone series, which is addressing the effects of climate change and Bradley’s painting practice were honored with a 2020 Massachusetts Cultural Council Finalist Painting Fellowship.
Virginia Bradley is an acclaimed abstract painter. Throughout her career Virginia Bradley has also received several prestigious painting fellowships, like from the McKnight Foundation. She has been honored to be a fellow in the USA and throughout the world including Yaddo in Saratoga Springs, USA, Acme Studios in London, UK, Sanskriti Kendra in New Dehli, India. Her paintings have been widely exhibited nationally and internationally. Prior to moving to the Berkshires she served as a Professor of Art, teaching painting and drawing at the University of Delaware.
Virginia Bradley’s research into natural phenomena, geological and oceanographic formation serves as a starting point for her abstract works. Like an alchemist she transforms the work through the use of diverse materials and physical acts. Virginia treats the painting with a myriad of different methods, while simultaneously experimenting with chemical reactions to the painting’s surface.
The “Yellowstone Series” is inspired by the Fountain Paint Pots in the Gibbon Geyser Basin at Yellowstone National Park in Wyoming. Climate change is having an adverse effect on the geysers. Already the amount of geyser eruptions has dramatically decreased. Eventually the geysers could completely disappear.
