Naomi McCavitt is a painter. And she’s smack dab in the middle of a creative uprising in RVA

McCavitt, who studied painting and print making at VCU, received her Masters of Fine Arts in painting at the San Francisco Art Institute. Today she’s back in Greater Richmond, and now acts as an adjunct faculty member in the Art Foundation Program at VCU. In the last several months McCavitt has seen resurgence in her work, with parallels to the area’s creative explosion at large.

“I like to call my pieces history painting mash-ups,” explains McCavitt. “I pull from art historical resources and by smashing them up together I try to create a narrative…these narratives are partially formed by the stories that were already there in the historical paintings.”

In her previous work, McCavitt focused on colonization and its contemporary repercussions. In graduate school she embarked on a series of paintings inspired by naturalist prints that were about cataloging plants and animals in a newly colonized world. “It was about separating and naming,” says McCavitt, who used the images as a metaphor for the type divisions that are created from colonization. “In the work I was clumping all these naturalist images together, and making it a mess, basically to ask what if these things rebelled?”

McCavitt sees value in changing historical narratives to encourage Richmonders to imagine alterative outcomes. In doing so, she hopes her work can be additive to the way we look at the world.

Focused on telling a story using art historical resources to talk about history, McCavitt hopes she can also create an alternate reality that will leave Richmonders questioning — what if this happened, and it was much more positive?

As she returns to consistent creation, McCavitt says that she is seeing a definite change in her work. “In the back of my mind I just think I’m putting something good back into the world.”