Second Street Gallery is pleased to present Mummers, a solo exhibition featuring paintings and sculptures by Charlottesville-based artist Megan Marlatt, held in the Main Gallery from October 7 - November 18, 2022. 

A small parade procession with the artist and the Big Head Brigade will took place along the Downtown Mall and led back to Second Street Gallery for the exhibition opening.

Read this recent article written in the CvilleWeekly publication about the exhibition HERE.

Watch our artist talk with Megan Marlatt on IGTV HERE.

Wysteria Ivy and the Woodland Creatures, 2021
Acrylic and oil on canvas
45 x 57.5 inches

Megan Marlatt’s work in Mummers explores the liminal, the space in between boundaries or at a threshold. Marlatt first learned to create big head masks (or capgrossos) from the Catalonian folk artists Ventura and Hosta in 2012 and continued to study the European tradition of pre-Lenten carnival. Most Americans think of amusement park rides and arcade games when they hear the word “carnival,” but Marlatt refers to an old event, evolved from Western pagan rituals and adapted into European Catholic and Protestant culture. The very same carnival Bruegel painted in The Fight Between Carnival and Lent nearly 500 years ago. 

Rooted in an ancient agrarian society dependent on the changing seasons, carnival’s time frame teeters between the weakening night force of winter and the strengthening day force of spring. Therefore, many carnival rituals across Western Europe involve shedding the evils of winter, waking up the icy earth and ushering in the fecund, warmer months of spring. It is in this liminal space and time between the changes of the seasons that a void in the universe exists and the magic of carnival emerges.

Part of that magic involves the borrowing of another’s persona through costume and mask wearing. Every culture across the globe has masks and they are the most transformative and empathetic of all human artifacts. They offer a masked performer the ability to climb into the skin of another being and see the other’s world from behind their eyes. While doing so, the mask erases all clues of the performer’s age, gender, species, or race. Mummer events like carnival, festival parades, or theater offer the opportunity to transform oneself temporarily into another person or being. The focus is not on the single identity of an individual, but the flux and interchange of relationships. In this way, it forms a venue for empathy with others and an opportunity for sharing as a community. Through painting and sculptural masks, Mummers explores this liminality where identities are not fully formed and opportunities arise to see beyond ourselves. 

Megan Marlatt has spent the majority of her life on the 38th parallel near Interstate 64; growing up in Louisville, Kentucky and living in Virginia for the past thirty-four years. She received her B.F.A. from the Memphis College of Art in 1981 and her M.F.A. at The Mason Gross School of Arts, Rutgers University, NJ in 1986 During the summer of 1985, she studied at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine, where she learned the art of fresco painting which informed her mural work for years to come. She was a recipient of a Fulbright Scholar Research Fellowship to Belgium in 2018, where she studied Belgian carnival culture and painters. She has won a Fellowship in Painting from the National Endowment for the Arts (1995), two Professional Artist Grants from the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts (2013 and 2006), one from the Virginia Commission on the Arts (1996), and The New Jersey State Council on the Arts (1985). She has had numerous national and international solo exhibitions and group shows. Since 2013, Marlatt has been the founder and director of the artist collective, “The Big Head Brigade”, a group that builds and performs in large papier-mache’ heads. Their work has been presented in New York, Brooklyn, Prague and Zurich. She resides in Virginia, where she has been a painting professor at the University of Virginia since 1988.

This exhibition is a Season 49 Call for Submissions pick and is generously sponsored by The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, the Virginia Commission for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Arts.