Calendar

National Geographic’s Planet or Plastic? exhibition showcases the global plastic waste crisis and highlights innovators working to solve this urgent issue. Featuring the work of researchers, scientists and artists, the exhibition traces the history of plastic and explores the devastating impacts of plastic pollution on our world’s oceans. The exhibition will also feature a look into the rise of single-use plastics due to COVID-19. Through powerful imagery, Planet or Plastic? makes the important case for the need to find a balance between using this material and protecting our environment.

Black Girl Magic is a compilation of original scenes, vignettes, and poems as well as excerpts from published speeches, poems, plays, and performances that celebrate the lives and accomplishments of Black girls and women past and present, popular and underrated. It follows the struggles that often prove necessary to birth brilliance, resilience, triumph, and success; the tragedies that produce inner strength, beauty, hope, and community which continues to withstand the test of time. Black Girl Magic is not intended to exclude girls and women of other races or ethnicities. In fact, Black Girl Magic is inclusive in that it offers them the opportunity to join in this celebration of a race of women often overlooked and undervalued.

Americans in Spain: Painting and Travel, 1820-1920 explores a pivotal moment, in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when American artists and their European counterparts flocked to Spain to capture its scenic charms and seemingly exotic customs. Co-organized by the Chrysler Museum of Art and the Milwaukee Art Museum, the exhibition is developed around each institution’s unique collection of American and old master paintings. The show features works by Mary Cassatt, William Merritt Chase, Robert Henri, John Singer Sargent, and others alongside their Spanish contemporaries and the country’s Old Masters. Picture: Mary Cassatt (American, 1844–1926), Spanish Girl Leaning on a Window Sill, ca. 1872, Oil on canvas, Manuel Piñanes García-Olías, Madrid

Whistler & Co. includes more than sixty etchings by James Abbott McNeill Whistler and ten of his contemporaries from Britain, France, and America. Whistler’s gritty images of the River Thames and views of Venice and Paris revived, in part, the art of etching in the 19th century.

The VSO welcomes guest conductor Eric Jacobsen, who has carved out a reputation as one of classical music’s most exciting and innovative young conductors. With him will be brothers and Newport News natives Brendon and Sterling Elliott, making a rare joint appearance to perform the magical La muse et le poete from French composer Camille Saint-Saëns. The program will conclude with Franz Schubert’s animated Symphony No. 3 in D Major, written when he was only eighteen years old.