Virginia Lovness Paintings and Prints: A Retrospective

The gallery at the Stillwater Public Library will host an exhibit featuring Virginia Lovness Paintings and Prints: A Retrospective in July and August 2017. Virginia is a longtime resident of Stillwater. In the 1940s, young Virginia Lovness drew models wearing the kind of lovely dresses she had always longed to have. These fashion drawings and others earned her a scholarship to Hamline University where she studied art while her skills were put to use in posters and school promotions. Expanding her interests to landscapes and eventually, non-objective paintings, prints and sculptures, she sold her pieces at early art fairs and to friends who admired her work. She once traded a large canvas for a pink Cadillac convertible.

Virginia met and married Don Lovness in 1948 and they began a creative partnership that lasted over 50 years. It was Virginia’s initiative and drive that brought them to Frank Lloyd Wright in 1954 with a request to design a painting studio for her. Over the next several decades they built two Wright homes by hand, and became self-taught connoisseurs of fine Asian and Pre-Columbian art. This exhibit honors the works of Virginia Lovness from her high school years to the art she produced in the 1950s and ’60s in her Frank Lloyd Wright-designed studio.

Meet the artist and discuss her work at a lovely evening reception on Thursday, July 20 the Stillwater Public Library from 6-8 p.m. The event is free and no registration is necessary.