The LCVA would like to thank its members, LU alums, and the community for its support of The Benefit is Mutual.

Most of the remaining art from the sale has now been posted to this site. If you are interested in making a purchase, please contact the LCVA at 434-395-2206.

From abstract flourishes of color and line to lush depictions of Virginia’s flora and landscape to figurative and representational pieces, these works by Janice Lemen and Barbara Bishop will find a place of honor in anyone’s home.

All works are offered unframed, ranging in price from $15 to $75.

Please note: The works for sale are not from the LCVA’s permanent collection. Proceeds from the sale will benefit permanent collections management including care, conservation, and acquisition.

This exhibition is made possible by contributions by Johnnie Britt Hubbel.

Selections of Art to be Sold

The art can loosely be broken into three categories. Please pick one to acquaint yourself with the offerings:

Abstract Art: Color and Composition
Natural Forms from Virginia's Landscape
Representational Works

About the Artists

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About Janice Lemen and Barbara Bishop

Janice S. Lemen (1916-1994) and Barbara L. Bishop (1938-1991) were much beloved Longwood University art department faculty and highly talented artists. During the years since their deaths, the LCVA has been proud to receive numerous contributions of their works from family and friends. As printmakers, Bishop and Lemen were exceptionally prolific. They created their beautiful prints in multiples, called editions. In some cases the LCVA has been fortunate to receive multiple prints from a single edition. Because the LCVA cannot care for an entire edition, the LCVA has selected one from each edition for its permanent collection. This exhibition showcases these prints. The specific technique is serigraphy (silkscreening), which is characterized by bold flat planes of color. The extras from the editions will be sold for the benefit of the LCVA’s collection management program including care, conservation, and acquisition.

Janice Lemen

Janice Lemen came to Longwood in 1944 when Barbara Bishop was making finger paintings in kindergarten. Lemen, from Missouri, had already received a BS in high school education from Southeast Missouri State Teachers College and an MFA from Peabody College in Nashville, TN. She had taught high school art and English and even studied art at the Art Students League in New York and at Columbia College during the summers. She began at Longwood as director of art at the now defunct Campus Training School and then worked her way through the faculty ranks to become full professor. When she retired in 1979, she had served the institution for thirty-five years. As a champion of artists, as a teacher, and as an artist, her impact on the university and its students was significant. Her legacy is particularly visible at the LCVA, where the Virginia Artists Collection that she started in 1951 has grown to 679 works.

As an artist, Janice Lemen enjoyed the creative process tremendously, and her output attests to this fact. She produced thousands of paintings, prints, and drawings. Visually, her works embody an inherent vitality of color, shape, and form which take cues from the Fauves, Abstract Expressionism, and even psychedelic art of the 1960s and 1970s.  Reporting in the Staunton Leader about Lemen’s 1960 show at Mary Baldwin College, Professor of Art Emily Farham stated, “one of the most rewarding qualities discoverable in the works derives from the largeness and openness of form. Compositions expand beyond the boundaries of formats, evoking an exultant feeling which, when combined with the pure Matisse-like color present in the best of the oils, lends spirituality.” Throughout the years, Lemen’s work was shown across the state, including the University of Virginia, the Virginia Museum of Fine Art, the Norfolk Museum (now the Chrysler Museum) as well as in commercial galleries and corporate settings. In 1961, the Washington Post heralded her prints as “superior.” Her colleague, Longwood University professor of art emeritus Homer Springer, described her work as “fresh, contemporary and creative.” Her use of fluorescent paint on day-glo paper shown with black lights at UVA prompted this comment in Longwood’s Rotunda in 1970: “apparently Longwood’s not as provincial as some would have you believe.”

Her example as an artist and as teacher made a big impact on her students. One in particular was Barbara Bishop, who came to study at Longwood from Roanoke. Barbara must have been inspired by Lemen’s character and commitment to art, particularly abstraction and serigraphy, because she too committed her career to similar methods. After graduating in 1960, Barbara Bishop earned her MFA from The Woman’s College of the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. Her master’s thesis espoused a fascination with the natural world around her and how it served as an inspiration for her work. Specifically Bishop reflected on how the earth embraces poetry and spirituality through its constant cycle of creation and destruction, harmony and discord, gain and loss. Bishop’s point of view is quite similar to Lemen’s. In fact, during her first teaching job after graduate school at Southern Seminary Junior College in Buena Vista, Bishop invited Lemen to show her work.

For the show Lemen wrote this statement,

“To be able to work in an intuitive way, one must amass a deposit of experiences from responses to life, from the use of materials, and from knowledge of the qualities which determine art. To be able to work from the subconscious, the conscious must have been active. Without impression there is no expression. The artist is a philosopher and his convictions are expressed in non-verbal terms. That is why a sensitive painter’s work keeps changing. His expressions change as he changes—in attitude, from different stimuli, and from more experience with the materials. A painter is like a writer in that all his work is, in a sense, autobiographical. . . . There are always some references to natural phenomena even in the most abstract painting.”

Barbara Bishop

Throughout her artistic career, Barbara Bishop seemed to grapple with the fine line between abstraction and representation, with subconscious to conscious responses to the world around her in her quest to evoke response rather than to define objects. For her retrospective at Longwood in 1989, Ann Weinstein and Betty Tisinger wrote about Bishop’s use of underlying geometric structure, large fractured and dissolving circular forms married with simplified organic shapes referencing leaves and trees. Her work at once seems to hold kinship with Classicism, Surrealism, and mid-20th century graphic design. Weinstein and Tisinger wrote that Bishop’s work embodied “the cadence of classical order in Ingres and ancient Greece; the sensuality of an odalisque; the rationality of the 18th century; the inquisitiveness of a rabbit; the mystery of a global orb and the spirituality of a star.”

Like Lemen, Bishop came to teach at Longwood and create a legacy. Bishop joined the faculty in 1965 and by 1970 became chair of the art department. She was also an inspirational teacher. In 1972 she received the first faculty recognition award from the student development committee. The award was presented for her “professional excellence and devoted service to the students, total involvement in her profession, continual productivity, concern for the individual student, and thoughtful and time-consuming counseling.” Barbara Bishop was also an instrumental force in advocating for the arts at Longwood. She started the LCVA’s American Art Collection by garnering a gift of works by Thomas Sully. Perhaps most notably, she is credited as one of the founders of the LCVA and served as its first director. At the LCVA, a gallery, lecture series, and internship (co-named for Dr. Carolyn Wells) are all named in her honor. At Longwood, a position in the art department bearing her name was endowed by her mother.

It is the LCVA’s hope that the works of Janice Lemen and Barbara Bishop will be enjoyed for their beauty and inspirational qualities. Their works are fascinating in content, form, and in their connection to the continuum of American art. The LCVA also hopes that their enthusiasm for art and selfless gifts to Longwood and the community will be an inspiration to others. Their works have had a tremendous impact on the LCVA , and because of their legacy, it will continue to flourish.

This exhibition was made possible by contributions from Charles H. and Candice Jamison Dowdy ’69, Northwestern Mutual Financial Network, and Sandra Breil.

-- K. Johnson Bowles, Director

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Selections of Art to be Sold

The art can loosely be broken into three categories:

Abstract Art: Color and Composition
Natural Forms from Virginia's Landscape
Representational Works

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