VCU news

By Dina Weinstein

It's a few nights before Nathan Hosmer, a painting and printmaking major at Virginia Commonwealth University, leaves for a month of visual arts study in Italy. The rising senior greets friends and School of the Arts classmates in a third-floor walkup apartment on West Grace Street that he and three fellow students have turned into an exhibition space.

Fifty of their colorful paintings adorn the walls of the small living room, and 15 are canvases by Hosmer. In paintings such as “POV you’re my guardian angel,” “Mírame” “Ángel Perreo” and “Kemando (Burning),” Hosmer, a student in the VCU Honors College, explores appropriating Latin American colonial concepts and assembling images that, in his words, “can be applied in a new way to talk about queerness.”

The exhibition, titled “Full Spectrum,” emphasized color, with the paintings grouped from red to orange and then shifting to cooler shades of the spectrum along the living room walls. The name and theme were developed by Hosmer and VCUarts students Merrin Winkel, Rae Carlson and Nadia Msalek, who were “trying to make it not explicitly about pride, but also being four queer artists that also use a lot of color,” Hosmer said.

Color, as well as history and even humor, are at play. By depicting images of figures in dark strokes but also with gold accents, Hosmer explores traditional ideas he grew up with, such as when his grandmother in Ecuador would end phone calls with “May God bless you, and your angel look over you.”

“Is my angel looking over me all the time, or is it just when you want it?” is the question Hosmer said he is exploring in “POV you’re my guardian angel.”

His work is highly influenced by Ecuador, where his mother was born, and by his knowledge of colonial-era Latin American art. He explores the fusion of Indigenous and European visual traditions.

“I think in a lot of the work, the use of gold, the overall decoration detail, speaks to that, where I'm taking these traditions and appropriating them for my own purpose,” Hosmer said. “The things that were depicted in those centuries was just the Virgin Mary or religious art.”

He asks how he can use such elements – gold pattern, ornamentation and over-the-top visual language – that came out of Latin American colonial art to apply to images relevant to him. Hosmer’s paintings in the “Full Spectrum” exhibition explored using the visual traditions from his South American heritage to talk about queerness, a mix that has seldom been used and might shock the Catholic church or colonial-era artists.

“They were never expecting me to be painting two guys holding hands or making out in the same style that was used to colonize Latin America,” Hosmer said.

His study of Latin American art history helps him better understand and play with the ideas of flamboyant paintings of archangels and angels from Catholicism, as well as the tradition from Cusco, Peru, where men dress up, essentially in drag, as angels as a Catholic ritual. It is not seen as blasphemy, as it is central to religious practice.

“I've been thinking a lot about the angels and how entrenched in Catholicism that is, and how I can kind of play with that by making them do really queer things,” Hosmer said.

He credits art history professor Lisa Freiman, Ph.D., with encouraging him and his “Full Spectrum” collaborators to take initiative. She taught Hosmer in her Concepts and Issues class and her Demystifying the Art World course. He appreciated how Freiman encouraged art students to pursue opportunities and create their own.

“Stemming out of those conversations from that class, and those ideas that came from that, [we said], ‘We want to start something. Let's just do it. We don't need to ask for anyone's permission,’” Hosmer said. “As small as that might seem, that was like a big hurdle conceptually to be like, ‘Oh wait, just make it in your apartment if you want.’”

He also credits VCUarts graduate painting student Grace Bromley for serving as a resource and mentor; Natalia Mejía, who earned her MFA in painting this spring, for offering advice and critiques; and Juliana Bustillo, his first painting professor, for making a deep and lasting impression on him. 

Even with modern technology at his disposal, Hosmer remains committed to the manual experience of painting. And his chemistry minor and an ongoing internship in the conservation department at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts give him skills to potentially work in the future in the field of conservation.

Before painting for the “Full Spectrum” exhibition, Hosmer often developed his work from studio classes, portraits or photos he had taken. One of those paintings, made from a photo of drag performers from the Fallout nightclub in Richmond, was included in a show of Virginia artists at the Virginia Museum of Contemporary Art in Virginia Beach this spring. Another painting is to be included in an upcoming issue of “New American Paintings,” a juried publication.

Hosmer’s hard work has paid off. This summer he was awarded the Roy E. and Irene S. Roby Scholarship and the Gerald Donato Scholarship, both of which recognize achievement in painting and printmaking. In the spring semester, he was awarded the VCUarts Dean’s Scholarship in painting.

During his summer study-abroad experience at the Santa Reparata International School of Art in Florence, Italy, Hosmer hopes to further explore themes he touched on in his “Full Spectrum” paintings.

“A lot of the things I'm talking about with my paintings in religious art can be traced back to Europe. So, I’m going to be inspired and think about that as opposed to a secondary influence through Latin America,” Hosmer said. “I’d like to see as much art and go to as many museums as I can, because seeing art on social media is not the same experience as in real life. You just can't compare.”