Solitude and Fraction House

To celebrate Virginia Tech’s sesquicentennial, the Council on Virginia Tech History’s Public Art Committee developed an international ideas competition seeking creative approaches to highlight how marginalized communities have shaped and continue to shape the university, and to consider the “layered histories” of the campus and the region.

Two public art works were commissioned by Floyd, Virginia artists Charlie Brouwer and Carrie Gault to stand near the historic Solitude and Fraction House structures.

Think on These Things

Charlie Brouwer

Four life-sized human figure sculptures sit in contemplative and meditative poses on the benches, which could seat at least 10 visitors. Empty spaces on the benches invite visitors to sit and join the figures in contemplating words carved into the benches such as “Indigenous, slavery, diversity, equality, education, history, knowledge.” Additional words, “kindness, compassion, honesty, dignity, bravery, clarity, empathy” carved into stones set in the ground inside the circle suggest ways of thinking about these things.

From the Artist 

Designed as a place for contemplation, Think on These Things features seven wooden benches, four wooden figures seated on them, and a sculptural “tree” in the center of a large concrete circle. The “tree” will be made out of white oak milled from the 300+-year-old “Merry Tree” that came down in a storm recently on the grounds of Smithfield Plantation. The tree served as a gathering place for the plantation’s slaves.

Thresholds: Understanding Our Complicated Past and Reconnecting Our Layered Histories

Carrie Gault

Four pairs of 10 1/2-foot-tall, 1,800-pound thresholds are installed on the grounds of Solitude. The thresholds are adorned with more than 2,000 hand-crafted, hand-painted clay tiles depicting images that represent more than 250 years of university and regional history.

From the Artist

Thresholds are about transition. They are about taking the next step; about moving through and beyond. They are also about coming home. My work features a series of thresholds, or doorways, that may designate where an enslaved person lay down their head or an Indigenous person gave birth. The pieces are simple in form, a silhouette evoking domesticity, asking the viewer to think about what “home” means in the different contexts of the site and its evolution from forest to plantation to university.

Each piece is clad in handmade tile created from an earthen clay with imagery developed from an organic palette that contrasts with the starkness of the existing structures.

Each of the four pieces contains a unique collage of images gathered from archives, family albums, oral memories, and current work of the Virginia Tech community. The imagery is intended to demonstrate the interconnectedness of the human experience through time, position, and experience. The images weave together to create a tapestry that when viewed from afar, adds a vernacular texture to the form, and when experienced up close, tells the stories of ancestors without the hierarchy that history imposes.