Strip Club Art is Not Linear

Ryan McGinniss gets the award for most creative start to a lecture entitled "Art History is Not Linear."

He showed an image of his birth certificate to prove his Virginia Beach roots.

A childhood drawing of happy-faced raindrops falling showed the splattered ones with upset faces.

"It's a conceptual drawing," he said to much laughter from the mostly student audience in the VCU Commons Theater today.

The product of an artist mother and computer geek father, McGinnis was raised ina  DIY household with activity stations everywhere.

 Living in Virginia Beach, he grew up immersed in the surf and skate cultures, recognizing the power logos had (see: 17th Street Surf Shop) and attracting him to the world of design..

It was in his junior high school band days  ("I was in a bedroom band. We never made it to the garage.") that he realized that music wasn't his strength and that creating the album art, T-shirts and flyers was what really interested him.

McGinnis spoke a lot about the enormous piece he spent three years working on for the VMFA.

The sixteen four-foot square panels are a mashup of images taken from the museum's collection and greet viisitors as they arrive at the museum's new entrance.

He made drawings from 200 of the works after choosing what appealed to him from the museum's holdings.

He showed the stages of his sketches for "Art History is Not Linear" which ultimately became the images in the panels.

In many cases, he recreated only a piece of a larger whole, like a knife from a still life or a face and folded hands.


And he stressed that there was no color correlation to the originals; rather, he intuitively chose the color for each drawing before overlaying them.

His latest work is a series called "Women," of which 65 pieces of a projected 200 have been completed.

They are done in black light paint and, like the VMFA piece, are a collage of assembled images, but this time of women's figures.

These new pieces have been shown only in strip clubs, one in NYC and one in Miami, that one notable because it was across from a more traditional art venue; it was an attempt to entice visitors to a non-traditional art venue.

At the Miami club, he also painted some of the dancers.

At that point, a student raised his hand. "Uh, could you explain this further please?" he requested in a small voice.

McGinnis did, but that's not to say that the student understood his objectives.

The students had endless questions about motive, technique and commerce.

But his advice to would-be artists was crystal clear and was received by the student body with a resounding silence.

"If you have a choice, don't be an artist."

Ryan McGinnis didn't have that choice, he said, and now his work hangs at MOMA and VMFA, among others. 

I'd say the chance of the artists in that room taking his advice are slim to none.

And Slim just left town.

Therein lies the optimistic beauty of the artistic soul.