John Wesley Church by Nate Larson

Please RSVP by 4 PM on November 11, 2020 to [email protected] or 540-882-3018 x 3.

Dear Foundation Members and Waterford Residents,

Many of you may have noticed Nate Larson following campers around the village this past summer, taking photos and recording stories or heard that he worked with village residents and Fair artisans taking tintype images of them with their tools. These works are now on view at the Greater Reston Arts Center (GRACE).

The Center is hosting a talk and reception for Waterford residents and Foundation members! Please join us Saturday, November 16 at 3 pm. Shannon Thomas Perich , Curator at the National Museum of American History, will lead a conversation with Nate about his work and this show, which highlights Waterford as a Centroid Town. To read more about the exhibition visit: https://restonarts.org/exhibition/nate-larson/. Show details can be found below. 

Centroid Towns: Like a Passing Shadow

A project about Waterford, Virginia

Nate Larson

GRACE presents the next chapter of Baltimore-based artist  Nate Larson ’s Centroid Towns project. Since the first US census in 1790, the United States Census Bureau has been recording the mean center of population as it moves steadily west and south. The first Centroid Town recorded was Chestertown, Maryland, and the projected Centroid of the 2020 census is Hartville, Missouri. Larson has done preliminary research in all 25 towns and completed five chapters of the project with communities in Ellicott City, Maryland; Bloomington, Indiana; Mascoutah, Illinois; and De Soto, Missouri. For this exhibition at GRACE, Larson dives deeper into the community of Waterford, Virginia, Centroid Town of 1810. (On view September 28—January 4).

Above are a few of the twelve occupational tintypes with local artisans and crafts folks that were taken at the  Waterford Foundation Inc .

Top Right: Hessian Regiment von Huyn

Bottom Right: Linda Landreth, Waterford Resident

Shannon Thomas Perich, Curator at the National Museum of American History

Perich is the Curator in the Photographic History Collection at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History where she has worked for over twenty years. Most recently, Perich served as a project director for a new floor of NMAH that explores the history and power of American entertainment. Returning to photographic history she has upcoming publications on photographs and the circus, and photographic process patent from 1840 into the 1870s. She is the author of Changing Face of Portrait Photography: From Daguerreotype to Digital (Smithsonian Books 2012) and Portrait of Family (Harper Collins 2007) about Richard Avedon’s photographs of the John F. Kennedy Family. She has taught History of Photography at the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA). Her blogs can be found on the National Museum of American History’s website and NPR’s Picture Show. Perich’s research often explores the dynamic intersections of the art, technology and history of photography, especially where the personal experience and national narratives are at play. 

D irections and Parking

GRACE is located on the corner of Market Street and St. Francis Street in the Reston Town Center. From the Dulles Toll Road (route 267) exit at Reston Parkway and go north (right) turn left on Bluemont Way, then right on St. Francis Street (just past the bus stop).

Parking is free on weekends.  Google Maps