2026
A Plastic Vase Painted Silver consisted of three discrete installations, and ran from November 6th, 2025 until February 21st, 2026. The exhibition, and each of its installations, included works by Jared Buckhiester, Walker Evans, Robert Gober, and Nancy Shaver—four artists who began their adult lives using a camera, all from the United States, with this country foregrounded in nearly all of the subjects they chose. Shaver’s direct and personal relationship with the other three artists in this show is the initial tether for the group.
A few years before developing a friendship with Evans, Shaver purchased a copy of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men from the MoMA bookstore. The Evans photograph of Floyd Burroughs’s bedroom fireplace, as decorated by his wife, Allie Mae, printed inside the book, affirmed what Shaver was coming to understand in her early life as an artist.
In an artist talk given at Virginia Commonwealth University in 2012, Shaver revealed, “This interior and this photograph taught me that I could look for art in the least important of materials.”
This statement served as a guide for the selection of works in the exhibition. The three installations are loosely grouped into themes that connect the four practices—both disparate and intertwined. These themes include, but are not limited to, beauty, honesty, respect or objectivity, literature, complexity, and love. The exhibition and its three installations represented 98 years of continued making.
