Past and Present in Richmond, Virginia

By Riley Goodman

June 04, 2025

A Maryland Yankee In Powhatan's Court (2024)

Artist: Riley Goodman

Project: To Cultivate A Magnolia

Description: When I moved to Richmond, Virginia in 2014, I was an eighteen-year-old, closeted queer boy, alone in an unfamiliar Southern city, looking to mature into a working artist and get to know myself along the way. In the eleven years since I have always found Richmond to be watching over me like a silent guardian. It is a place that recognizes its deeply rooted history, with a passion to continually blossom anew—much like I have. And thus I am invested in exploring the mythology of Virginia through image-making that not only remarks on my own coming of age, but more widely investigates the complexity of individuals’ artifacts of existence in a place imbued with an almost indescribable magic, where past and present coexist.

Referencing the hardiness of its leaves in tandem with the delicacy of its flowers, To Cultivate A Magnolia visually examines the mythology of the American South through the folklore and history of Richmond and greater Virginia, the complexities of queer identity, the contemporary presence of the American Civil War, and reflections that come as we age.

Down From The Heavens (2024)

Fade Into You Playing From The Living Room (2017)

Andy (2016)

Boys Of Summer, In Their Ruin (2024)

Reverie At Marshall's Keep (2022)

All Of You Out There In The Dark (2025)

Fair Weather Soon (2020)

Claire (2020)

Cruel Summer (2020)

Remembrances On A Parlor Wall (2017)

Last Sunrise Of Daniel Call (2024)

806 Cathedral, or What Happens After (2023)

Astral Weeks (2022)

Hope Springs Eternal (2025)

The Will-o'-the-wisp (2024)

Virginia Dare (2020)

Abby, Before She Moved (2021)

Phantoms At Foushee's Mill (2024)

The Old Dominion (2022)

Like Yellowjackets On Sweet Peas (2024)

A Cause Lost (2020)

Gem Of The James (2024)

Bluebirds In The Tobacco Fields (2024)

Ross, The Day We Met (2021)

Where The Auroras Crackled (2021)

Splatted About The Fields (2022)

Beware Relic Hunters (2021)

Where The Ceiling Drips Blood (2022)

Nights Of Rolling Thunder (2023)

Fair Well 'Til I See You (2020)

Summer's End (2025)

Forever At The Windows (2021)

Sundown At Poplar Vale (2021)

Riley Goodman

Riley Goodman (b. 1996), raised in the Patapsco River Valley of Maryland, inquires folklore, American history, and humankind’s relation to the environments they inhabit in an effort to understand what endures, and how this manifests through the passage of time. Informed by the compositional styles of cinema and painting, Goodman weaves a vast visual narrative inspired by everything from historical accounts and folk-based storytelling to dreams and familial legends. Goodman’s work becomes an ever-occurring presentation of history via the use of artifact and ephemera. By establishing this crafted world, Goodman invites the viewer to question tenets of authenticity, leaving the idea of “historical truth” in an undisclosed middle ground. Goodman is a BFA graduate of VCUarts and his first monograph, From Yonder Wooded Hill was published in 2022 by Fall Line Press. His work has appeared in The Washington Post and Time, among other outlets, and most notably resides in the permanent collections of the MoMA Artist Book Collection and the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts.