A local artist will be giving back to Hospice House and Support Care of Williamsburg through an art show and silent auction Friday. Mary Riley Pugh’s “New Directions” exhibit will be displayed and on sale at the Legacy Hall, located at 4301 New Town Ave., from 5:30 p.m. to 10:30 p.m.
According to Hospice House Director of Development Janet Reid, the hospice house provides respite for caregivers, bereavement resources for the community and short-term residential care for those in the last phases of their lives. Pugh said she wanted to give back to the organization that helped her through the grieving process when her mother passed.
“It would have been a lot harder without them,” Pugh said. “They just do a fantastic thing for this community and not that many people know about them.”
Pugh decided that 50 percent of the proceeds from the night will go to Hospice House and 100 percent of the money from a silent auction of two of her paintings will also go toward the organization.
Pugh, currently an exhibit designer at the state-owned historical institution Jamestown-Yorktown Foundation, said the paintings to be displayed during the exhibit were all of the abstract expressionism variety. She said lately she’s had an incredible amount of inspiration and is happy to have a place to display it.
“It’s like I’ve been on fire for a year,” she said. “There’s not enough paint in the world and I’ve been buying all these canvases.”
Pugh graduated with a bachelor’s of fine arts degree from the University of Tennessee, a master’s of education, administration and supervision with a focus in the visual arts from Parsons The New School for Design and also studied at the David J. Passalacqua School of Drawing and Illustration.
Reid said the nonprofit depends on events – like this one – to stay in operation. The organization, she said, receives about 10 percent of its annual budget through state funding and United Way.
The rest of the $900,000 budget is made up of donations and fundraising events.
