A room of their own

People. Art. Revolution.

These three words sum up the current exhibit at the Nasher Museum of Art-A Room of their Own: The Bloomsbury Artists in American Collections. This exhibit serves not only to showcase pieces of art like no other, but also to tell a story of a group of people seeking to make a change, or as Bloomsbury Group founder Roger Fry called it, a "visual revolution."

The pieces in the exhibit serve less as spectacles of beauty than as tools of expression and reform. The Bloomsbury group began to convene in the early 1900s and included members such as Virginia Woolf, John Maynard Keynes and Bertrand Russell.

Led by it's founder, Roger Fry, and including sister of Virginia Woolf's sister Vanessa Bell, the visual wing of the collective aimed to create art reflecting the styles of Post-Impressionist and Modernist artists, a quality which can be distinctly noted in many of the pieces.

In addition to their more conventional media, such as paintings and drawings, the Bloomsbury Group artists also opened a workshop in which they produced household items such as shutters, tables and carpets. With these pieces, the group worked to recreate the prosaic Victorian styles into a vision much more unique. The diverse exhibit includes both works on paper and canvas as well as original pieces of furniture.

"[The exhibit] gives you an insight into how the interesting group of people lived," said Craufurd Goodwin, James B. Duke professor of economics.

The owner of many of the pieces featured in the exhibit, Goodwin is also an expert on the Bloomsbury group, alongside his economic research. He teaches an interdisciplinary course called Economics and the Bloomsbury. The course, like the interests of the Bloomsbury group, spans the topics of economics, the arts and public policy.