Waterside art gallery covers breasts for window shoppers

NORFOLK

Behind the glass walls of Mayer Fine Art, a gallery inside Waterside Festival Marketplace, air currents rustled the disposable plates covering breasts on a drawing.

The Styrofoam plates were there because late last week, after a visitor complained about an image featuring exposed breasts, gallery owner Sheila Giolitti was asked by Waterside management to put the artwork in a less conspicuous spot. Since she could find none, she improvised.

Giolitti's plan was to invite the public to stop by and decorate the Styrofoam-plate "pasties," she said, and to supply the glitter and pens.

"I think it's a ridiculous concern and should be treated as such," she said on Wednesday, stressing that she was irritated with the complainer, not the management. "This nude is so tame."

The art was inside the gallery, but much of the work on display can be clearly seen by passers-by on the second floor of Waterside.

"My opinion is, it's a big to-do about nothing," said Lane Brown, general manager of Waterside.

Brown was on vacation last week when the issue arose. He said he won't ask Giolitti to remove the art. While he wishes she had a more discreet spot for the work, he is accepting her solution.

"If people have a problem with it," he said, "I don't know. It's artwork. You go to the Chrysler Museum, go anywhere, and you'll see similar things. I can appreciate their position, but you can't satisfy everybody."

On Wednesday, every once in a while, a brisk current nudged one of the plates off its mark. From about 11 a.m. to noon, however, none of the passers-by even glanced at the offending artwork.

When the drawing was brought to their attention, visitors expressed widely varying opinions.

"I just feel like a woman's private parts are hers," said Jane Bruno, 42, of Suffolk, who added that she would rather not see exposed breasts in public.

"Because it is art, it doesn't offend me that way," said Jaz Brown, 26, a Virginia Beach construction worker on a break. "Art is trying to capture the person. I think it's beautiful."

"What about little kids, though?" said his co-worker, Daniel Pitino, 35, of Virginia Beach. "Not sure. Not sure."

A mother with a 3-1/2-year-old son said it didn't offend her to see nudity in art. "But my little boy would be asking questions," said Kimberly Heath-Shoup, 32, of Chesapeake.

"Adam and Eve were naked before they got the apple from the tree. Nobody thought about these things until that happened," Heath-Shoup said.

The drawing is part of a show, which runs until Aug. 20, featuring work by 16 undergraduate art students from various colleges. Much of the work is abstract.

The piece in question is Erika Risko's "Martyrdom," a realistic rendering of the figure on four sheets of paper. She is a senior at the Moore College of Art & Design in Philadelphia.

Speaking from Philadelphia, Risko said Giolitti told her on Wednesday about the controversy. "I just think it's all very funny, that a community that accepts a Hooters can't accept a piece of fine art that's in the tradition of Greco-Roman art dating back thousands of years."

Teresa Annas, (757) 446-2485, teresa.annas@pilotonline.com