"Influencing through the Art Experience" for VIE September 2023
Suzanne Pollak
“When the First Lady of Virginia, Suzanne Youngkin, and her husband, Governor Glenn Youngkin, moved into the Executive Mansion in 2022, one of the first things she did was transform its walls.
As one might expect to find in the country’s oldest continuously occupied Executive Mansion, the rooms were lined with paintings of Virginia statesmen and Virginia landscapes set in heavy gold frames. But Mrs. Youngkin saw things differently. She wanted a broader, newer story to be told about the Commonwealth of Virginia through the work of living as well as historic Virginia artists, and she wanted to reopen the Federal-style landmark, designed in 1813 by prominent architect Alexander Parris, which had been closed to the public since the pandemic.
Mrs. Youngkin asked Judy Boland and Ann Goettman, who sit on the Citizens’ Advisory Council on Furnishing and Interpreting the Executive Mansion (CAC), to realize her vision by creating the Art Experience (https://www.executivemansion.virginia.gov/art-experience/). The duo was an interesting choice: Neither one is a museum curator. But while Boland’s background is in psychology and Goettman’s is in marketing, both are passionate about art. Although the women were not well acquainted at the time, they found themselves agreeing on which artists and paintings to suggest for the first exhibition, Spirit of Virginia….”