© Riley Goodman, “Boys Of Summer, In Their Ruin,” 2024, from the ongoing series “To Cultivate A Magnolia”

We would like to thank everyone who submitted to the inaugural Lenscratch Art + History Competition. We were impressed by the enormous number of compelling bodies of work, making it challenging to select just five outstanding projects. History and Art have been deeply intertwined for centuries. The winning projects we are featuring this week had a clear connection to history—exploring this relationship from personal, familial, and community viewpoints, extending to the history of places and countries, and even delving into mysteries and myths. Each image kept us wanting to discover more about the past, how it impacts the present, and—ultimately—the future.

Jeanine Michna-Bales and Sandy Sugawara

Photographer, designer, and historian Riley Goodman captures a Southern sense of place in his ongoing series “To Cultivate A Magnolia.” By weaving together a rich blend of still life, landscape, and portrait imagery, he shares his journey to discover his identity and place within the city he has chosen to call home.

© Riley Goodman, “Hope Springs Eternal,” 2025, from the ongoing series “To Cultivate A Magnolia”

What drew you to the topic of your Art + History body of work?

When I moved to Richmond, Virginia in 2014 I was an 18-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 journey since, I have always found Richmond to be watching over me like a silent guardian. From wafts of gardenias or night-blooming tobacco, and historic green spaces as locales of refuge or rendezvous — to glimpses of phantoms on midnight strolls and downtown streets turned Hollywood sets at golden hour, it is a place that recognizes its deeply-rooted history, with a passion to continually blossom anew — much like I have over the past eleven years. After graduating from VCUarts (Virginia Commonwealth University School of the Arts) in 2018 and deciding to stay in the city, I felt compelled to explore this intersection of complex history and magical realism as I found my own coming of age being woven into the rich tapestry of this place. I was drawn by the notion of investigating folk experience through what endures, what it means that it has, and how the historical intermingles with the contemporary.

© Riley Goodman, “The Will-o’-the-wisp,” 2024, from the ongoing series “To Cultivate A Magnolia”

What impact, if any, do you think this project has had or will have?

Though no one series can encompass the multitudes of a place’s being, I hope by melding the historical and contemporary through a queer lens, the impact “To Cultivate A Magnolia” will have its resonance as a story both familiar and new, that joins the canon of art’s long fascination with the mythology of the American South.

© Riley Goodman, “Virginia Dare,” 2020, from the ongoing series “To Cultivate A Magnolia”

© Riley Goodman, “Phantoms At Foushee’s Mill,” 2024, from the ongoing series “To Cultivate A Magnolia”

Artist Statement
When I moved to Richmond, Virginia in 2014 I was an 18-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. From wafts of night-blooming tobacco, and historic greenspaces as locales of refuge or rendezvous — to glimpses of phantoms on midnight strolls and downtown streets turned Hollywood sets at golden hour, it is a place that recognizes its deeply rooted history, with a passion to continually blossom anew — much like I have.

As Benjamin Botkin mentions in “A Treasury of Southern Folklore,” “if at times…the immortals of Southern history seem to lack folklore appeal, that is because the folk stories have died with the people that told them or because the biographers have been more interested in erecting a marble monument than in portraying a flesh-and-blood creature.”

And so I am invested in exploring the mythology of Virginia through image-making that not only remarks on my own coming of age as that flesh-and-blood creature, but more widely investigates the complexity of individuals’ experiences in a place imbued with an almost indescribable magic where past and present coexist.

Thus, referencing the hardiness of its leaves in tandem with the delicacy of its flowers, “To Cultivate A Magnolia” poetically visualizes 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.

© Riley Goodman, “Down From The Heavens,” 2024, from the ongoing series “To Cultivate A Magnolia”

© Riley Goodman, “A Maryland Yankee In Powhatan’s Court,” 2024, from the ongoing series “To Cultivate A Magnolia”

© Riley Goodman, “A Cause Lost,” 2020, from the ongoing series “To Cultivate A Magnolia”

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 these manifest 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 Magazine, among other outlets, and most notably resides in the permanent collections of the MoMA Artist Book Collection and the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts.

Instagram: @rileycgoodman

© Riley Goodman, “Abby, Before She Moved,” 2021, from the ongoing series “To Cultivate A Magnolia”

© Riley Goodman, “The Last Sunrise of Daniel Call,” 2024, from the ongoing series “To Cultivate A Magnolia”