Home to both a national park and an active missile range where the first atomic bomb was tested, White Sands, New Mexico, is a place where shifting dunes of shimmering gypsum reflect the desert sun.
It’s also the place sculptor Lily Cox-Richard (M.F.A. ’08), associate professor of Sculpture + Extended Media, felt called to in 2023, when she received a Nancy Graves Foundation grant to support her foray into a new medium—glass.
The mutable nature of the terrain in White Sands appealed to her as a sculptor, while its decades of being transformed by military and tourist activity captivated her imagination. An artist whose practice is driven in part by questions surrounding stewardship and community, Cox-Richard thought the site could help them explore the question that’s been at the forefront of her mind: In a divided and ecologically threatened world, “How can we get to the future, and do so by taking care of one another?”
Over multiple trips during full-moon cycles, she visited the park and conducted rituals in the sand. She then used a handheld 3-D scanner to map the impressions those rituals left behind.
“In this project, I’m looking to the land for wisdom,” Cox-Richard says, “but I’m also reaching inside myself to think about what I have to contribute in this moment.”
“Disquiet in the Sand” is the culmination of that project. Curated by Acting Senior Curator Amber Esseiva (B.A. ’12) an on display at the Institute for Contemporary Art at VCU‘s Markel Center until February 22, 2026, this multimedia exhibition centers on a constellation of colorful glass “scrying mirrors”—dark, semi-reflective surfaces used for divination (the practice of seeking hidden insight and knowledge). Cox-Richard made them by creating glass molds using the 3-D scans from White Sands, as well as other sites with complicated political and ecological histories. Suspended in the third-floor True Farr Luck Gallery of the ICA, these scrying mirrors act as lenses, reflecting and refracting light and inviting viewers to look deeper, listening for messages from within themselves and the human-transformed earth.
Cox-Richard wants the exhibition to be a playful space where collective action can mean gazing inward together. She also hopes the search for intuition it invites can help guide us toward an answer to the question that’s on so many minds right now: “Where do we go from here?”
“Disquiet in the Sand” is made possible by generous support from Markel, Nancy Graves Foundation, Margaret Lewis, VCU Foundation, and Ashley Kistler.