RECENT COMMENTS

Do you know anything about the old Garnett Print Shop?

PHOTO: Benjamin Wigfall by Willie Redd – Virginia Museum of Fine Arts

From Dr. Vaughn Whitney Garland (Vaughn.Garland@VMFA.museum) at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts:

I am looking for information on the old Garnett Print Shop at 27th and P Street and hope you can help by sending my question across the neighborhood. While speaking with Governor Wilder we just found out that his friend Benjamin Wigfall worked at Garnett’s as a youth and Wigfall is the topic of my program here at the museum. I would love to find out any information from the larger Church Hill community about the shop and the Garnett family of printers. Can you help?

Benjamin Wigfall was born in Richmond, grew up in Church Hill, and graduated Armstrong High School. He graduated Hampton University and later earned an MFA from Yale School of Design before returning to teach at Hampton in the late 1950s and ‘60s. His painting Chimneys was acquired by the VMFA in 1951.