The Visual Arts Center of Richmond will open an exhibition of work by Anna Hepler titled “Push Me Pull You” on Friday, April 1. A 5:30 p.m. artist talk will be followed by an opening reception that will run from 6 to 8 p.m. A press preview will be held on March 31 from 10 a.m. to noon.

In conjunction with VisArts’ exhibition, Quirk Gallery will open “Alphabet,” an exhibition of Hepler’s work on paper and small sculptural models in mixed media. “Alphabet” will run from April 5 to May 8, with an opening reception on April 5 from 5 to 8 p.m. The Visual Arts Center’s young professionals auxiliary board, Visual Arts Creative Ambassadors, will pour wine at the reception.

Hepler works in multiple mediums—drawing, ceramics, metals, textiles, printmaking and plastic—out of her Eastport, Maine studio. She is best known for large, site-specific inflatable sculptures like “Bloom,” which she installed in Suyama Space in Seattle, Wash. and “The Great Haul,” which hung 20-feet down from the ceiling of the Portland Museum of Art’s entryway in Portland, Maine. Her VisArts show will feature wire and fiber sculpture, ceramics, woodcuts, etchings and cyanotypes.

“We are thrilled to have Anna exhibit her work in not just one but two Richmond spaces,” says Stefanie Fedor, executive director at the Visual Arts Center of Richmond. “Hepler is extremely process driven and works in so many different mediums. She’s an extremely good fit for both VisArts and Quirk.”

Hepler was a Henry Luce Foundation fellow in South Korea and has received support from the Artist Resource Trust, the Roswell Artist-in-Residence Program, the Tamarind Institute and the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. She has exhibited her work at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Tokyo, Japan; the Museum of Fine Arts in Santa Fe, N.M.; the John Michael Kohler Arts Center in Sheboygan, Wis.; the DeCordova Museum and Sculpture Park in Lincoln, Mass. and throughout Maine at the Portland Museum of Art, the Center for Maine Contemporary Art and the University of Maine Museum of Art. Her work is in the collections of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., the Tate Modern in London, England and the Portland Museum of Art in Portland, Maine.

She earned a B.A. from Oberlin College and a M.F.A. from the University of Wisconsin at Madison.

Exhibitions at the Visual Arts Center of Richmond are supported by a grant from Altria Group, Inc. Push Me Pull You is presented with support from a National Endowment for the Arts Art Works grant and the Windgate Charitable Trust. The exhibition is accompanied by an original catalog and documentary video documenting Hepler’s studio process.