In Richmond, the Art Cheerleaders became a civic pep rally for art.

In 2007, Rebecca Goldberg revived the Art Cheerleaders in Richmond, Virginia, along with Mary Burruss and others, carrying forward the SMFA project’s use of cheerleading, satire, and public performance while adapting it to a new arts community. They cheered for artists, galleries, fundraisers, arts funding, and the messy civic life around culture.

How the Richmond Squad Began

The energy of Richmond’s Broad Street arts corridor provided the perfect incubator for a movement that sought to champion artists with the same fervor usually reserved for professional sports. The squad held their auditions and first practices at the Firehouse Theatre, as covered by Style Weekly. They performed at such venues as Richmond’s InLight and Wearable Art X, Style Weekly’s 25th Anniversary Celebration at Toad’s Place, An Evening With Bill Plympton at the Canal Club, and several times at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, where they won a Muse Award for Creativity in Business in 2008 for their arts advocacy and impact on the Richmond arts community.

Featured Media

Key Performance documentation

Bill Plympton at Canal Club

Richmond Art Cheerleaders opening performance for An Evening with Bill Plympton, Canal Club, Richmond, November 9, 2007. Video/photography by Jocelyn Bandas. Copyright held by The Art Cheerleaders. Courtesy of the Art Cheerleaders archive.

The Art Cheerleaders Enter Richmond’s Storybook

The Art Cheerleaders later entered Richmond’s institutional memory by inclusion in the Valentine Museum’s exhibit Fancy: Costumes, Characters, and the Richmond Masque, where they were described as promoting “appreciation of art’s cultural importance through humor and snark. [Their] cheerleading uniform is an immediately understood visual identity that the Art Cheerleaders adopted in unexpected settings to rally for Richmond artists.”

Connection Back to SMFA

While the Richmond Art Cheerleaders moved into broader advocacy, they maintained deep ties to the SMFA lineage. Cheers like “Make Art!” remained at the core of their repertoire, ensuring the satiric spirit of the Boston original continued to thrive in a new context.