A passion for art links two RPI grads

David Alexick (B.F.A. ’64/A; M.F.A. ’66/A) and Anne Menin Gibson-Alexick (Cert. ’52/A) didn't meet until years after graduating from Richmond Professional Institute.

As a high school student interested in painting, David Alexick (B.F.A. ’64/A; M.F.A. ’66/A) knew his future would include art. After receiving a catalog from Richmond Professional Institute, he thought he’d found a school that would help him achieve his goals.

“I looked at the curriculum in fine arts and that was it,” he says. “It crystallized it for me. I didn’t really look anywhere else.”

As a student at RPI, the precursor to Virginia Commonwealth University, Alexick earned accolades for his work. In 1963, as a junior, he won a Virginia Museum Fellowship worth $2,000 (“A lot of money back then,” Alexick says). At about the same time, he also earned a certificate of distinction in the Virginia artists’ biennial exhibit. The honor included a one-man show at the Robinson House on the grounds of the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts.

“I blossomed there,” Alexick says of his time at RPI. “It was the right place at the right time. I can’t help but think that some force or spirit was watching over my life and put me where I was supposed to be.”

After graduating, Alexick completed teaching stints at a community college in Pennsylvania and Longwood College (now university), interspersed with doctoral studies at Penn State University and a job as the assistant curator of education at the Worcester Art Museum in Massachusetts. Finding the weather too cold up north, his career path led him to a part-time teaching job in the Department of Fine Arts at Christopher Newport College (now university). Soon the position became full time, and over the course of the next 27 years, Alexick — who ultimately rose to a full-tenured professor — taught everything from art history to sculpture. 

In 1993, while teaching an art history course, he met his future wife, Anne Menin Gibson-Alexick (Cert. ’52/A), a watercolorist who shared the same alma mater as well as a love of art. The two became friends and married in 2004. “We’re a happy team,” Alexick says. “We really work well together.”

Like her husband, Gibson-Alexick attended RPI because of her interest in art, specifically fashion illustration. Throughout her career, she worked as an artist at various department stores including Richmond-based Thalhimers and Miller & Rhoads. Gibson-Alexick also taught fashion layout at RPI for a year before moving to Newport News where she worked as a graphic illustrator at Newport News Shipbuilding for 11 years. One of her first assignments there was to draw a caricature of a retiring employee.

“I thought, I’ve never done a caricature in my life. How can I do it?” Gibson-Alexick remembers. “It got so everybody wanted one.”

Another assignment required her to create a design for the front of the U.S.S. Boise submarine.   “It was a very unusual design in red, white and blue,” Gibson-Alexick says.

Christened in 1990, the sub continues to be deployed. “So my work is really out there,” she says. 

Gibson-Alexick retired in 1993 and Alexick joined her in 2007. Upon his retirement, Alexick was honored by Christopher Newport University as professor emeritus. An art gallery was named for him in the school’s Ferguson Center for the Arts.

“I’m happy to be retired,” Alexick says. “It just seemed like the right time. We got some new people in and they were just tops. I felt like I was leaving the department in good hands.” 

The couple stays extremely busy (“I wonder how in the world I ever found time to work,” Gibson-Alexick says) with painting, traveling, spending time with family and shopping for antiques for their homes in Newport News and Williamsburg.

Last summer, the duo began a large project that nears completion: construction of a studio-gallery space on two acres in Williamsburg where they will create their own paintings and show other artists’ work, all the while fueling their boundless passion for art.