W&L’s Staniar Gallery Presents Matt Eich’s ‘Sunlight, Shadow, Rainbow / Grace Notes’ The solo exhibition will open Feb. 16 with an artist’s talk slated for March 10.

Office of Communications and Public Affairs
February 3, 2026

Washington and Lee University’s Staniar Gallery is pleased to present “Sunlight, Shadow, Rainbow / Grace Notes,” a solo exhibition by photographer Matt Eich. The exhibit will be on view from Feb. 16 through March 13. Eich will also give an artist’s talk at 5:30 p.m. on March 10 in Wilson Concert Hall in the Lenfest Center for the Arts, followed by a reception.

The exhibition and reception events are free and open to the public.

Eich’s longform projects grapple with themes of memory, family, community and the American condition. He explores these themes through a micro and macros lens, pivoting between looking inward at his family and outward at his country. His upcoming exhibit spotlights tandem bodies of work, “Sunlight, Shadow, Rainbow” and “Grace Notes,” which play with and against each other and invite a slow, indulgent viewing. The photographs, taken in the years during and since the pandemic, feature his daughters and evoke feelings of tenderness, hope and unease. They engage the joys, mysteries, sorrows and uncertainties of youth experienced through the eyes of a father.

Eich’s work has been featured in more than 30 solo shows, in addition to more than 100 festivals and group exhibitions. His prints are held in the collections of the Chrysler Museum of Art, the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston and the Portland Art Museum, among others. Eich has received an Aaron Siskind Fellowship, two Getty Images grants, two Virginia Museum of Fine Visual Arts Fellowships and an Aperture/Google Creator Lab Photo Fund Grant. He was an artist-in-residence at Light Work in 2013 and at the Robert Rauschenberg Residency in 2019.

Eich is the author of five photographic monographs and makes books under his own imprint, Lille Oak.PRESS. Based in Charlottesville, Virginia, he is an associate professor at the Corcoran School of the Arts & Design at the George Washington University. He received a bachelor’s degree in photojournalism from Ohio University and an MFA in photography from Hartford Art School’s limited-residency program.

For more information about the 2025-26 exhibition and programming schedule, visit Staniar Gallery’s website.

Staniar Gallery is located on the second floor of Wilson Hall, in Washington and Lee University’s Lenfest Center for the Arts. When the campus is open to the public, gallery hours are Monday through Friday, 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. For more information, please call 540-458-8861.