It’s another busy morning in the Casey household on Rugby Road. John Casey, a celebrated local novelist and UVA creative writing professor, is already out back in his writing shed. Meanwhile, his wife, McGuffey Art Center President Rosamond Casey, has done T’ai Chi, made breakfast and lunch for their youngest daughter, Julia, a student at Charlottesville High School, and corresponded with art dealers in Boston and Washington, D.C., about reproducing her 40-page calligraphic manuscript, Wood Notes Wild: Notations of Bird Music. She communes by the woodstove with her “sacred cup of coffee”and peruses the New York Times. Soon she’ll be off to the studio, where she might have an impromptu meeting with the McGuffey Executive Council, then work on a commissioned calligraphic design or begin planning for her upcoming class, “Mapping the Dark: A Course in Conceiving Art,” an eight-week session in “exploring mixed media with the goal of matching an inner state with an external form.” If Casey is lucky, she’ll have time to work on her next project, “Men in Suits,” which she says has languished for two months, before it’s time to drive Julia to violin lessons. Who said being an artist was easy?
Among the book-cluttered shelves in the Caseys’ house, Ros Casey’s creative side emerges in everything from the carpentry in the kitchen to the landscaping in the back yard. In the living room hang photographs of a young Julia and two cousins, which Casey took at her family’s Pennsylvania estate. She set the pictures alongside a poem by former UVA student George Bradley, which she turned into a book, The Blue Cage, and which was featured in an exhibition at the National Museum of Women. In an upper hallway, watercolor sketches depict scenes from a year spent in Rome, when John Casey was a fellow at the American Academy.
Surprisingly, the Caseys say they share little of their unfinished projects with each other. “It used to be that I would come running up out of my shed and try and read something to her while she was cooking supper,” says John Casey. “It didn’t work very well because I tried to explain, ‘Well, here’s what happened in the first hundred pages…’ You really do have to keep your own counsel.” That’s been the case more than ever since Rosamond Casey became McGuffey chief. As the partially City-subsidized collective, located in the former McGuffey Elementary School off Second Street, enters its third decade, facing what some consider to be an uncertain future, Casey, 53, has stepped up to become one of its greatest assets.
Portrait of the artist
In 1976, following her graduation from the Boston Museum School of Fine Arts, Rosamond Pittman began working in Washington, D.C., in the graphics department of ABC News, a fast-paced job that earned her respect in Beltway circles but left her unfulfilled: “People were discouragingly impressed by my news credentials, when it was a job I had negative impressions about, if any at all.”
She also pursued her art, working with The Smithsonian Institute and with the Fillmore Arts Center, a K-8 program in the D.C. public school system, where she began developing a curriculum based on “signs, symbols and alphabets.” Letters were one of her passions. “There is something internal driving humankind to make some kind of scratch in the earth,” she says. While in D.C., she met John Casey, whom she married in 1981. And soon the new Rosamond Casey settled into life in Charlottesville, helping raise two daughters, Maud and Nell, from John Casey’s previous marriage, and eventually bringing two more, Clare and Julia, into the family.
It didn’t take long upon arriving for Casey to become involved with McGuffey, principally teaching calligraphy and working by commission. In 1995 she branched out by establishing Treehouse Book Arts, which was “like a school for fairly archaic crafts” including papermaking and bookbinding. Though the classes have since gotten more conceptual, Casey continues to teach a Treehouse summer program for kids at her home. In May 2003, Casey accepted a one-year term as McGuffey president, a position some artists regard as thankless and time consuming, and broke with tradition last May by taking on a second term. “Anybody can be it, just nobody wants to,” says Casey. “I enjoy being at the center of things—it’s a safer place to be than on the edges.”
The tasks of McGuffey president include anything from managing administrative issues to coordinating events to settling private concerns between members, which can be a particularly daunting task, says McGuffey artist Fleming Lunsford. “McGuffey is a funny place because you’ve got this group of artists who are all essentially working independently and doing our own thing in many ways, so you’d think that it’s difficult to come up with a leader. Ros is a very thoughtful leader. She takes everyone’s opinions into consideration and she sees the larger picture that McGuffey has and should be playing in the community.”
City limits
Rosamond Casey’s family traces its political pedigree at least two centuries back, and with it, a reputation for dubious political decisions. Her ancestors were French Protestants who supported Napoleon. They arrived a day late to Waterloo only to find the emperor vanquished, says John Casey. “If they’d arrived on time, they’d be killed and [Ros] wouldn’t be here.”
The family then fled to Milford, Pennsylvania, where they established strong ties to Theodore Roosevelt and helped him establish the Bull Moose Party, a progressive faction of the Republican party which, during the 1912 presidential election, drew enough votes away from Roosevelt’s successor, William Howard Taft, to win Democrat Woodrow Wilson the presidency. When Casey assumed her second term as McGuffey president in May, amid heated conversations with Charlottesville’s City Council over increasing the center’s rent, it seemed as if history might repeat itself.
Concerned by the impending departure of arts-friendly Councilors Maurice Cox and Meredith Richards, on April 27 McGuffey artists sent an open letter to the center’s mailing list that criticized incumbent Democratic candidate Kevin Lynch’s lack of support for the center during budgeting sessions and for a 2002 vote against renewing the McGuffey lease. “Basically we were trying to really fulfill the stated mission of being a community art center,” says Russell Richards, a McGuffey artist and Meredith Richards’ son, who advocated the letter. “It’s important that people be aware of the rather precarious political situation.”
Fearing the McGuffey voting bloc, along with a write-in campaign for Meredith Richards, might have a real impact on the election, and cost city Democrats one or more Council seats, party leaders brusquely responded. When Mayor Cox showed up at an emergency meeting of McGuffey’s five-member Executive Council, Casey gave him the floor. “He lectured us as if we were children,” she says. McGuffey sent another postcard, which, though not a retraction of the earlier one, clarified that “the letter was in no way intended to be a partisan position.”
Lynch says clarifying his position early on with the artists would have spared the ill will. Currently, he says, the City budgets about $28,000, or the cost of building utilities, for the center, most of which is offset by the artists’ rent. Though he would like to see McGuffey’s funding on equal footing with other arts organizations like Live Arts and other City-supported spaces like the mostly unused Jefferson School, he has no intention of closing it down, he says. “We’ve had enough discussion now between City Council and the artists,” he says, “that they know that if their rent goes up, it’s not because the City doesn’t appreciate McGuffey or is trying to move the artists out, it’s because we’re fiscally constrained and there are other arts organizations that are deserving.”
Though Casey says different camps exist within the McGuffey building, she says McGuffey should not have exerted its political influence. “We got ourselves a little more involved in the public arena in that we pissed off some people we shouldn’t have. So there had to be some deft maneuvering to get ourselves back out of that jam.” However, Casey does see more public outreach and awareness as integral to preserving the center.
“We’re in a position to persuade by our work,” she says. “I think we have a unique role. [McGuffey does] something that no other institution in Charlottesville does… meets the public, allows questions to be asked and detailed answers to be given.” Though one of the requirements of McGuffey’s charter with the City is that members open their studios to the public for at least 17 1/2 hours per week, Casey leads the charge for opening the center up even more to special events. In March 2004, McGuffey hosted Tibetan monks for a series of workshops that included a sand mandala display. And hoping to capitalize on a newly available space in McGuffey, which formerly housed the Second Street Gallery, Casey has aided the development of a monthly Spotlight Series, in which a panel of artists, writers or performers would have “an opportunity to raise questions and try to answer them,” she says.
Digging for treasure
Rosamond Casey pulls out a finely crafted box, 12.25" x 9" x 3.5", and gently sets it on the island at her space in McGuffey’s Studio No. 16. The work is “Mapping the Dark: A Museum of Ambient Disorders.” Inside the box, 10 booklets fold out, revealing the lives of fictitious characters through psychological profiles: A woman worried by her weight clips bar codes from the food she eats. An older man, going deaf, begins meticulously bottling noises. Another man with amnesia tries to reconstruct his previous life based on a single photograph.
“Mapping the Dark,” which debuted in March 2003 as a McGuffey installation piece, marked a turning point of sorts for Casey. Brushing off the safety net of titles like “calligrapher” and “bookmaker,” she deliberately entered the realm of “mixed media” for the first time, using a variety of materials and techniques, from found objects to carved stones, even training herself to paint with her feet for a character who comes to terms with a phobia of losing her hands. “Those tools become the medium through which to express the character’s plight,” says Casey.
The box, one of 45 in existence according to the website of her dealer, Joshua Heller Rare Books, Inc., is delicately stitched in brown leather, Japanese silk, cloth and fiber. All the “lives” are color-coded and organized by hand-punched, numeric dot patterns. “It’s very professionally done,” says Neil Turtell, executive librarian for the National Gallery of Art. “Unlike most artists’ books, which look like books, hers was sort of a treasure chest.” Last year Turtell purchased one of the boxes, going at $1,750 each, for the illustrious D.C. gallery’s permanent collection. “Obviously you can tell I think very highly of [Casey’s] work and I don’t do that lightly.”
Nor is Turtell alone in his thinking. The Library of Congress also picked up “Mapping the Dark” for its illustrated book collection. And Wood Notes Wild: Notations of Bird Music, which incorporated bird songs with painted designs, made its way into an exhibition at the National Museum of Women in the Arts before being purchased for $8,000 by the Rochester Institute of Technology’s Melbert B. Cary Graphic Arts Collection. All of this puts Casey into a comfortable spot straddling the line between creative and profitable. For husband, John, the potential was always there. “She finally got around to thinking, ‘Geez, I’ve been doing 20 years, maybe I should try and sell some,’ and then bingo, the popcorn popped,” he says.
Rosamond Casey is now in the position to pursue her deeper calling, not as a working artist, but as an artist artist. “I don’t make art anymore for hanging on walls,” she says. “I’m much more of an installation artist or conceptual artist—I mean, I think about art.” And she teaches it. With “Mapping the Dark: A Course in Conceiving Art,” Casey shows other people how to live and think artistically and to unlock their own passions. “The role of a teacher is to gently open the hand of an artist and let them visualize—help the thing that is most important to them emerge.”
Casey’s class
Rosamond Casey’s work has inspired art lovers for years. She unlocked her own creativity through her project “Mapping the Dark: A Museum of Ambient Disorders,” and since 2003 she’s developed a class to help artists and non-artists tap into their abilities with “Mapping the Dark: A Course in Conceiving Art.” The third session of the class begins Tuesday, January 25.
The eight-week course covers all aspects of creating a work of art, from developing your thoughts to choosing your medium to offering a final display that an audience will connect with. “What I’m teaching is language…a translation for how to turn an idea into something that has form,” says Casey.
As a new member to McGuffey, photographer Fleming Lunsford was also one of Casey’s students. “She definitely has a presence,” says Lunsford. “From that class, I pulled a lot of personal, very dark work…I can’t say if I’d just been toodling along in my studio I would have probed in such a way.”
In one exercise, students bring in objects, which are combined to create something new. “That’s really all art is—taking one object and putting it in new relation to something else, finding a different meaning,” Casey says.
Teacher and artist Isabel McLean took the techniques she’d learned from Casey’s class into creating an exhibit, “Detritus: A Mixed Media Memoir” at the Renaissance School in October. “The class is so individual, because I knew exactly what I wanted and she allowed me, and facilitated my getting there. It was different from what other people in the class wanted.” McLean says she still uses the journal she kept in the class.—B.S.