There’s a cliché in the art world: the reluctant teacher. Many artists take teaching jobs for the steady paycheck and to stay connected to art—not because teaching itself is their calling. And often these teachers are just a little resentful: students, grade books and faculty meetings come to seem like burdens that eat into studio time.
Then there’s Chica Tenney. Since she came to Charlottesville in 1964, Tenney has been building a reputation as a serious artist, a community leader and a beloved teacher, and her holistic approach to all three roles blends and reinforces each of them. Perhaps it’s for this reason that her retirement from Piedmont Virginia Community College last December has not severed her ties to Charlottesville’s visual art community. “It’s an unusual thing to discover somebody can move so seamlessly between their life and their art,” says Rosamond Casey, president of McGuffey Art Center and a longtime friend of Tenney’s. “I think that more than anybody I know, her art is her life.”
During the month of October, no fewer than five venues around town will be showing portions of a Tenney retrospective [see sidebar]. The show, curated by Daniel Mason, is collectively and portentously titled “Chica Tenney: Advent.” If the past is any indicator, good things are on the horizon, both for Tenney and the community that surrounds her.
Tenney has always been an artist. “I just grew up with that designation, because I was drawing all the time,” she says. A native of Michigan, Tenney took summer art classes as a child and went on to study art at Michigan State University before leaving college when she married her husband, Harry. The pair moved to the New York area and then to Washington, D.C., and all the while Tenney continued making art on her own. Eventually, in 1964, they landed in Charlottesville because of Harry’s business. It was here that Tenney would become a respected artist and teacher.
As “Advent” makes clear, Tenney’s artistic output reflects a series of shifts in genre and medium. As a young artist, she made abstract prints that coolly vibrate with large areas of color. She also painted onto photographs in serial images meant to echo film. Eventually, though, she returned to the practice of drawing and painting from life that had captivated her as a child.
These days, much of her work depicts the view from her Buckingham County studio. The vast landscape of work is usually tempered with images of domesticity: a porch railing, a table with a potted orchid, or a shadow subtly revealing a house’s hidden presence. Another series of sepia drawings, called “Messengers,” shows people with the possessions that catalog their lives: Albemarle County artist Beatrix Ost sits with a fan-patterned teapot, her drooping shawl and a carved ebony hand; Harry Tenney holds chopsticks over several pieces of sushi and piles of fruit.
“Advent” coincides with McGuffey’s 30th anniversary—fitting, in that Tenney was one of the art center’s original founders. In some ways, Tenney, McGuffey and Charlottesville have all grown together. When Tenney came to Charlottesville, she saw it as a good place to raise her son and daughter, but not as an artistic hotbed. “There wasn’t a lot going on,” she recalls, with characteristically gentle humor. “There were three other women artists that I could find.” Tenney continued to make art, though, studying at UVA and Virginia Commonwealth University. And in 1975, when Charlottesville’s potential as an art community began to unfold in the form of McGuffey, Tenney was there.
“Who would have imagined that it would last 30 years?” she laughs, remembering how McGuffey began as the brainchild of a contingent of artists and UVA architects who saw the City-owned school building on Second Street as a possible art center. Tenney was one of several artists who put in long hours during the center’s first years, hanging shows, designing brochures and silkscreening posters. The effort helped Charlottesville turn a corner.
“Suddenly people saw Charlottesville as a good place to live for an artist,” Tenney says, calling the current art scene “on a par with anywhere outside of New York.”
Casey believes McGuffey was a golden egg for the city. “Having this great big building so close to the Down-town Mall was a real invitation to expand the arts in the Downtown area,” she says. “I think Chica is one of a number of people who can be credited for that.”
Throughout the transformation, Tenney’s role in the community deepened. When Casey moved to Charlottesville in 1981, she re-members, “The name Chica kept coming up everywhere among the people that I met. She was incredibly open, incredibly kind and sensible, and she seemed to know her way around the whole art scene in Charlottesville.”
Former student Cri Kars-Marshall relates Tenney’s tendency to use her network for the greater good to a conviction that art is part of—not separate from—the world at large. “You have to look at the world around you and bring that into your art,” Kars-Marshall recalls Tenney teaching her and other PVCC students. “As an artist you’re not only an artist; there are other things you’re concerned with.”
That sense of responsibility—so different from the model of artist-as-solitary-genius—made Tenney an unusually well-loved figure at PVCC. “You would like to clone her,” Cliff Haury says of Tenney. He’s known her since they both arrived at Piedmont in 1976, and he’s been reading Tenney’s student evaluations since he became dean of humanities, fine arts and social sciences 20 years ago. “[They] simply repeated time and time again what a gifted classroom instructor she was,” he says, going on to praise her other talents in areas from running PVCC’s gallery to choosing bathroom tile for the V. Earl Dickinson Building on campus during its construction.
Tenney says community college teaching suits her outlook. “I just seem to be drawn to the group effort as well as requiring an enormous amount of solitude and privacy. I like to see what people can do in their own brief time to be effective, what can be changed, what can be growthful for the community.”
That community supplies a wildly varying range of students, from the fresh-out-of-high-school to the fresh-into-retirement. “The diversity of ages I really find interesting. I’ve seen them be very helpful to each other,” Tenney says.
Anyone who knows Tenney well would add that Tenney herself made those interactions possible. Haury says that instead of letting beginners be intimidated by older, more accomplished artists, “Chica could take superior students in her class and allow them to be role models for the younger students.” Casey calls Tenney a “great encourager,” saying, “There’s something in her whole spirit that makes the arts seem delicious and accessible and exciting.”
And serious. Virginia Thompson, who began studying with Tenney in 2002, says Tenney was committed to “the integrity of the subject. It would be so easy to turn it into a hobby course, but she never did that.” Thompson adds that Tenney often urged her students to combine art and activism—“to get involved in a larger way, not just to keep art for ourselves.”
Tenney herself says she has an interest in “working on the fabric of the community.” To that end, in 1994, she recruited Kars-Marshall and other local artists to teach in a new program called ArtReach, which brought various art media to local at-risk youth. ArtReach was a program of Second Street Gallery, where Tenney served on the board, and operated through the Charlottesville Schools Alternative Education Program, Venable Elementary School and Teensight at FOCUS: A Women’s Resource Center.
“I think that was a critically important thing for the individuals who took part in it,” says Casey. “It was very relaxed. It directed them into areas they were really getting pleasure from.” Tenney says art making, for these kids, was both healing and stimulating. “My feeling is that the creative process offers hope,” she says. “Externalizing your emotions is healthy, but also learning to deal with questions and come up with ideas.” Though Tenney left and the program was downsized in 2002, it continues to operate at Teensight.
Tenney’s retirement from PVCC, she says, was mostly for the sake of painting full-time. “I wanted to be able to paint in the spring,” she says simply. Haury says Tenney’s legacy at PVCC will endure on several fronts, including donations to the college from grateful alumni of her classes. Kars-Marshall, who took several courses with Tenney and has since become a ceramic artist, is currently involved with the establishment of the Chica Tenney Fund for the Visual Arts, which will provide scholarships and prizes for PVCC art students. She says, “There is this groundswell of gratitude from students towards her.”
In 1982 Tenney was about to begin working on a MFA at VCU, and needed to pull back from the responsibilities of studio membership at McGuffey. At the same time, the Buckingham County farmhouse she and her husband had slowly restored was finally ready to use as a studio. She moved her art practice there, and the farm has been a crucial escape for her ever since. “Buckingham County is really flat and reminds me of Michigan,” she says. “It has the horizon line that I’m interested in in terms of immersion. It’s a place I can really think about light.”
Much of her work began, at this time, to occur on a large scale: mural-sized paintings, four-foot-wide drawings. Tenney says her interest in immersion, nurtured during her Great Lakes childhood, drives this oversized work. “You can feel that with a horizon line of water, mountains, you can feel it in a city among throngs of people, and I needed that size to convey that feeling.”
Now, Tenney’s looking forward to being immersed in not only the expansive space of her farm, but also uncluttered stretches of time. “I probably will just revel in being able to read and paint and think about what I’m interested in painting next,” she says. So far, though, her retirement’s been full of preparations for the retrospective, a process she likens to “a combination of being in graduate school and planning a wedding.”
In readying the 70-plus pieces that make up the five-venue show, Tenney has enjoyed taking a long view of her career. “That was a great benefit of it, to be able to curate and locate the work and think about it and the evolution of the ideas in it.” The show started as a simple retrospective in the PVCC Gallery but quickly expanded when Daniel Mason, the gallery’s interim director, became its curator. “Her retrospective offers an opportunity to pose the question of an artist’s role in the community,” says Mason. “For Chica Tenney that meant starting an art center, serving on boards, doing art education for everyone.” The multivenue approach, he says, is a way of physically and graphically connecting the many art institutions around town on which Tenney’s put her stamp. “Perhaps an exhibition itself can unite a community,” he hopes.
Mason says the title “Advent” is meant to counter traditional notions of a retrospective show as a swan song. “Chica is on the verge of something in her painting,” he says. Whatever that thing is, Tenney says, it will emerge intuitively. “I’ve always looked at art as a research, as a way of staying connected with what is happening right now and expressing a feeling about that,” she says. “Through making art you’re paying attention—honoring something that may seem ordinary but is extraordinary. That same ability was useful to me in teaching.”
Like many of Tenney’s former students, Virginia Thompson has gone on to develop a serious art practice of her own. If she’s any indicator, the voice of Chica Tenney will be echoing around Charlottesville for a long time to come, retirement or no. Says Thompson, “I just trust what she said to me so much that it’s like all the time she’s talking over my shoulder. She’s someone I’ll always be able to turn to.”