Month: May 2008

Hartz takes job at Oregon

According to a press release from the University of Oregon, former UVA Art Museum director Jill Hartz, whose name was quietly removed from the museum’s staff website during the winter, has accepted a position as executive director of the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art at the University of Oregon.

Hartz confirmed the appointment during a phone interview with C-VILLE this afternoon, saying that the Schnitzer Museum is "a beloved institution both to the University and the larger community."

"They have a very eclectic program. For me, it’s the next step up," says Hartz. "It’s a much larger museum—it has a restaurant and a café, and 23,000 square feet of gallery space, larger staff, larger budget, a lot of major supporters. And they’re really open to the kind of programs I’ve done here, that are of interest to a number of different constituencies, supporting the academic mission but also reaching out beyond that."

Hartz starts her position in August. This summer the museum begins its 75th anniversary celebration. Hartz lauded the museum’s highly praised collection of Asian art as well as its contemporary work, which will constitute a good deal of the exhibitions scheduled for the anniversary year.

"One of my first shows will be a contemporary Cuban show that’s already on the schedule. So, having worked on Cuban art here, that fits really well with my interests." The exhibit, "Cuba Avant-Garde: Contemporary Art from The Farber Collection," opens on October 4 and runs through January.

"Probably in the spring of next year, we’ll be doing some major shows that look back at what the museum has accomplished and where we want to go from there," she adds.


Goodbye, Rugby Road, hello, Oregon! Former UVA Art Museum director Jill Hartz has accepted a position as the executive director of the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art at the University of Oregon.

UPDATE: UVA Art Museum was o.k. to “edit” fake poop, says artist

As the saying goes, "Every dog has his day." Well, the dog formerly at the center of Irwin Berman‘s exhibit at the University of Virginia Art Museum has left the school with a steaming, heaping pile of orange and blue turds on its paws. And the artist tells C-VILLE he has no problem with that, though his collaborators may see it differently.

As part of his show "Sedentary Pleasures," which opens at UVA Art Museum on Friday night, May 2, Berman—an alumnus of the Medical School and a sculptor—crafted a four-legged milking stool piled high with fake dog droppings. After learning about "Seal," the canine mascot of UVA until his death in 1953, Berman wrote and produced a three-and-a-half minute short film that mythologizes the stool’s origin. For that project he had help from UVA alums Michael Wartella and Sam Retzer and associate professor of art William Bennett. In the film, an enormous dog’s face devours a Cavalier figure and then rains multi-colored shit down from the sky; blue and orange coils amass on top of a stool that resembles the piece in Berman’s show.

"This was all supposed to be part of this show, to be shown at the [UVA Art] Museum," says Bennett during a phone interview. "Somehow, somebody in the University administration—not sure who, how or why—decided this film wasn’t appropriate for exhibition." Berman’s original intention, according to Bennett, was to give the film away in exchange for donations to the UVA Art Museum or Department. A few weeks ago, however, Bennett says that UVA pulled both the stool and the film from the exhibit.

In a follow-up call to C-VILLE, Berman said that The Great Seal was simply one of four pieces not selected for the final exhibit; an e-mail from the artist clarified that the grounds for this decision "reflected sound curatorial judgments by the Museum Director and Curator," Elizabeth Hutton Turner. As previously reported, former museum director Jill Hartz was removed from her position and replaced by Turner, the vice provost for the arts at UVA.

Instead, the stool and the film will be on display at Les Yeux du Monde. Both can be viewed during the gallery’s normal hours throughout May, and a copy of the DVD may be obtained in exchange for donations of $100 to the UVA Art Museum or Art Department.


UVA to Berman: Shit happens. Sculptor relocates sculpture and film to Les Yeux du Monde.

Edwards and school board on MCP

New city councilor Holly Edwards has described stepping into the 40-year debate over the Meadowcreek Parkway (MCP) as something akin to walking into a theater in the middle of a movie. She and I talked about the MCP a bit for the story that’s in this week’s paper, and she framed it in a way that I hadn’t heard any councilor, opponent or activist frame it.

"I believe that the desire [to build the parkway] came at the same time as Urban Renewal," she says, sitting at a table in The Nook. "There was this vision of developing Downtown that was about business and transportation and economic stability. And even when those decisions were made, ‘economic justice’ was not the term that was used because urban renewal was poor people removal, bottom line. And there’s no getting away from that."

It’s an interesting connection: the MCP and Urban Renewal. And one that needs to be considered. As long as I’ve been covering the whole MCP saga, the points of contention have centered around the environment, our culture of transportation and whether Downtown businesses will shrivel and die if a road isn’t built directly to them.

But the debate hasn’t focused on people—not people on the lower end of the economic spectrum, or, in Edward’s view, African Americans.

"Even just the face of the people that are in this conversation, I wish there were more African Americans involved in the conversation," she says. "But there even seems to be a cultural divide in that respect. It’s priorities, a sense of making a decision as to where the involvement in civic engagement is even practical. I think that many times within that community there is a sense of apathy that prevents people from getting involved."

And to abruptly switch gears here, today, May 1, besides being International Workers Day (national workers are celebrating even having a damn job, I suppose), is the day that the Charlottesville School Board makes a decision whether to approve the use of land near the high school for the MCP. And after speaking to the chairperson, Ned Michie, I don’t think there’s going to be much of a push to oppose the Parkway.

But that doesn’t mean MCP opponents haven’t been trying. Michie told me that he’d received some e-mails from people urging him to block the MCP with this decision. And the local Sierra Club sent a mass e-mail to its supporters urging them to connect with  school board members and ask them to oppose the land agreement.

It even included some helpful talking points:

  • "Students should not have to give up their athletic field for an unnecessary parkway.
  • Road construction so near the high school will cause increased pollution and hazards for students.
  • School personnel were not consulted during parkway planning.
  • The parkway will drastically reduce the amount of "greenspace" in the city by paving over part of McIntire Park and a softball field.
  • Funds for the parkway should instead be invested in public transit, bike and pedestrian trails that will benefit our students."

All this said, I’ll be surprised if anything comes out of this evening’s meeting other than a rubber stamp.

GraceWorks wins $10K from high school philanthropists

A nice chunk of change was given Tuesday night to GraceWorks, a small local nonprofit that runs an afterschool program for needy kids. GraceWorks earned the blessing of a committee of 10 high school students put together by the Charlottesville Area Community Foundation; for 14 years, CACF has assembled the committee and given it the task of awarding a grant to a local nonprofit that serves youth.

This year, GraceWorks snagged $10,000 toward its mission of busing 20 disadvantaged Albemarle County school kids to a local farm after school four days a week; there they soak in a bucolic atmosphere, work on their homework, do fine arts and environmental activities, and eat a healthy dinner. Julie Baker, a Western Albemarle High School English teacher, and a number of volunteers keep the program going. Now they have a little more cash to support their efforts, and the committee of high school students has the enviable experience of being photographed handing out one of those comically oversize checks.