The hum of American life reverberates throughout the hills and valleys of Virginia in the form of the Will Overman Band, a passionate quartet whose music is simultaneously rooted in the folk song spirit of a Blue Ridge mountaineer and filled with an energetic dynamism. The band delivers sincere music with all the comfort of a Southern home-cooked meal, fueled by a genuine desire to connect.
Friday 9/4. Free, 5:30pm. nTelos Wireless Pavilion, 700 E. Main St., Downtown Mall. 245-4910.
“It’s like a twin-engine plane” is how an Albemarle County resident and local teacher describes the noise that now overpowers the quiet bustle and birdsong of his once-peaceful backyard.
Donald Healy and his wife live in a townhome on Commonwealth Drive, behind the recently opened Costco in the Stonefield shopping center. Their home is situated atop a hill, putting it in line with the roof of the massive wholesale store, which is decorated with an array of heating and cooling units.
The Healys were accustomed to unwanted noise since the construction of the big-box store began, but they were under the impression that, when finished, the neighborhood’s ambiance would be quieter.
On the day of Costco’s grand opening, Healy says the fans running on top of the building sounded like a small airport.
“It was deafening,” he says. “Sometimes you sit out there and it’s just too much to bear.” But it’s not just his backyard, he says, acknowledging that several neighbors are even closer to the new store. Even inside in Healy’s two back bedrooms with the windows closed, “you can still hear it,” he says.
His wife, Sarah, reached out to local officials. Lisa Green, the Albemarle County code compliance officer, took a noise meter out to the Healys’ neighborhood for measurements. At the property line, where she is required to measure noise, the readings were just below the noise ordinance. But because the backyards of the homes on Commonwealth Drive are elevated on a hill, Green noted that the readings went slightly above the ordinance when she stepped farther into a home’s backyard.
“This is something we deal with constantly with new construction,” she says.
According to Brad Sheffield, the Albemarle County Board of Supervisors’ representative for the Rio District, there was a similar issue with Gander Mountain on 29 North. The store backed up against backyards and the air conditioning units were level with the homes. Though Sheffield was not a supervisor at this time, he says he’s been told the developer complied and reduced the noise.
Calling the noise bouncing off of Costco “just a hum,” Green says she still sympathizes with the Healys and understands that their backyard was once a very quiet place, so even the slightest noise could be irritating.
Green notified the developers, who she says were “exceptionally responsive,” and within days, they had created a plan to muffle the noise.
“They are committed to being good neighbors,” Green says.
According to Costco’s regional manager Anita Schwartz, the developers planned to conduct their own noise test at press time to determine whether placing baffles around the heating and cooling units or removing some from the roof will be most effective in reducing the noise. She says the results will come back in two weeks.
High quality music gets local exposure for the 16th year at the Charlottesville Chamber Music Festival. Co-founding musicians Timothy Summers and Raphael Bell bring familiar names and rising stars from across the globe to perform around town in a broad program of modern and classical works ranging from the sublime to the strange.
Through 9/20. $6-100, times and venues vary. 295-5395.
In the summer of 2012, the co-captain of the Fluvanna County High School girls varsity soccer team was charged with misdemeanor assault and battery and given a 90-day suspended sentence for biting an ex-teammate, who was playing for Western Albemarle High School in a heavily anticipated rivalry match.
Three years later, New York Times best-selling author Jonathan Coleman’s 60-page book, Crossing The Line: How One Incident in a Girls’ Soccer Match Rippled Across Small-Town America, recalls this controversial game by placing it in a larger context of what led up to it and what resulted, and asks readers to consider who, in the story, is the victim and whether there is more than one.
Taking the alleged biter’s side, Coleman focuses on the role of Greg Domecq, the now-retired associate principal of Western Albemarle who doubles as the father of the alleged victim. Though he says he had no biases before he began reporting for the book, Coleman says he learned from many sources that Domecq seemed obsessed with his children’s athletic careers and that winning was potentially more important to him than anything.
“My sense was that something terribly wrong had happened here,” says Coleman, who believes Kat Ditta, the alleged biter, “was the victim of something that had nothing to do with her,” and that she was just a competitive player in the way of the Western Albemarle Warriors winning the match, which they did. Coleman suggests that Ditta never actually bit Christine Domecq.
Ditta’s charges were ultimately nolle prossed (dismissed) at the Domecqs’ request, but she looks back on the negative impacts of her conviction and thanks Coleman for helping her realize that she had nothing to do with her own misfortune.
One of Greg Domecq’s former colleagues at Western, Lisa Marshall, who worked with him for many years, says she believes the book was unfair, and that Domecq has shown her documentation that refutes some of the accusations in Crossing the Line.
But Coleman contends his book couldn’t be more deeply reported, and not one person has come forward to dispute anything.
Repeated calls and e-mails to Greg Domecq were not returned. Marshall says he told her in a text message that he is sick of talking about the book.
Ditta, however, finally feels okay with talking about her experiences that stemmed from the controversial soccer match and costly court case, which included financial trouble and severe depression.
“It was mind-boggling,” she says. “You can keep yourself out of trouble through your entire high school career and end up in trouble anyway.”
At the time of her conviction, Ditta says she attempted to cut herself off from society by hiding in her parents’ basement. When she had to leave the house, she’d take her mom’s car instead of her 1995 bright-red Jeep Wrangler that people around town easily recognized.
To pay court fees, Ditta, family and friends hosted a cookout and also raised enough money on a crowdfunding site to go toward one semester at Virginia Wesleyan College.
“It was certainly detrimental,” Ditta says, “and going into college with a criminal record isn’t great.”
At Virginia Wesleyan, she played soccer until sustaining a sport-related injury sophomore year. Lynchburg College, for which Christine Domecq plays, is in the same conference, and the two teams met when Ditta was a sophomore and Domecq was a freshman. Though Domecq didn’t play in that game, she and her family were present, and Ditta says seeing the Domecqs “affected my game a little bit.”
With the publication of Coleman’s book, Ditta says she and her mother feel like her good name has been restored.
“I’m doing great now,” she says. “I’m a lot more confident than I ever was before. Once you’re put in the spotlight, you come out of your little bubble for sure.”
Updated September 2 — Kat Ditta was charged in June 2012 and her trial was in July. The original version said she was charged in July.
Updated September 4 — Greg Domecq is the now-retired associate principal of Western Albemarle, not the now-retired vice principal.
March 17—St. Patrick’s Day—was a pretty typical day for third-year Martese Johnson at the University of Virginia. A Tuesday, it was one of the heaviest academic days for the media studies and Italian major, and he was in class until mid-afternoon. That evening, “I hung out with friends on the Lawn for a time,” he says, “and people said, let’s go out and have fun and party.”
Then everything changed.
Johnson, 20, was arrested by three Virginia Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control agents early March 18 outside Trinity Irish Pub and charged with obstruction of justice and public intoxication or swearing after he gave owner Kevin Badke, who was checking IDs at the door, his valid driver’s license.
Johnson wouldn’t have gotten in that night anyway because Trinity was allowing only 21-year-olds and over in after 10pm, but when he gave Badke the wrong ZIP code on his driver’s license, that raised enough doubt for Badke that he didn’t bother to check the birthdate, he told the Cavalier Daily. Both men describe the exchange as “cordial,” but Johnson drew the attention of nearby ABC agents when he was turned away from the bar.
The world awoke to a photo of a bleeding black man on the ground surrounded by police. In a year of black men being killed by police, it was—sadly—not a new image. Johnson joined the list of other hashtags: #michaelbrown, #ericgarner, #freddiegray.
“The thing that stands out the most,” said Johnson in August, “I was the first hashtag that’s still alive today.”
Mr. Jefferson’s U was not South Side Chicago-born Johnson’s first choice. He yearned to be a University of Southern California Trojan, but he cast wide his college application net.
“In high school, I was very indecisive and ambitious and so I applied to 26 colleges,” he says. “I narrowed it down to three.”
His first visit to UVA was a summer Darden business program. “I hated it,” says Johnson. “It was my first introduction to southern preppy culture.” He committed to USC at 17, but was too young to legally agree.
UVA was a last-minute decision, he says, after making an eastern college tour and reaching out to his RA here. He discovered that UVA is a different place in the fall than in the summer. “Students were here and I saw how tight the community was,” he says. “There was a larger family vibe and I really appreciated that.”
Nonetheless, during his first year in Charlottesville he experienced the isolation and discomfort a lot of students experience, particularly black students. He learned that music chosen for homecoming, for instance, was something more likely to appeal to white culture, like Taylor Swift or country music, than to what black students may be listening to.
First-years can’t go to bars and the four black fraternities don’t have houses. “Everybody goes to fraternity parties,” Johnson says. “If a black student tries to go to a white fraternity, they’re typically turned away.” That happened to Johnson several times.
“I’ve been called nigger and physically threatened by members of white fraternities,” he says. “That’s very common.”
“These are the factors that push us to the outskirts. And we come together in the outskirts.” A lot of black students choose to live more than a mile away from the Lawn in the Faulkner dorm complex on North Grounds, “which is really far out,” says Johnson. “It’s the culture that promotes that behavior.”
His experience at UVA has been “drastically different” from most African-American students’, he says. “Ninety percent of them remain part of the black community and never explore other facets of the university and organizations that are influential in the university,” he says. “If there are no black students on Student Council, no black voices will ever be heard on Student Council.”
Johnson himself nearly stayed on the outskirts, getting involved in black organizations such as his fraternity, Kappa Alpha Psi, and the Black Student Alliance.
“It was my love for the black community that sort of propelled me into the white community and the larger community at UVA,” he says. “Minority students and athletes are disproportionately reported for honor violations. At that time, no one black was on the Honor Committee. I realized there was no black voice.”
In the video of his arrest, Johnson is heard saying, “I go to UVA. I go to UVA, you fucking racists.”
He explains why. “Since I got here, UVA, in my mind, has been my safe haven where I could grow as an individual, academically and personally,” he says. “Also I realized I’m part of a larger society. UVA is not a larger society and when I step off Grounds, I’m a random black kid who’s near a bar.” And being on the Honor Committee at UVA was no protection.
“He was shocked and hurt,” says third-year Aryn Frazier, who met Johnson through several black organizations, including the Black Student Alliance. “He was not shocked in that he didn’t know police brutality happened. He was shocked and hurt in a community where he’d made it one of his main goals to bridge gaps and experience the university to its fullest that he would become subject to police brutality.”
Frazier, political action chair for the BSA, had gotten up at 5am March 18 to catch up on school work and the first thing she did was check her phone. “Seeing that picture was jarring,” she says. “I immediately called my mother because she knows lawyers.”
She went to her first class, and skipped the rest to figure out what was going to happen next. “Martese was my friend and that happened to him, whom I know personally,” she says.
Frazier helped organize the demonstration that night attended by hundreds, including students, faculty and community members, both black and white. Johnson was present, the 10 stitches visible on his forehead.
When he first saw the bloody picture of himself that went viral, Johnson was appalled. “In the moment, I didn’t realize I was hurt with the adrenaline pumping,” he says. He was taken to the hospital and when he reached the jail, he says his wounds were still bleeding. “You’ll be fine,” he says police told him.
Dean of African-American Affairs Maurice Apprey referred Johnson to his lawyer, UVA law school grad Daniel Watkins, now with Williams Mullen in Richmond.
Watkins had his own brush with the law while at UVA when an ex-girlfriend accused him of stalking and assault in 2011, charges that were later dismissed. “After I got arrested, my goal was to go into the public defender’s office,” says Watkins. He says he’s defended more than 60 criminal cases in the past three years.
“I told [Johnson] about my case, that I had been wrongly accused and also faced public ridicule,” says Watkins. “What I regret to this day is that I never talked about my side of the story.”
Watkins says he had two priorities for Johnson: to not get convicted and to protect his reputation.
UVA President Teresa Sullivan asked Governor Terry McAuliffe for an independent Virginia State Police investigation. Charlottesville Commonwealth’s Attorney Dave Chapman asked state police for a criminal investigation of the arrest. Rector George Martin said investigation wasn’t enough and the state needed to do something to make sure this didn’t happen again. And supporters packed the courtroom for Johnson’s first court hearing March 26.
“I was outraged,” says Dean Apprey, “because it’s a long stretch from checking an ID with the wrong ZIP code to an intracranial injury that requires 10 stitches. What is law enforcement doing to teach de-escalation between an arresting agent and a suspect or student?”
With the groundswell of support, Johnson was taken aback with remarks he found on anonymous sites such as Yik Yak, which included, “He probably wouldn’t have been seen as resisting arrest if he’d shut his smart ass mouth. Drinking underage and talking shit to ABC. Real smart.” Or, “Please go protest where people are not TRYING TO DO THEIR FUCKING HOMEWORK.” Frazier, too, noticed the “very mean-spirited comments” about Johnson. “I think he was glad to see a large part of the community rally around him,” she says.
On June 12, charges against Johnson were dropped—and the prosecutor decided to not bring charges against ABC agents Jared Miller, John Cielakie and Thomas Custer, whom the ABC refused to identify to the media but who are named in a defense motion.
The agents had “articulable” suspicion to detain Johnson after he was turned away from Trinity, said Chapman, who determined the bloody arrest was more from a clumsy fall than police brutality. And the whole incident took place in fewer than 30 seconds.
“Oftentimes interactions with police can quickly go sour and just as often, it isn’t precipitated by criminal conduct on the part of the arrestee,” says Watkins. “You can be a student at a No. 1 public university and walking across the street and find yourself bloodied on the ground.”
Although the ABC agents have been cleared criminally and administratively, Johnson questions the need for a Prohibition-era agency to go after young people. In 2013, UVA student Elizabeth Daly, 20, and her friends were terrorized by ABC agents who mistook her sparkling water for beer in a Harris Teeter parking lot. Daly was charged with three felonies when she fled an agent banging on her window with a flashlight and one with a drawn gun, and spent the night in jail. Her $10 million lawsuit against the agency was settled for $212,500.
Johnson has not said whether he will sue the ABC.
And yes, he believes race was a factor. “There was no reason for me to be treated like that,” he says. “I’ve seen this happen with white students. They’re never physically harmed.”
ABC Special Agent Miller, who grabbed Johnson’s arm, according to a defense motion, claimed that his eyes were glassy and he could smell “the strong odor of alcoholic beverage coming off him,” the state police investigation says.
Johnson disagrees with the agent’s assessment. “I was not drunk that night,” he says.
To Johnson, the more important question is “not whether I was drinking, but why did these officers feel like treating me that way?”
He says he was “disheartened” that the state police investigations found no wrongdoing and said no policy was broken. “That’s what upsets me the most,” he says. “A policy that allows any person to be harmed to that extent.”
Johnson spent the summer as an intern for the Center for American Progress, a progressive think tank in Washington. “This is my first summer being thrown into the real world,” he says.
Often he was recognized, and although he’s always been comfortable interacting with people, walking down the street in D.C. and having to stop and have a conversation “can be stressful,” he says. “I never wanted this public figure image, but now I’m hoping to use it to better society.
“I’ve always been passionate about issues of all kinds of social justice, criminal justice and the plight of minorities in our country,” he continues. “I always knew I would address those issues some way. I didn’t know how. When everything happened to me, it threw me into the moment and it made me understand now is the time to create change.”
Johnson says he’s committed to creating cultural change in the communities in which he lives—such as putting a multicultural center on the Corner, which is not always seen as welcoming to minorities and where Charlottesville residents who don’t go to UVA usually aren’t found, Johnson says—and to larger policy changes. “It’s motivated me to create change in the moment instead of waiting for me to have some sort of official position,” he says.
His experience also has made him more empathetic and understanding of people going through a variety of situations. “I’ve seen personally how quick people judge who you are, your character and your intentions before having any insight into what has gone on,” he says. “By being subjected to that, I have a stronger awareness of how complex every situation can be. Humans are complex in themselves, and I think we forget that and try to make situations black and white when they’re not.”
For example, when people ask him if the three officers who arrested him should be punished, he says it’s not that simple. “Perhaps we should punish their parents,” he says. “Perhaps we should punish the community they came from. Punishing those three officers won’t solve the larger societal issues.”
Has UVA changed as a result of #Martese Johnson? Yes and no, he answers. In the no column, he lists the Cav Daily’s now-removed-from-its-website April Fools’ issue with the headline, “ABC agents tackle Native American students outside Bodo’s Bagels.” Johnson calls it “racist satire,” and notes the CD didn’t satirize the Rolling Stone’s now-discredited gang rape story. And he lists anonymous student comments made “on a daily basis” on Yik Yak.
In the yes column, he says minority communities at the university are coming together to prioritize issues. “We want a multicultural center on the Corner,” he says. “Con-
versations on race are happening. It shows this problem has become a big priority.”
Over the summer he made a number of speeches, including one in New Orleans the week before he returned to Charlottesville, and he headed to Chicago for the 60th anniversary of Emmett Till’s death on August 28.
It wasn’t much of a break from dealing with his St. Patrick’s Day trauma, but Johnson seems okay with that. “Me having a break is a smaller priority than using the platform I’ve been given to promote the change I think is so important,” he says.
The scars on his forehead have healed, but they’re still visible. “I’m afraid to cut my hair,” he jokes.
Despite all that’s happened, Johnson says he has no regrets that he chose the University of Virginia, which “has helped me grow personally in ways that I would have never foreseen back when I was choosing colleges to attend.”
And, he says, “I have never been in a community so uplifting and supportive.”
One thing that stands out is his experience as a trending hashtag. “The fact that I became a hashtag and still have the opportunity to breathe…” he says. “The prevalence of those is still too many and they keep happening.”
Johnson always has been interested in politics and always has figured one day he’d run for office—like another guy from his hometown, Barack Obama. He doesn’t discount a run for POTUS. “I’m still thinking about it,” he says.
There is one major problem: He’s about 14 years too young. He laughs. “Maybe in my late 30s or early 40s.”
Local fire chiefs were in the news last week. The city hired Henrico County Assistant Chief Andrew Baxter to head the Charlottesville Fire Department, succeeding Charles Werner, who retired after 37 years in the department.
Although he’s worked in Henrico since 1995, Baxter has lived in the Charlottesville area for 25 years, and he has a nursing degree from UVA. He’s eager to work in the same community where he lives. “We talk about that all the time in the fire department,” he says. “It’s hard to do when you’re commuting 65 miles.”
The biggest difference in jobs is going from a department with 526 members to Charlottesville’s more petite 91-person staff. “I’m looking forward to knowing everyone in the department,” says Baxter, who starts September 14.
Over in the county, the International Fire Chiefs Association named Albemarle Fire & Rescue’s Dan Eggleston Career Fire Chief of the Year August 27 in Atlanta. Eggleston has led the department for 13 years and has been a chief since 1998.
Eggleston heads a department of 600 staff and volunteers. During his tenure, he’s added three fire stations to improve response time in the 720 square-mile county and 90 career firefighters to supplement daytime staffing in the volunteer stations.—C-VILLE writers
The scoop on Splendora’s limited-time, booze-inspired flavors
I scream, you scream, we all scream for…pumpkin beer-flavored gelato? Splendora’s Gelato Cafe owner PK Ross never gets tired of experimenting with flavors (anybody remember the ghost pepper-honey-raspberry concoction?) and after weeks of doing diligent research around town she’ll be serving up scoops of beer- and cocktail-inspired gelato.
With fall just around the corner it’s no surprise that the beer options are of the ever-popular pumpkin variety, and she’s been playing around with several brews, including Starr Hill’s Boxcarr Pumpkin Porter, the Twisted Gourd from South Street and Southern Tier’s deep, heavy Warlock Imperial Stout. Ross says she expects to roll out three or four different pumpkin beer gelatos, but deciding which cocktails to mimic has been a little more challenging.
“Even though beer can surprise me, the brewer is still doing all the hard work, and I’m just picking and choosing the things that work well in cream,” Ross says.
Creating a cocktail-inspired frozen dessert, though, requires a little more ingenuity—it’s not as easy as simply making a cocktail, mixing it with cream and sugar and calling it dessert. Ross says she constantly plays around with different liquors and other ingredients, subbing things in to mimic the layered flavors of the cocktail like raisins in place of vermouth.
Definitely on the menu will be a gelato inspired by a popular cocktail from The Alley Light, which is made with crema de mezcal, citrus and hot chili tincture. It’s called the Smokey Dokey and it’s no joke(y) —the liqueur and grapefruit are intense and right upfront, there’s an unexpected bitterness that Ross says is from gentian root, and the ghost chili simple syrup hits you with a back-of-the-throat spice. Ross says the cocktail itself calls for habanero, but she’s found that ghost chilis do better in cream.
The plan is to add more cocktail-inspired gelatos to the September lineup. Ross wasn’t thrilled with the results of her experimentation with negroni ingredients, so other options may include something rum-based like a dark ‘n’ stormy (if she can find fresh ginger), or a mint julep or Manhattan for the bourbon-lovers.
Now for the question on everybody’s mind—will this get me drunk? According to Ross, the answer is no. This is not her first foray into the world of alcohol in gelato; she says any final product with an alcohol content higher than 3 percent would require a liquor license to sell in the shop, and they tend to clock in between ½ and 2 percent.
“So kids can have it, but it’s really up to the parent and whether or not they want their kids to know what beer tastes like,” Ross says.
These flavors will only be available the week of September 7-13, so get ’em while they’re cold.
Time for a facelift
It’s been a good run for West Main, A Virginia Restaurant, but owner Andy McClure says the 11-year-old eatery has run its course in Charlottesville. On August 24, the two-story restaurant at the corner of West Main and Fourth streets quietly closed its doors. McClure says employees were notified well in advance, but a Facebook post announced the closing and farewell party around lunchtime that day.
“People have been coming here for years and years. Those memories they have are pretty strong and it’s tough to see a place that was special to you for so long go away,” McClure says. “It’s sad for me too, but it’s also exciting, and it’s time.”
What exactly it’s time for, McClure says he’s still not entirely sure. He doesn’t own the building but he intends to stay and breathe new life into the space, turning it into a restaurant with a completely different feel. He expects the renovation to take about two months.
“The reason West Main came to be was because there weren’t a lot of burger-and-TV-type places anywhere in the downtown area,” says McClure, who also owns Citizen Burger Bar on the Downtown Mall, plus The Virginian and The Biltmore on the Corner. “There was a segment of the market that wasn’t being served, but fast-forward to now, and everybody does that. It needs to be more unique, more specific.”
West Main Street has evolved drastically over the last five to 10 years, and McClure says part of the restaurant business is being constantly aware of changes and recognizing when it’s time for a space and a concept to turn over. “I’m not entirely sure what it’s going to be,” McClure says. “But I can say that it’s not going to be like West Main.”
Chef on tap
We haven’t heard much from the Beer Run guys since they announced the plan for Kardinal Beer Hall in the old Coca-Cola building, but as they get closer to the grand opening we’re learning a little more about what they have up their sleeves.
Thomas Leroy—who opened and ran Zinc and has made his way around other local kitchens—joined the team as head chef, and he’ll be serving up traditional German-inspired beer hall fare like sausages, smoked meats and homemade pretzels. Leroy says they don’t yet have an opening date, but they’re shooting for mid-
September.
Definitely on the menu will be a gelato inspired by a popular cocktail from The Alley Light, which is made with crema de mezcal, citrus and hot chili tincture.
As the school year gets underway, a group of artists from the McGuffey Art Center is hitting the books. Or rather, they’re cutting, sewing, painting and otherwise transforming books as part of a new exhibition at UVA’s Arthur J. Morris Law Library. Titled “Discarded,” the show draws its name quite literally from a common medium: discarded library books. You see, unlike other libraries, the law library regularly updates its collection with new editions as the laws and regulations in those books change over time.
The event has become an annual tradition for the library, as it seeks to “enrich the experience of our law school community and to give artists an additional venue for their creative productions,” according to law library director Taylor Fitchett.
Since launching in 1999, the library’s annual art opening has had various local connections. “We have drawn from the brilliant pool of creativity at McGuffey on numerous occasions, but for this show we are using the women of McGuffey exclusively,” says Fitchett.
One of these women is L. Michelle Geiger, an organizer of and contributor to the show. “As an artist I have spent a lot of time with paper, as a printmaker, collecting and making books,” she says. “This is really one of the first times that I have gone beyond the folded page and made a much larger, sculptural piece.”
Artists have freedom in how they approach their individual contributions. “Each artist was given a book—or many books in the case of some—and the only instructions were to use the book in some way,” says Geiger. “Ninni Baeckstrom encased one in cement; Eileen French has drawn the book flying toward the viewer; I deconstructed the books and made kinetic sculptures of seaweed and dipped smaller pieces of paper in wax to make barnacles. There was no wrong answer.”
“Discarded” features work by Baeckstrom, French, Fenella Belle, Cynthia Burke, Nina Burke, Brielle DuFlon, Stacey Evans, Judy McLeod, Janet Grahame Nault, Susan Northington, Kelly Doyle Oakes and Jeannine Barton Regan.
Many of these artists have worked in mixed media before and the attention given to the written word in the exhibit is interesting.
“I used a thick volume of Crimes and Punishment to make both of the pieces—not the novel but a textbook of [court] cases and verdicts,” says DuFlon. To assemble one of her pieces, titled “Bedtime Reading/Rest Assured,” she layered and coated pages of the book to create a paper-based fabric that she could sew into a pillowcase. Through pattern cutting, stitching and edging, she created the illusion of a lace-edged pillowcase using only paper. The art is assembled with a pillow stuffed inside and at first glance looks almost inviting.
“The idea behind this pillow was to create something that one could rest one’s head on, but after reading the literature that the pillowcase was made of, one wouldn’t want to,” DuFlon says. “I chose some truly disturbing and relevant cases to create this pillow… I’m interested in the way that we live with the awareness of what is happening around us. Some of us feel safe with the knowledge of a law enforcement system, others of us don’t. There are fair and unfair trials. All of these issues are enough to lose sleep over.“
An opening reception for “Discarded” will be held on September 3 at 5pm and will feature a live performance art piece by Anne Megibow. The exhibition will remain on display throughout the academic year and is open to the public during the library’s regular hours.
This fall, the Ix Art Park will host an expanded schedule of community events thanks to a partnership with WTJU 91.1FM. Together, the two organizations teamed up to participate in the Levitt AMP Music Series. Organized by Levitt Pavilions, the music series was created in 2014 as a way to present free concerts for small and midsize towns around the country. It builds on the Signature Levitt Program, which does the same in large cities.
“It was just such a perfect fit for WTJU’s mission to bring people together through music, as well as the Ix Art Park’s mission to engage in creative placemaking,” says WTJU general manager Nathan Moore. We got together and put in an application.”
An online voting process then confirmed Charlottesville as one of 10 host cities, each of which receive funding to present 10 community concerts in 2015. “The community needs more opportunities to mingle, meet, break bread, dance and let go,” says Ix Art Park’s Brian Wimer. “It’s free. And everyone’s invited. We’ll have country, folk, funk, Latin (from Mexico to Brazil), jazz, marching band and even klezmer—plus, of course, lots of that indie rock which makes up Charlottesville’s strong music scene.”
To this end, some of the events in the series will be partnerships with local groups including The Bridge PAI, Tom Tom Founders Festival and Cville Sabroso. The list of performers includes plenty of local favorites like Lester Seal, John D’earth, Pantherburn, the (All New) Acorn Sisters and the Sally Rose Band. You can also expect to hear many of the performers from the series on WTJU, giving on-air interviews or in-studio performances to help get the word out.
The first of these Charlottesville concerts takes place on September 5 with Nashville musician and cartoonist Guy Gilchrist. “Getting him was a minor miracle,” says Wimer. Charlottesville’s own Red & The Romantics open. The free Levitt AMP Charlottesville Music Series continues through November 6.
What other types of art events does Charlottesville need?
Tell us in the comments below.
Sandra Marks, 41, who was known locally for her Readings by Catherine business on U.S. 29 North until she disappeared following a big raid a year ago, made it back to town August 28 for a bond hearing in U.S. District Court.
Marks was arrested in New York, and a 34-count indictment accuses her of bilking clients out of hundreds of thousands of dollars. She told clients she could get rid of a “dark cloud” or curse on them or their families if they made a “sacrifice” of large amounts of cash and valuables that Marks promised to “cleanse” through prayer, meditation and ritual, and then return, according to the indictment.
In court, the judge said he was concerned that she might be a flight risk because a good portion of the money she claimed to have made over the years is still unaccounted for by authorities, says U.S. Attorney’s Office spokesperson Brian McGinn. Her next court appearance is October 20.
Carter Mountain, Charlottesville’s popular site for fall apple picking and barbecue, has become the scene of police investigations for the third time in a year as the latest in a string of strange happenings was reported this past Wednesday.
First was the discovery of skeletal remains found August 26 along Route 20 near the I-64 exit. A cyclist reported the remains, found in a creek, around 5:26pm, according to the Albemarle County Police Department. While the identity of the deceased has not yet been released, police say it’s a male who’s been dead roughly three to four weeks.
That discovery was not the only report troubling Carter Mountain last week, though. On the very same day that the remains were found, a missing person report was filed for a local Charlottesville resident. Debra Marie German, 59, was reported missing at 10:15pm August 26. She was last seen at 2pm when a cab dropped her off at the base of Carter Mountain. No information has been released so far about why she was on the mountain and what trail she might have taken, but police search efforts were focused around Route 53. Two officers on ATVs found her the next morning. She was taken to the hospital and she’s expected to be okay, according to Carter Johnson, the Albemarle County Police spokesperson.
German’s disappearance on Carter Mountain is the second in the past year. On July 12, 2014, Bonnie Santiago, 56, vanished and was last seen at 1am at Carter Mountain Orchard, where she was said to be visiting her boyfriend. Although authorities searched the area for two days, she was never found.
–Cara Salpini