Shapes and sizes: Ever wondered how to use a stencil to best effect? Don’t even know what a stencil is or does? In Lou Haney’s two-part virtual workshop, Create & Critique, you’ll learn innovative processes for creating your own stencils and how to use them in different contexts, such as paintings, textiles, and other artistic endeavors.
When Field Studio founders Hannah Ayers and Lance Warren went to cast a leading man for their historical documentary series “The Future of America’s Past,” they knew just who to put in front of the camera. Ed Ayers, who researched and taught history at the University of Virginia for 27 years before taking over as president of the University of Richmond in 2007, had the style and substance the wife-and-husband team needed to anchor their vision.
“Hannah and I have the same last name, but I don’t think it was just nepotism,” Ayers says, graciously giving his daughter, who he and his wife raised in Charlottesville, the benefit of the doubt.
“The Future of America’s Past,” specifically its pilot episode “Freedom’s Fortress,” recently was nominated for an Emmy Award through the National Capital Chesapeake Bay Chapter of the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences. The regional honor is among a handful “presented in various area-specific ceremonies…honoring excellence in television programming,” according to the national Academy.
The Academy plans to announce its Capital Awards, in which “Freedom’s Fortress” will compete against five other films on August 8.
The younger Ayers and Warren conceived of their production company’s flagship documentary series in December 2017 as an educational vehicle, a way to breathe life into historical events by highlighting their impact on modern public policy. Their Richmond-based Field Studio soon began work on a pilot, and the team released its first series teaser in Spring 2018.
“Freedom’s Fortress” focuses on Virginia’s own Fort Monroe, a military installation that played a pivotal role in both the launch and end of slavery in British North America. The first enslaved Africans arrived at Fort Monroe in 1619, viewers learn in the pilot, and on May 27, 1861, a Fort Monroe officer gave escaping slaves refuge by making what became known as the “contraband decision.” Major General Benjamin Butler said enslaved people reaching Union lines were “contraband,” meaning they would not have to be sent back to the Confederacy.
After Butler made his decision, thousands in bondage fled to Fort Monroe. Ed Ayers, who in addition to being the University of Richmond’s ninth president until he stepped down in 2015 was also UVA’s dean of the College and Graduate School of Arts and Sciences and won the Bancroft Prize for distinguished writing in American history, and says not even he knew the extent of Fort Monroe’s involvement in the United States’ troubled past before talking to folks in the area.
“I knew it was the place of the contraband decision, but that’s all I really knew,” Ayers says. “I, like many people, thought the first African people had been brought to Jamestown. People don’t really know the fact that the stories intersected.”
In “Freedom’s Fortress,” as in other series episodes, the host travels around interviewing locals: the Fort Monroe site superintendent, a local archeologist, even a brewer using historical yeast. Shedding light on traditionally misunderstood or underappreciated historical events and places is what “The Future of America’s Past” is all about, Hannah Ayers says. The idea is to produce a show with familiar elements—think the late Anthony Bourdain’s “Parts Unknown”—while taking on public history topics that speak to weighty issues like social injustice.
“We go to places where people are inspiring stories in the way they are keeping the history alive,” Ed Ayers says. “And we’re trying to tell those stories with sensitivity and care.”
The VPM Media Corporation, which produces original television content in central Virginia and the Shenandoah Valley and works with PBS to bring the programming to national audiences, has supported “The Future of America’s Past” from the beginning. Field Studio has now completed eight episodes over two seasons, covering topics like the Brown v. Board of Education decision outlawing segregation in schools, a New York City factory fire, and Chicago’s 1919 Red Summer race war. Almost 80 percent of PBS stations nationwide, including eight of the top 10 markets, have carried the show.
But the future’s somewhat uncertain for “The Future of America’s Past,” as the COVID-19 pandemic has delayed production on the show’s third season. Ayers says she and her husband have concepts for all four episodes, and in the meantime, they’re creating “Rapid Response” shorts tied to newsworthy events like the pandemic itself and the Black Lives Matter movement.
“We’re very encouraged by the national reach of the show,” Warren says. “The past is often terribly present, and too often history is a point of contention. We hope [“The Future of America’s Past”] shows how history can be constructive.”
For Ed Ayers, who’s spent his life trying to learn and convey the stories of “people who are not like myself,” the show is an opportunity to use a medium like television—not to mention his daughter and son-in-law’s cinematic vision—to bring his work to younger and wider audiences.
“We live in history like we live in oxygen,” he says. “It is invisible, but it is constantly pushing and pulling on us and the people we love. The things of history are too often quarantined in the textbook. We’re trying to make history visible.”
The Ivy Inn, an acclaimed local fine-dining staple, rests comfortably in the shady greenery of Old Ivy Road. Klockner Stadium is just beyond the treeline, but in midsummer you would never know it was there while sitting in the outdoor dining space surrounded by lush flora. Once a tollhouse and tavern for travelers on the road to Virginia’s capital city, the historic property blends perfectly into the architectural chic of Charlottesville.
The original structure was built in 1715 and was partially destroyed by a fire in the early 1800s. Reconstruction of the property was funded by Jesse Pittman Lewis, a soldier and close confidant of Thomas Jefferson. The land changed hands several times, at one point purchased by the University of Virginia as part of the larger Faulkner Estate, named for William Faulkner, the esteemed author and writer-in-residence at the university. The building that houses the Ivy Inn Restaurant, as it is known today, is just over 200 years old, with most of the original construction still intact.
The restaurant recently celebrated its 25th anniversary under owner and head chef Angelo Vangelopoulos, who purchased the inn with his father, Tom, in 1995. After graduating from The Culinary Institute of America in 1990 and gaining experience beyond the pizza kitchens in which he grew up, Angelo was ready to find a restaurant he could call his own. He says they “spent almost a year looking at available properties in D.C., NoVa, and suburban Maryland with no luck. We expanded our search to central Virginia and quickly came upon the Ivy Inn for sale. A month later, we were moving to C’ville.”
Descended from a long line of restaurateurs, Angelo knew early on that he was bound for food service. “I was 12 years old, we went to Blackie’s House of Beef in D.C.,” he recalls. “I had filet mignon and lobster tail and thought it was the greatest thing ever. I remember looking up at this ornate chandelier and saying out loud, ‘This is the kind of restaurant I want to own!’”
The Vangelopoulos’ culinary legacy stretches back over 80 years to the Greek village of Velventos, less than 20 miles from the real Mount Olympus. Here, Angelo’s grandfather, who he is named after, opened a bakery that became a central hub of commerce. Angelo says his father, the youngest of seven children, worked in the bakery, learning to cook from his grandmother, and carrying water from the village center every day to make bread. In 1965, Tom immigrated to the U.S. to take a job with his brother in Raleigh, North Carolina, at the aptly named Brother’s Pizza.
Over the next decade, Tom and his wife moved around the country, working at a phyllo dough factory in Cleveland, a pizzeria in northern Virginia, and a vertical gyro rotisserie in D.C. Finally, they settled at Victor’s, a Greek-Italian pizza parlor in Springfield, Virginia, where they served homestyle classics for another 18 years.
“It’s the restaurant I grew up in, though I have memories of most of them,” explains Angelo. “I learned by watching [my father] and his dedicated work ethic.”
Today, Angelo works closely with his dad in the kitchen. His wife, Farrell, is general manager and his brother-in-law is his sous chef. However, it’s not just DNA that keeps the Ivy Inn afloat. The Vangelopoulos team works hard to make its staff feel as close as family. Most famously, Angelo likes to thank his staff and their families each year with an Easter feast. After the pandemonium of the inn’s Sunday brunch, a gyro of roast goat, served in the property’s garden, transitions to a center of enjoyment and relaxation for the restaurant’s crew.
As word of the paschal celebration has spread, the event has grown in popularity. Angelo’s most recent dinner boasted a crowd of almost 250 people, attracting renowned chefs from the area’s fine-dining juggernauts.
“The restaurant business is a high stress environment. Good people naturally come together to help one another get through the tough parts,” Angelo says. “The chef might have been hard on you, your customers maybe not as friendly as usual. You come out the other side a little closer and you learn to lean on one another…family, in the restaurant, includes everyone.”
Tom lists his education on Facebook as coming from the School of Hard Knocks, exactly what you would expect from a hard-working family man who started several successful restaurants from the ground up. Yet, his successor had grander intentions. With a desire to broaden his mindset and encouragement from his favorite cousin, Angelo opted for a more formal education.
“Once I learned that I could spend all day every day doing nothing but learning about food and cooking, it was an easy decision. The advantage I have going to CIA is my exposure to so many different cuisines and their respective techniques. That’s where my dad can grow, and he’s still, at age 81, asking me questions all the time. He loves to learn new things.”
Angelo admits, though, that the difference in perspectives can lead to butting heads with his father in the kitchen. He is more willing to tweak and experiment with classic recipe, while Tom is a purist, committed to doing things exactly the way he learned them from his mother, brothers, and sisters.
Tom no longer co-owns the restaurant, but he still bakes the inn’s housemade breads and prepares a personal selection of takeout dishes (moussaka, pastitsio, flakey spanakopita) via Mr. V’s Pantry. Family has been a cornerstone of the Ivy Inn over the past quarter century, and a tenet of the Vangelopoulos name for longer. And even during this volatile time for local businesses, the father-son relationship remains at the heart of the restaurant, and an essential part of Charlottesville’s culinary community. —Will Ham