Month: August 2022

Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library 170 McCormick Rd., UVA Grounds. “No Unity Without Justice” centers around the work of UVA students and Charlottesville community racial justice activists who organized demonstrations and events that resulted in significant anti-fascist victories in response to Charlottesville’s 2017 Summer of Hate. Through October 29. 

Botanical Plant-Based Fare 421 E. Main St., Downtown Mall. Acrylic works by Matalie Deane. Through October 4. 

The Center at Belvedere 540 Belvedere Blvd. “Capturing the Color,” an art exhibit by The MidAtlantic Pastel Society. Through October 27. First Friday opening.

Central Library 201 E. Market St. In the third floor lobby, works by library staff member Dominic Brown.

Chroma Projects Inside Vault Virginia, Third St. SE. “Light: Illusions” showcases recent works by Beverly Ress. Through September 30. First Friday opening.

Corner Gallery Campbell Hall, UVA School of Architecture. “In The Garden: A Comparative Study Of Public Parks In Paris,” features Howland Fellow Madeline Smith’s perceptions and experiences in eight different public green spaces in Paris. September 5-26.

Crozet Artisan Depot 5791 Three Notch’d Rd. “Stained Glass in the Dalle-de-Verre Technique” by Vee Ovalds. September 1-30.

Crozet Library 2020 Library Ave. Watercolors by John Russell.

C’ville Arts Cooperative Gallery 118 E. Main St., Downtown Mall. “Making the Cut—the Art of Paper Cutting by Ming,” showcases  works in the traditional art of paper cutting by Ming Qiu Chen. First Friday opening.

The Fralin Museum of Art 155 Rugby Rd., UVA Grounds. New exhibitions include “Power Play: Reimagining Representation in Contemporary Photography,” “Earthly Exemplars: The Art of Buddhist Disciples and Teachers in Asia,” “The Little Museum of Art,” and “Kenji Nakahashi: Weighing Time.”

Jefferson School African American Heritage Center 233 Fourth St. NW. “Witnessing Resistance,” images taken by photo-journalist Eze Amos between 2016 and 2017 that represent activist resistance to the alt-right. Through September 16.

East Wing Gallery Campbell Hall, UVA School of Architecture. “Densifying In Place: Five Proposals For Inclusive Infill Housing By The Charlottesville Zoning Design Workshop” features five speculative design proposals representative of a range of architectural and topographic conditions across the city. Through September 13.

Elmaleh Gallery Campbell Hall, UVA School of Architecture. “Finding Virginia’s Freetowns,” a collaborative exhibition that documents Freetowns in Albemarle, Buckingham, Fluvanna, and Orange counties. Through September 8.

The Garage 100 E. Jefferson St. “In Season,” acrylic paintings on canvas and wood panel by Brittany Fan. Through September 28. First Friday opening.

Guild Gallery Inside Vault Virginia, 300 E. Main St. “The Future and Beyond,” works by Hannah England, Feixue Mei, Raneem Tarfa, and Sha Li in a variety of mediums, including acrylic paint, illustration, collage, and oil paint. Through October 14. First Friday event.

Les Yeux du Monde 841 Wolf Trap Rd. “Bright Lines,” works by David Summers. Opens September 24. 

McGuffey Art Center 201 Second St. NW. In the Smith Gallery, “Vessels,” reduction linocuts by Maryanna Williams. In the First Floor Hallway, “There is another world, but it is inside this one,” recent mixed-media works by Anuja Jaitley and Jennifer Billingsly. In the Second Floor Hallway, “Reflections: From the Physical to the Metaphysical,” a McGuffey member show. In the Associate Gallery, “Good Humor: A Mini Show of Happy Art,” oil on panel by Mary Jane Check. Through October 2. First Friday opening.

New City Arts 114 Third St. NE. “Feed Them,” drawings by Warren Craghead III and paintings by Mara Sprafkin, made in collaboration with her children. Through September 23. First Friday opening.

Northside Library 705 Rio Rd. W. In the quiet room, works by Ellen Moore Osborne.

PVCC Gallery V. Earl Dickinson Building, 501 College Dr. Through September 9, the Annual Student Exhibition. Opening September 23, the Annual Faculty Exhibition and a retrospective of works from PVCC’s The Fall Line literary magazine. Through November 9.

Quirk Gallery 499 W. Main St. “With a Thousand Other Heartbeats,” acrylic paintings by Kathleen Markowitz, and “Slant,” paintings by Don Crow. Through October 9.

Random Row Brewery 608 Preston Ave. Ste. A. “Art for Life,” an exhibit of pastel works by Joan Dreicer supporting the UVA Cancer Center. Through October 31. 

Ruffin Gallery 179 Culbreth Rd. “The Transubstantiation of Shoe Polish,” works by Michelle Gagliano. Through September 23.

Second Street Gallery 115 Second St. SE. In the Main Gallery, “Teeny Tiny Trifecta 5,” the fifth annual group exhibition and fundraiser. In the Dové Gallery, an artist-in-residence exhibition featuring Somé Louis. Through September 30. First Friday openings.

Shenandoah Valley Art Center 126 S. Wayne Ave., Waynesboro. In the Cabell/Arehart Invitational Gallery, the annual exhibition by the Virginia Watercolor Society. Through September 23.

Studio Ix 969 Second St. SE. “Inspired by Gauguin’s Tahiti,” a group exhibition from Fiber and Stitch Art Collective that reinterprets the bold forms, colors, and themes of Gauguin’s exotic Tahitian locales. Through September 25. First Friday opening. Artist talk and happy hour September 22.

Top Knot Studio 103 Fifth St. SE. “Whereabouts,” works by Andrew Sherogan. Through September. 

UU Congregation of Charlottesville 717 Rugby Rd. “Connections,” paintings by Tim Burgess. Through September 30.

Visible Records 1740 Broadway St. “This is the Place,” mixed media by JaVori Warren and Megan Richards, Freeman Artists in Residence. Through October 2. First Friday opening.

Steel a few moments: Celebrate friendship and love, and learn a few life lessons too, at a Steel Magnolias Drag Brunch. Don any shade of “blush and bashful,” tease up your hair, and enjoy the sweet Southern drawls of Dolly Parton, Shirley MacLaine, Olympia Dukakis, and Sally Field as they navigate life in a small town. Munch on brunch classics, sip on coffee and cocktails, and make sure to arrive early for a live pre-show performance from local drag queens Bebe Gunn and Cherry Poppins.

Sunday 9/4. $13.27, 12:30pm. Alamo Drafthouse Cinema, 5th Street Station. drafthouse.com

There’s a new wall mural at Ix Art Park. It’s an explosion of colors, shapes, and symbols. There are words of advice—“Be humble”—and statements of power—“Black women built this,” “Lesbian pride.” It’s made of hearts and rainbows and flowers and peace signs. And above it all, a bold and insistent proclamation: “There are Black people in the future.”

The quote by artist Alisha B. Wormsley calls to onlookers from across the street in large white letters. It’s a prophecy and a gesture of solidarity, advocating for more than just a Black presence in humanity’s far-off cosmic future, but also for Black lives and Black relevance in the near future—the future of changing neighborhoods and redrawn districts.

For Jay Simple, the new executive director of The Bridge Progressive Arts Initiative, which shepherds the Charlottesville Mural Project, the visibility of Wormsley’s quote from the street is paramount. The park sits across from Friendship Court, an affordable housing community, and so the work was carefully considered for its potential audience. “If you look at the current situation with gentrification in Charlottesville, you see they are actively, within that community, fighting for their right to be there,” says Simple. “So the idea of being able to see that wasn’t anything more for me than a way to be able to say ‘I see you.’”

While Simple acknowledges that the mural itself can’t change the struggles of families in Friendship Court, he knows the power of the work is in how it activates the community. The Ix mural was made not by a single artist but by 2022 Soul of Cville attendees, who had the opportunity to participate in group painting sessions. The artwork features a dotted outline of an Airstream, as it was initially to be a community-led ideas board for what the vehicle should look like, but clearly that shape couldn’t contain the enthusiasm of the artwork’s many contributors. 

“The mural stands out to me because we did it together,” says Khalilah Jones, an Ix Art Park board member and image consultant.

“I was one of the first people to get to paint on that wall, and it felt liberating,” says Jones, who painted the words “Phoenix Rising” and “Stronger, wiser, better” on the wall as a reference to overcoming the deadly Unite the Right rally, which marked its fifth anniversary the same weekend as the festival. But like many local events, Soul of Cville and the Charlottesville Mural Project sought to uplift the community on a somber weekend. “That was what my theme was because of August 12, about resilience and unity and rising up from ashes and coming back strong, better, and wiser.”

“They were all painting on that wall and acknowledging that, being Black, we have things to offer, we have a presence, and we’re not going anywhere,” says Jones. “And we’re to be celebrated just like the rest of the world is to be celebrated. And here’s a mural to remind you of it.”

There’s a more abstract idea behind the mural, however, something that speaks to the nature of arts institutions and of public art itself. As executive director of The Bridge, Simple is particularly concerned with what role an arts organization plays in a community. Public art can sometimes impose, either by being built without local input or by being physically obtrusive. The many Confederate monuments that have dotted the South are painful examples of this, as artwork that antagonizes and ignores communities. But, in other cases, even galleries can be unwelcome and considered agents of gentrification. Repairing that communication breakdown is key to Simple’s philosophy.

“I come into this position with the thought process that [if] you’re gonna put a mural somewhere, it can’t just be an endeavor between the institution and the artist, but it needs to be a conversation with the public as well about what’s going there,” says Simple, “because just two people can’t possibly parse out all the feelings one may have when they come to that public art.”

Simple was enamored with the arts from a young age. He was born in Chicago and grew up in Philadelphia, and as a child, his creative interests ran the gamut—he played saxophone, drew, and took up photography and theater, anything to express himself. And his parents encouraged his interest in the arts, which Simple considers an acknowledgment by them that “engaging with some clay or having to think about an idea and get it down on a piece of paper … are all these lessons that you can apply to the greater goals that you have in life.”

At a glance, Simple is a photographer. He earned his BFA in photography from Columbia College Chicago, a master of liberal arts from the University of Pennsylvania, and an MFA in photography from the Rhode Island School of Design, in addition to holding a photo teaching position at The New School in New York (along with appointments at Longwood and VCU). But as an artist, Simple has never settled on a single discipline, preferring instead to keep a practice that incorporates elements from all sorts of mediums and traditions.

“Anything really that comes to mind, I give myself the agency, like, ‘Hey, I wanna do that, I can be a painter,’” he says.

Simple’s belief in independent creative liberation is at the core of his character as a leader. He believes that arts institutions like The Bridge are just one part of a thriving artistic community in a city, rather than an epicenter where what he calls “capital-A” art happens. And he considers the new Ix mural to be an example of the kind of relationship he hopes to have with Charlottesville, by “bringing art to the public where they’re at, and making it accessible for them to be able to engage with. But also to make that engagement something that can be meaningful for the people that have to see it on a regular basis.”

So, as Simple puts it, when someone goes for a jog, or heads out to grab something to eat, they’ll see that message from the street: “There are Black people in the future.” And unlike a statue that glares down at them, or a massive wall painting done by a single hand, it’s a group effort designed to uplift. Instead of imposing or advertising or directing, the mural insists. It beckons, it encourages, it has a conversation with the viewer. And that’s its true power.