Author: Dan Goff

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Arts Culture

Lightening up

For Brighter Together, visual artist Jeff Dobrow took the small screen to the big screen by displaying his work on several UVA architectural icons, such as the Rotunda (above). The series finale is May 14 and 15 at UVA Chapel. Photo courtesy of subject

Of all the changes COVID has brought to the arts world, one of the most significant has been to big-screen entertainment. Charlottesville theaters and moviemakers have done their best to adapt, whether it’s drive-in film festivals or rent-a-theater evenings, but the pandemic has undeniably sped up the trend of people consuming entertainment alone and on decidedly smaller screens.

Jeff Dobrow, a visual and technology artist based in Charlottesville, has given a lot of thought to this. “We are so used to consuming amazing experiences in small ways,” he says. “Our laptop screen is 17 inches. That’s our new world.”

He argues that it doesn’t have to be that way. Brighter Together, Dobrow’s ongoing series of visual shows through UVA Arts, is his solution to the small-screen problem. Since late March, Dobrow has been using projection mapping technology to display a variety of images on various buildings on Grounds, starting with the chapel and concluding on May 14 and 15 with Madison Hall. The intended result is to inspire both awe and hope—awe at the dazzling, enormous images transforming iconic architecture, and hope about the ability to safely draw crowds of art lovers together in the same space.

Creating such larger-than-life projections may seem like a daunting task, but it’s business as usual for Dobrow, who’s been working in technology since he was a teen. (“It’s been my entire life, since I started programming computers for RadioShack in 1983.”) Much of his early career was devoted to the commercial side of the field, but he says that one day he woke up, “did a 180,” and immersed himself in the arts instead.

Dobrow had been living and working in Charlottesville for several years when UVA Arts reached out to him about the Brighter Together project. “I’ve known Jody [Kielbasa] for probably five or six years,” he says. Back in 2017, he and Kielbasa, UVA’s vice provost for the arts, had “chatted about the bicentennial”—an event that heavily utilized projection mapping on the Rotunda, displaying a visual history of the building—“but that was not my kind of show.” When Dobrow gave up commercial art, he also shifted away from chronological storytelling in his visuals, opting for more loosely conceptual work. His style didn’t mesh with the bicentennial’s, but it proved to be perfect for Brighter Together.

True to form, Dobrow consciously chooses not to tell a story with his work on these buildings—either of the university at large or of the pandemic year. “I didn’t want to create a piece that contemplated…the horrible reality [of 2020],” he says. “We’ve had enough of that. Let’s dance, let’s have some fun.”

Fun doesn’t begin to describe the sublime projections. Some of the images are recognizable and taken from the animal kingdom, like a tiger prowling across the surface of the chapel or a butterfly visiting flowers on the Rotunda—a decidedly more peaceful image than the bicentennial’s flaming Rotunda, itself a callback to the disastrous real-life fire of 1895. Other Dobrow images, rippling and morphing shapes and patterns, are less rooted in reality. Everything is connected by different selections of EDM music that can be heard at each of the Brighter Together events.

Dobrow identifies these soundtracks, and how they interact with the visuals, as the most important relationship in his artwork, aside from the relationship between the art and the building onto which it’s projected. For Brighter Together, he enlisted the help of Red Flower Lake, a local husband-and-wife group. The duo’s otherworldly tunes pair nicely with Dobrow’s trippy visuals, creating a product that might be commonplace at a music festival, but is considerably more remarkable when projected onto UVA’s historic buildings.

Projection mapping is still a new art form, particularly in the U.S. “It’s huge in the rest of the world and has been for years,” says Dobrow. “Like most things in the United States, our first exposure to it was…through revenue-generating advertising.” He’s advocating for it to become a more accepted medium, both for patrons of the arts and for aspiring creators. “A huge part of what I do is education, especially for at-risk kids. No one has heard of [projection mapping], but a lot of it is accessible.”

Not only is the concept relatively recent, Dobrow says it’s also constantly in flux thanks to continual technological improvements—or, in his words, “basically everything that’s going to turn us into Terminator 2.” It’s already incredible, he stresses—the GPU technology he’s used for Brighter Together enables the images to interact with the music in real time—and it’s becoming more advanced by the day. He contrasts the canvas and brush process of traditional painting with the more complex world of projection mapping. “With technology, we are experiencing things we didn’t think we could do.”

What Dobrow wants to emphasize most—and what’s hardest to convey in a newspaper article—is the sheer magnitude of his projects. He says the creation of his projections often gives him small-screen fatigue, hunched over “my little laptop for endless periods of time…but when I go and put it back on the building, it’s huge. It’s everything. The transformation hits me every time.”

Brighter Together is a partnership between The Division of Student Affairs, UVA Arts, and the office of the Provost and Vice Provost for the Arts with generous support from the AV Company.

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Culture

Exalt in the everyday

Aimee Nezhukumatathil and Ross Gay will discuss their work at this year's book festival.

With the one-year anniversary of hunkering down in our houses approaching, it’s easy to forget about the beauty of the natural world that we still have access to. Ross Gay and Aimee Nezhukumatathil are here to remind us. 

Poets Gay and Nezhukumatathi will discuss their essay collections—The Book of Delights and World of Wonders, respectively—during a book festival event called O Wondrous World!

Nezhukumatathil, whose essays are complemented with gorgeous color illustrations, draws many parallels between the chosen flora and fauna and her own life, whether comparing the defense mechanism of the touch-me-not to her own rejection of sexual predators or comparing her family to a pod of narwhals. But she is also content to simply admire nature’s creations: “The bibliography of the firefly is a tender and electric dress.”  

Gay’s collection of 102 essays ranges from eating a tomato on a plane to his impressive list of nicknames for himself—but each piece deals in delight. And much of this delight  focuses on nature, thanks to Gay’s affinity for gardening, a habit he shares with Nezhukumatathil. Gay has this to say about the relationships between their works:

“I think I’ve learned from Aimee so much about staying focused (as much as I do) on what I’m trying to celebrate and study, not ignoring sorrow, never that, but that the training and the practice is to study what you love, if you can, which we can help each other with, and which is one of the ways we care for the world.”—Dan Goff

Ross Gay and Aimee Nezhukumatathil will discuss the joys of the nature at a panel entitled O Wondrous World! on March 22 at noon.

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Arts Culture

Milk, but no honey

Locally produced zine Mala Leche offers a forum for underrepresented voices. “Saint Lucy Eyes” by Sam Gray accompanies a handwritten explainer of Lucia of Syracuse’s persecution. Photo courtesy of the artist

On the cover of Mala Leche’s inaugural issue, the name of the zine is tiny, hardly visible. The focus is much more on the “bad milk” itself—a cut-out image of a baby bottle, emblazoned with a black skull and crossbones and resting in an equally inky puddle.

It’s an eye-catching design, one intended to draw passersby to its distribution boxes at the Bridge Progressive Arts Initiative. But the cover is just the start, as anyone who picks up a copy will discover upon reading the letter from the editors, Sri Kodakalla and Ramona Martinez, Mala Leche’s co-creators. The zine, they write, “reflects the voices and interests of womxn, non-binary, and genderqueer artists & thinkers.” Kodakalla and Martinez also assert that their zine plays a part in the “death and rebirth of society.”

The first issue’s 16 pieces of art, contributed by 13 creatives in the central Virginia area, serve as proof of a community that is as diverse as it is underappreciated. The works vary widely in subject matter, but have similar levels of intensity and urgency: an anonymous essay about a ride-along with a Charlottesville cop, a handwritten consideration of St. Lucy, stark black-and-white depictions of some of C’ville’s still-standing monuments.

Kodakalla considers Mala Leche’s diversity one of the publication’s most important features. “The thing about Mala Leche is that it creates this space for all those different viewpoints to exist in one zine,” she says. The goal, both she and Martinez agree, is to create a product that’s “relevant to every person.”

Along with co-editing Mala Leche, Kodakalla and Martinez are also the acting co-directors of the Feminist Union of Charlottes­ville Creatives. FUCC got its start as a Facebook group in 2017, Martinez says, and has only been an “official” organization since it recently received fiscal sponsorship from the Bridge PAI.

One tradition that has been around since the start is FUCC’s annual art show. “It’s really powerful to have a show of all women, non-binary, and genderqueer artists,” Martinez says. “You have to wonder how many genderqueer, non-binary artists have work hanging in the museums of New York right now.”

Mala Leche was created largely to give a different platform to those same artists. Martinez says she had been talking about her dream of such a zine for months before Kodakalla suggested they start it through FUCC. “It just made so much sense because it’s tapping into a network of artists and writers who already have a lot to share.”

Martinez says about half the work in Mala Leche’s first issue was submitted by artists already involved with FUCC, while the other 50 percent came from outside contributors, such as Meesha Goldberg, a painter and writer whose poem “Casualties of the Anthropocene” is one of the issue’s most memorable pieces. “The Earth is made of food / We are one another’s harvest,” Goldberg writes, invoking images of a “shroud of vultures” and deer “strewn & supine” on the highway.

Kodakalla and Martinez had interacted with Goldberg in other capacities—Kodakalla oversaw a 96-foot mural recently completed by Goldberg for the McGuffey Art Center, while Martinez enlisted Goldberg’s help to relocate a stray rooster that had wandered onto her property (the rooster now resides on Goldberg’s farm somewhere “in a secluded valley”). Both were so impressed by the variety and power of Goldberg’s work that they invited her to guest edit Mala Leche’s second issue.

Titled “Fever Dreams of Mother Earth,” its themes hew closely to Goldberg’s poetry and visual work. The issue, which is accepting submissions through February 26, will tackle the “delirium of [Mother Earth’s] dark nights…Mala Leche is conjuring the medicine of Art that we may one morning sweat out our fever and wake from this collective nightmare. Let us lucid dream again!”

Goldberg says she was drawn to the zine for its “strong, perverse tension” and the ways it’s positioned to highlight “sickness in society.” And nothing is sicker in society right now, she argues, than Mother Earth. “So many of our social problems come from cultural disconnection with the land.”

An important aspect of Mala Leche that its creators want to emphasize is that the zine is in black-and-white, so those interested in submitting should plan their artwork accordingly. It imposes a limit when printing visual content—Goldberg herself boasts many vivid, hyperrealistic paintings in her body of work, and to reprint them on such a scale wouldn’t do them justice—but Kodakalla and Martinez maintain that the very existence of Mala Leche is cause for celebration: In addition to giving deserving artists a platform, it pays them too, thanks to the Bridge PAI’s fiscal sponsorship.

The editors are excited about the radical and sometimes revolutionary submissions received by Mala Leche. They’re never sure what to expect, and both agree that the unknown is part of the appeal.
“We’re not really looking for any one particular vision,” Kodakalla says.

“Right now is the time to dream the new world up,” Martinez agrees. “There isn’t one answer as to what that world should look like.”

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Arts Culture

‘Little Fish’ goes big

Little Fish, which premieres as a feature film on IFC this week, is about a couple afflicted with a memory-destroying illness. Photo from IFC Films

Years before COVID-19 became a worldwide reality, Aja Gabel had pandemics on the mind. In 2011, Gabel—a fiction writer who earned her MFA at UVA two years prior—wrote and published “Little Fish,” a devastating short story that tracks a couple’s deterioration as both partners become afflicted with a mysterious, memory-destroying contagion.

The story was an award-winning success—and a decade later, it remains relevant for reasons other than the obvious real-life parallel. On February 5, a film adaptation of “Little Fish,” starring Olivia Cooke and Jack O’Connell as the couple, will be released by IFC.

Gabel has a novel (2018’s The Ensemble) under her belt and another in progress, but she continues to cite “Little Fish” as “my favorite story I’ve ever written.” Although it’s one of her more dystopian works—The Ensemble, conversely, follows four competitive classical musicians and takes inspiration from the author’s musical childhood—Gabel maintains that all of her work is dominated by the question: “What does it mean to love?”

In the case of “Little Fish,” she narrows the question: “Does love have any place in your life if there is no memory or nostalgia?” Gabel’s not convinced she “answered it completely,” but it’s undeniable that the story is an intimate, albeit achingly sad, exploration of love pushed to the limit.

“Little Fish” is also clearly a labor of love, a simultaneously minimalist and jam-packed creation whose gorgeous, lean prose hints at a myriad of revisions and prior iterations. Gabel gives brief glimpses of a world ravaged by the NIA (neuroinflammatory affliction) pandemic, leaving the reader to imagine the wider implications of the tragedy.

Given the pared-down style of “Little Fish,” it’ll be interesting to see how IFC inflates the story to nearly two hours of screen time. Gabel, who has seen the final product, says “it’s not a deviation so much as it is an extrapolation.” The filmmakers took the original story and delved further into each plot point, expanding upon the global implications as well as more deeply detailing the couple’s relationship.

The result is bound to be different than the story—Jude, one half of the couple, seems to have more dialogue in the trailer alone than he does in the original story—but Gabel says she’s more than satisfied with this interpretation of her work. “There are so many details of the world and the couple and the situation…made cinematic. It’s really incredible.”

Gabel had little creative oversight during the actual production of the movie, which is just how she wanted it. “‘Little Fish’…was optioned with a screenwriter already attached,” she says. “That was what was really appealing to me about the deal.” Mattson Tomlin, the film’s screenwriter, is as yet unknown but has several other projects in the works, including 2022’s The Batman, for which he’s credited as a writer.

Little Fish is far from an effects-heavy blockbuster. If the trailer—with its shaky-cam shots and moody instrumental soundtrack—is any indication, the adaptation will fit in with IFC’s other indie films. Gabel says IFC came on last year to distribute the movie, after its actual creation. Financed and made without a distributor or a studio, her story was first optioned in 2016 and officially shot in early 2019. She guesses that Little Fish might’ve caught IFC’s attention in 2020 because of its sudden timeliness, but emphasizes that the movie “definitely was not made or conceived of during any kind of COVID time.”

Now Gabel is making a conscious choice to stay away from pandemic fiction—not wanting, she says, to write about something so relatively recent. Instead, she’s turning to her home state of California, where she currently resides, to write about an issue that’s been raging there for years: climate destruction. Her output on this subject has been nonfiction. “I don’t know what to do about it, but there’s an impulse to document it,” she says. “It feels like the one thing I can do.”

Gabel maintains an air of mystery when discussing another project, her novel-in-progress. Like “Little Fish,” it has “an element of sci-fi in it,” she says, but emphasizes that her initial preoccupations as a writer remain. “It’s still about love, still about memory, still about the nature of how we remain connected to people when things become difficult.”

Much as Gabel continues to be drawn to similar themes in her writing, she’s also drawn to the memory of “where I learned to write.” Virginia, she says, keeps an alluring hold on her from across the country. She attributes this pull to the beautiful geography of the place, and also the people she met while living in Charlottesville. Gabel cites professors Deborah Eisenberg and Christopher Tilghman as enormously influential, saying the latter was the “very first person who really took my work seriously.”

Virginia has been the site of some of the most significant moments of Gabel’s writing career—whether reading “Little Fish” to an audience of students during a 2012 teaching stint at Sweet Briar, presenting The Ensemble to a crowd at New Dominion Bookshop, or her friendships with fellow writers in the MFA program. “My family’s out here, but I always think about coming back to Charlottesville,” says Gabel. “I hope to come back someday. It’s a special place.”

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Arts Culture

History repeats: Vinegar Hill ushers in Charlottesville Players Guild’s season

Terésa Dowell-Vest says the time is right for a revival of Vinegar Hill, a play she premiered at Live Arts in 1999 to honor the residents of Charlottesville’s razed Black neighborhood. 

Two decades ago, Terésa Dowell-Vest embarked on a research project. After attending grad school in California, the actor and playwright set out to collect the oral histories of family and community members in her hometown of Charlottesville. The product of this research was 1999’s Vinegar Hill, a play named after the town’s once-thriving Black neighborhood. Destroyed in the 1960s in the name of urban renewal, Vinegar Hill and its former residents are memorialized in Dowell-Vest’s work.

Today, the play is part of Charlottesville history—but it’s about to return to center stage. The Jefferson School African American Heritage Center’s Charlottesville Players Guild, itself a revival of local Black theater, will kick off its 2021 Amplify season with a four-day symposium focused on Vinegar Hill. The symposium will be conducted virtually from January 15 to 18, and includes not just a reading of the play, but also a multimedia presentation of Vinegar Hill histories and a panel discussion about the neighborhood’s destruction.

The Vinegar Hill revival is a natural fit for Amplify’s opening event. All of Amplify’s productions in the 2021 season are the works of Black playwrights who either have roots in Charlottesville or who currently live and work in the city.

This is a break from traditional programming for the Guild—its 2017 revival featured a production of Fences, and programming has consistently included August Wilson’s work. But CPG’s artistic director, Leslie M. Scott-Jones, rejects the ideas of tradition and normalcy. “I don’t like the term ‘new normal,’ because there isn’t a normal,” she says, referring in part to the modified reality COVID has imposed on the world. “We have been conditioned to believe that there is a certain set of circumstances that constitute ‘normal.’”

Normalcy, Scott-Jones explains, is constantly in flux for artists, and especially for Black artists. “We are used to adjusting things about ourselves in order to survive,” she says. In order for the CPG to survive during the pandemic, programming has gone virtual—a shift that Scott-Jones says resulted in her decision to take a break from Wilson’s plays. “I didn’t want to lessen the impact of the work by doing it virtually.”

Dowell-Vest’s play will enjoy its first revival since its initial run at Live Arts. Although more than 20 years have passed, the playwright has clear memories of her preliminary research and what inspired her to start it. “I remember as a kid hearing my grandmother say, ‘It’s a shame what they did downtown,’” Dowell-Vest says. “That’s what I kept hearing over and over growing up.”

When she returned to Charlottesville in the late ’90s, it was as the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities’ first director of the African American Heritage Center. Dowell-Vest says she had always considered herself an artist and performer rather than a historian. In her new position, “I had tools…I had people who understood research.” She used these tools to delve further into the story of Vinegar Hill, to better comprehend the undercurrent of history that ran through her formative years in Charlottesville.

The project was a difficult and delicate one, Dowell-Vest explains. “People—Black, white, or otherwise—are very protective of their stories.” But through a combination of persistence and patience, Dowell-Vest was eventually able to collect enough stories about Vinegar Hill to fit them into a larger, dramatized narrative.

“I think I was reinvesting myself in my hometown,” she says of the project, as well as giving the city a “reminder” of the community it had physically torn down but failed to spiritually destroy. It’s time for another reminder, Dowell-Vest says.

She lives outside of Houston now, teaching at Prairie View A&M University, but visits Charlottesville occasionally (she’ll be here virtually for the Vinegar Hill discussion panel). Every time she returns, “Charlottesville looks completely different.” She attributes some of the change to “growth and evolution,” but also blames “greed, and sprawl, and decimating communities that have been generationally residential.”

Dowell-Vest sees the Vinegar Hill story played out again and again to varying degrees. She’s reviving her play, she says, to give “younger people context about where they are and the work that still needs to be done.”

Hailed as a local, modern classic, Vinegar Hill will be a hard act to follow. But Scott-Jones has a promising 2021 lineup—one that includes Thirty-Seven, a play of her own creation.

“I started writing it to answer a question for myself,” she says. “What makes a person, specifically a Black person, decide to become an activist?”

The title, she says, refers to the creation of the 9-1-1 emergency call in New York City, spurred by the murder of a Black woman outside her apartment building. “There were 37 people at home in her building who heard her calling for help and did nothing.”

Following Thirty-Seven is Ti Ames’ See About the Girls, a continuation of Amiri Baraka’s classic The Slave. David Vaughn Straughn’s Tanesha focuses on the videotaping of fatal police brutality against a Black person and the protagonist’s indecision about how to use the footage. Aiyana Marcus’ She Echoes on the Vine, the season’s closing play, is an exploration of one Black woman’s ancestry.

Although Scott-Jones is unsure which of these plays will be totally virtual and which might have live audiences—the season runs through November—she predicts Amplify will be a success, and a testament to the power of Black artists in Charlottesville. “[The plays] are all very different, but they’re all…telling the story of Black life,” she says. “I’m really hoping this season is a beacon for any other Black playwright out there.”

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News

Getting a boost: From IVs to beet spray tans, Well Room has something for everyone

Intravenous Nutritional IV Therapy is engineered to make you “immediately feel better,” says Well Room’s Megan Kingdon.

For many, an IV drip connotes extreme sickness. The treatment is primarily associated with hospitals, and the image of fluids being fed directly into someone’s veins often implies a serious health issue. At the very least, IVs tend to make people squeamish.

Megan Kingdon hopes to change these perceptions. In June, she opened Well Room, where you’ll find a variety of “wellness products and services to refresh & vitalize”—including Intravenous Nutritional IV Therapy. The drip options range from Basic to Athlete, cost from $85 to $170, and are engineered to make people “immediately feel better,” Kingdon says.

Although her background is in traditional Western medicine—a certified Nurse Practitioner, Kingdon got her master’s in adult and women’s health at Columbia University—she says her desire to found Well Room came from a dissatisfaction with the “band-aid” culture of American health care. “We’re really good at treating acute illness, but wellness is not something we’re taught to treat.”

Put simply: None of Well Room’s clients are ill, but they could all stand to boost their wellness. And in 2020, who couldn’t?

Kingdon acknowledges that opening a wellness-based business this year has been a double-edged sword. Well Room had a rocky beginning, with a pushed-back March start date in accordance with Governor Ralph Northam’s stay-at-home order, but Kingdon says the business’ services themselves have been in high demand.

And not just the IV drips—because, as Kingdon admits, “there are plenty of people who are not into having a needle put into their arm.” In addition to the intravenous therapy, Well Room offers an infrared sauna, with “rays that penetrate the tissue instead of just heating the air around you,” nitrogen-based cryotherapy, and organic spray tans made with sugar beets. 

All of these services, Kingdon says, are intended to provide people with much-needed “solitude, peace, and relaxation.” Well Room’s customer base has a high level of stress—she estimates that nine out of 10 of her clients’ health histories include anxiety “and often depression as well.”

Aside from this unifying factor, Well Room’s clientele varies pretty widely. Kingdon says the main support for her business comes from younger to middle-aged women, but that some of her patrons are much older or younger—she’s even treated children with cryotherapy for sports-related injuries. She attributes the diversity of customers to Well Room’s “variety of things under one roof” and to her desire to make her business “something for the community…I don’t want it to be something precious.”

For Well Room to become a Charlottesville staple, Kingdon acknowledges that she and others will have to continue working to change thoughts about unconventional medical techniques. “I don’t see the Western training and these other approaches as mutually exclusive,” she says. “I don’t think they have to be at odds with one another.”

So often in Western medicine, she says, the actual root of a patient’s medical problem is never addressed. “We can’t keep letting chronic illness run amok and then put band-aids on it.”

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Arts Culture

Light in the distance: ‘Let There Be Light’ adapts to the pandemic

The exhibit takes place in front yards and businesses throughout Charlottesville Friday, December 4 and Saturday, December 5 from 6-9pm.

A few months ago, James Yates awoke from a nightmare.  He was hosting “Let There Be Light”—the same luminesce-focused art exhibit he has helmed for the past 13 years at Piedmont Virginia Community College—but there was a problem. “Nobody was wearing masks, and everybody was crowding together,” he says. “I woke up in a panic and realized we can’t do ‘Let There Be Light’ at PVCC this year.”

Yates arranged a meeting with Beryl Solla, PVCC’s chair of performing and visual arts and curator of “Let There Be Light,” to weigh their options. They agreed immediately that the program shouldn’t be canceled outright—for a number of reasons, Solla says, “we need it more than we’ve ever needed it before.”

In years past, “Let There Be Light’’ was headquartered at PVCC. The programming—which consists of several Charlottesville artists’ effulgent creations—took place outside on the college campus with refreshments, conversation, and a chance to warm up inside.

But the exhibition couldn’t exist in its typical form, which necessitated creative problem-solving. Yates thought of “Yard Dreams,” a 2016 project he had organized where installations were set up on various Belmont lawns. After some discussion, he and Solla decided to adopt the same structure for the winter solstice event.

This year, 23 “Let There Be Light” exhibits will be scattered across the city. Maps will guide people from location to location, and everyone will be asked to follow standard safety procedures, like staying in their cars when possible and wearing a mask when outside.

The curators are excited to see what might result from the restrained event, and Solla wonders how the pieces might transform it. “Drive-by art…art that’s meant to be seen at 40 miles an hour, is just so odd and surprising,” she says.

The foundational aspects of “Let There Be Light” remain unchanged. For example, the program’s emphasis on the secular will be preserved. “Separating it from Christmas,” Yates says, was a priority since its creation. The seeds for an illuminated art event were planted in his head when he was a “wee child,” and he and his family would drive around town to see neighbors’ light displays. “I wanted to replicate that magical feeling,” he says, while providing an alternative to the “hyper-commercialization of the holidays.”

This year’s program features many familiar artists, including PVCC professor Fenella Belle whose latest creation, “Border Lines,” enigmatically promises an “exploration of the role lines play in dividing and connecting us.”

Choreographer and filmmaker Shandoah Goldman returns to present two short, COVID-related films in a drive-in format at the Woolen Mills Chapel, and C. James Cunningham’s piece, “SOS,” will “be floating in the sky above the Downtown Mall,” says Yates.

Yates and Solla say that even when the arts world returns to normal, they’ll consider keeping the multiple locations as a new level of interactivity. Solla doesn’t anticipate pushback from the artists, who are a “peculiar breed…ready to try anything.”

They were, after all, amenable to this year’s changes, and willing to adapt so that a program intended to combat darkness could continue to do so in a particularly dim year. Solla says they all agreed: “We need the light, we need the love, we need the vision for the future.”

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Culture Living

Worldly wear: Davon Okoro’s ambitious fashion brand Dépendance Global

Davon Okoro turned his childhood interest in clothing fashion into his own label Dépendance Global. Photo by Marley Nichelle

Like many kids of his generation, Davon Okoro spent a lot of time in front of the TV. But while his peers were watching cartoons, Okoro was finding himself in the groundbreaking styles and fashions of MTV.

“I grew up in Nigeria and we didn’t have much money,” he explains. “My mom would go to the thrift store and get us a bunch of graphic tees and jeans.” Okoro saw similar secondhand fits flaunted by the stars of MTV and was inspired. “Ever since I was a kid I had a thing for clothes.”

His family left Nigeria and moved to Far Rockaway, New York, on Okoro’s ninth birthday. Today, he’s a second-year nursing student at UVA, and despite pursuing a career in the field of medicine, fashion remains a driving force in his life. In February, he created Dépendance Global, a clothing line of his very own.

Dépendance Global (French for “global addiction”) brings together a few of Okoro’s most enduring interests: fashion, but also multiculturalism and the nature of addiction. “I’m trying to bring awareness to the concept [of addiction],” he says. “Maybe it’s a loved one, maybe it’s drugs, maybe it’s money, maybe it’s work—but we can get so caught up in addiction sometimes that we forget who we are.”

The global aspect of Okoro’s brand speaks to his own varied and unusual life. The cultures he observed in Nigeria, New York, and now Virginia are all “so different,” he says. Likewise, he doesn’t want Dépendance Global to be limited to any one place or time, and plans to continue his informal anthropology across the world. “I want to go overseas and see how other cultures live.”

Okoro says the name refers to his desire to “branch out. I have so many ideas…Dependánce Global is not supposed to be just about one issue.”

A brief glance at his brand’s website confirms that neither Okoro nor his clothing plan on being boxed in. He has four products currently for sale online—tees and sweatshirts with creative nods to a variety of influences, from Arabic to basketball to Playboy.

One shirt, “Psychological Pain,” was inspired by Okoro’s nursing studies. It features a hunched, multiplied figure in apparent agony, lit electric purple by its own neurons. A pain scale from zero to 10 runs up one sleeve, and the back of the shirt reads, “PAIN—THE 5TH VITAL SIGN. YOU ARE NOT ALONE GET HELP!”

“Nursing is about the human body and how the human body works,” Okoro says. “It’s an art of its own.”

Another, called “Black is Beautiful,” speaks to Okoro’s experience living as a Black man. Darine Stern graces the front of the short sleeve button-up, a reprint of the Playboy cover for which she modeled as the magazine’s first African American covergirl. “Growing up, I almost hated my own skin,” Okoro says. “Now I know my Black is beautiful.”

Virgil Abloh, a groundbreaking Black designer and entrepreneur, is another influence who served as a model for Okoro’s self-realization. “When I saw that as a kid, it really motivated me to keep pursuing my dreams,” he says. “I never really got to see African Americans in these positions.” Okoro also lists Kanye West, Yves Saint Laurent, and Louis Vuitton among his inspirations—although, “I grew up in a very low-income neighborhood, so there wasn’t a lot of Louis Vuitton around.”

Dépendance Global may still be in its infancy, but Okoro only sees it growing—existing alongside, or maybe even taking precedence over his nursing ambitions. He expects the brand to one day live up to its name, becoming as well known as the projects of his idols. “If you buy a T-shirt, buy a hoodie, I want that to be your favorite T-shirt or hoodie,” says Okoro. “I want people to know that this is a brand for every person. It’s made out of love.”

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Culture Living

Buckling up: Diamondback Toolbelts shine in a tough industry

Charlottesville-based Diamondback Toolbelts began in a garage before relocating and soaring to international success with some help from well-executed social media. Photo courtesy of diamondback Toolbelts.

Anyone who’s visited McIntire Plaza is familiar with its eclecticism. The businesses include Circa—in itself, a testament to variety—a Brazilian jiu-jitsu center, a tiny black-box theater company, and a furniture showroom enigmatically named Poem.

Even those who frequent the plaza, though, might not know about Diamondback Toolbelts. Tucked into the far end of Harris Street, the warehouse misses the majority of the traffic and doesn’t have a sign. But despite its quiet presence in Charlottesville, Diamondback has spent the last four years bursting into international relevance as a highly renowned upscale toolbelt company.

CEO Connor Crook is largely to thank for this success—although in conversation, he doesn’t show any of the smugness one might expect from the accomplishment. On the Friday afternoon when Crook meets for an interview, he’s both easygoing and a bit hyper, exuding a friendly energy that shines from underneath his Diamondback-stamped face mask. The warehouse is nearly empty—more people were there earlier, Crook explains, fulfilling international orders—but his liveliness fills the conference room, where he sits at a table littered with swatches of test fabrics for his belts.

Crook says communication skills come from the decade-plus of law he practiced before Diamondback—a “miserable experience,” he claims. “I never felt comfortable in the skin of a lawyer.” Crook missed working creatively with his hands, something he had many opportunities to do as a boy at his grandfather’s construction company. “I grew up around this.” When his longtime friend Michael Williams contacted him about buying a toolbelt company, Crook didn’t hesitate to change careers.

They’d discovered Diamondback Toolbelts—an Alaska-based company run out of a garage. There wasn’t much in the way of products, as each belt was made on demand and by hand, but there was a passionate client base on Facebook that claimed the belts “were just the greatest things in the world.” Crook purchased an original Diamondback from one such happy customer to get a feel for the product and immediately knew it was something special.

Crook still has this belt—a faded blue, battered, but sturdy relic—hanging on a metal rack in the conference room alongside several others he’s sourced from Facebook. “Our museum pieces,” he calls them proudly. After purchasing the company with Williams in 2016, Crook made improvements to the belts, but even these earlier iterations of Diamondbacks are impressively crafted. Both finely detailed and extremely heavy-duty, they look like military-grade products—and in fact, several of the fabrics on the conference table are made of Kevlar or Dyneema, the sort of thing that typically belongs in a bulletproof vest.

Growth didn’t come immediately. Crook says they “got their footing” in 2017, and in 2018 he bought out Williams, a process that took most of the year, but in 2019 the company seriously expanded. Crook was able to increase his hiring, a move that included bumping up part-time employee Damani Harrison to head of sales, marketing, and customer service.

It’s very likely that those who don’t know Harrison in a Diamondback context have interacted with him elsewhere in Charlottesville. During his time living in the city, he’s been a musician, coffee shop manager, substitute teacher, reporter, activist, and soccer coach—“and that’s just scratching the surface,” he says, adding, “I haven’t slept in 20 fucking years.”

Harrison started off in 2018 doing “grunt work,” but soon enough was running Diamondback’s Instagram account, which Crook calls “the luckiest thing in the world,” and today has more than 60,000 followers. If that popularity seems unusual for a high-end toolbelt company, Crook and Harrison were surprised too. Then they realized there was a “burgeoning community on Instagram that was really into fine craftsmanship,” says Crook.

Harrison quickly learned to cater to that community, tinkering with Instagram’s algorithm to find international clients. “One weekend, I decided that I was gonna teach myself Korean hashtags. So I stayed up for like 48 hours.” With the aid of Google Translate, Harrison successfully added foreign- language hashtags to Diamondback’s posts and discovered the Instagram Korean trades community—niche but also, as it turned out, lucrative. Through Harrison’s experiment, Diamondback gained the business of a Korean client, today its second-largest customer.

Crook partially attributes international sales to Diamondback’s lucrative 2020, his company’s best year to date. And even in America, business has been thriving, despite the pandemic. “Our customer base is essential workers,” he explains. “They stopped working for maybe two weeks.”

But the root of Diamondback’s success in Crook’s eyes, the reason it will continue to be many tradespeople’s brand of choice, is a mutual respect between company and client. “The people that we sell to have been a neglected group. A large part of my brand is building respect around what they do.”

Both Crook and Harrison mentioned American education’s disregard for skilled labor. As a substitute, Harrison saw how the system “failed so many kids who would’ve benefited being exposed to the trades way earlier.” His work for Diamondback, he says, is meant to normalize and destigmatize the industry, to help give tradespeople their deserved esteem.

“There are a lot of people who are looking for respect within the industry,” Crook agrees. “If you put the effort into understanding your customer and treating them as a human being, it doesn’t matter what the economy does…the sky’s the limit.”

Categories
Arts Culture

C’ville chic: Bottom Drawer is hyperlocal and hyper-absurd

It’s not an exaggeration to say the graphic tee revolutionized the fashion world. Its unique pairing of text and image allowed for an unprecedented level of self-expression, and gave birth to a slew of immediately recognizable designs—from I ♥ NY to Frankie Says Relax to D.A.R.E. (the latter being as ironic as it is iconic).

The ability for individuals to make their own shirts has led to localized versions of the graphic tee trend, and Charlottesville is no exception. Who among us doesn’t recognize a WTJU rock marathon tee, or the teal heart design of the Cville love shirt? Like other small but culture-rich communities, we wear aspects of our city emblazoned across our chests.

Kate Snyder, founder of Charlottesville-based T-shirt company Bottom Drawer, just might have our next iconic logo. The Townie tee, “the very FIRST perfect T-shirt in a line of completely perfect T-shirts” (or so claims Bottom Drawer’s Instagram page) was unveiled in early August, and it’s exactly what it sounds like. TOWNIE is displayed in all caps, block letters—in your choice of black text (“PLAIN BAGEL”) or rainbow (“EVERYTHING BAGEL”)—across a white background.

Snyder says her lifelong townie status—she was born and raised in Charlottesville—combined with a love of fashion, specifically graphic tees, inspired her to make this Bottom Drawer’s debut design. “I think of graphic T-shirts as the most basic way to announce something about yourself through your clothes,” she says. “It’s an interesting way to say who you are…spelled out in black and white—or multicolored, as the case may be.”

Although Snyder has dabbled in T-shirt design before, creating and selling POACH tees (an edgy parody of COACH) a few years ago, she hadn’t planned to start an entire Charlottesville-based business. In fact, she hadn’t intended to remain in Charlottesville at all—a 2020 UVA graduate, her postgrad sights were set on New York. However, Snyder’s professional prospects were cut short by the pandemic. Like so many others, she found herself in “this weird townie space, living in my childhood bedroom.”

Hence the Townie tee. “This was my banana bread or my sourdough starter,” Snyder says. “I wanted to test out that creative side.” Her creative side, as it turns out, comes with a very unique sense of humor—one that can be seen most obviously in Bottom Drawer’s Instagram. Whether it’s a movie still of James Stewart as George Bailey, expertly Photoshopped to sport a Townie tee—It’s a Wonderful Life is, after all, the ultimate townie tale—or an interview of dubious authenticity with Karl Lagerfeld about breakfast and fashion, Snyder has established an undeniable brand for Bottom Drawer in just a month.

Under all the irreverence, though, is a real commitment to her community. Three dollars from each Townie sale goes to The Haven, an idea that Snyder says was brought on in part by the pandemic. “Obviously, the circumstances of people suffering from homelessness in Charlottesville has been exacerbated…it seemed like a no-brainer.” This charity pairs well with Snyder’s newest initiative: including a pre-stamped postcard in each Bottom Drawer package so that her customers can write a letter to someone and support the United States Postal Service.

Snyder has released three designs since Townie, each one punnier than the last. “Hautemeal,” the most recent, features an anthropomorphized and decidedly elegant bowl of oats. It is, as she is happy to admit, “openly ridiculous”—but then, she says, so is the idea of fashion itself. “Why not, when you’re getting dressed, make the thing that you’re getting dressed in as ridiculous as possible?”

Snyder, who still plans on moving to New York sometime soon, isn’t sure how much longer Bottom Drawer will continue to put out new products, but she says the venture has made her realize designing shirts is “something that I would like to do forever.” If wearing fashion is a form of self-expression, then Snyder has found that creating it is a form of self-discovery. “I’m trying to find my own language through my work for Bottom Drawer.”