Author: Elizabeth Derby

When FIREFISH Gallery co-curators Araxe Hajian and Sigrid Eilertson brainstormed concepts for their next collaborative project, they decided to flip the script. Rather than host a visual art show that invited verbal interpretation, they decided to ask visual artists to interpret Hajian’s short story “This is How You Open a Pomegranate.”

“I didn’t see this as an illustration of a story,” Hajian said. “I wanted to see how someone else would tell this story. We did it backward, not writing responses to art, but art as response to writing.”

Inspired in part by their new memberships with the Virginia Arts of the Book Center, Hajian and Eilertson chose 10 diverse local artists, including Eileen Butler, Chicho Lorenzo, Ken Nagakui, Julia Travers, Kate Hunter, Rose Brown, Suzanne Nelson, Frank Riccio, and Claudia Walpole to create new works that interpret the story.

“It’s a kaleidoscopic story, not plot driven, much more of an inner monologue,” said Hajian, who is Armenian-American. “A few artists I knew said ‘It’s so visual, I want to draw it.’”

At face value, “This is How You Open a Pomegranate” is the recollection of an American woman traveling with relief efforts to an Armenian village leveled by an earthquake. (Though the story is fiction, it takes place in Spitak, a real city devastated by a 1988 earthquake.) When the narrator finds a baby alive in the rubble, she forms an unexpected bond with the child and must decide whether to stay or leave.

In pottery, textiles, paintings, collage, multimedia, mosaics, and letterpress prints and art books, artists’ responses ranged from food imagery to scenes of objects built or broken. “They reminded me how we focus on what themes resonate emotionally, these ideas of being uprooted, of attachment and detachment, of loss and the concept of home,” said Hajian.

All the works are for sale to benefit the Armenia Tree Project, which plants trees in impoverished and deforested zones like Spitak. Though the gallery often hosts collaborative shows to benefit non-profits, “this is the first time we’ve interpreted an object of literature,” Eilertson said.

As a result of artistic interpretation, the facts of the story shifted, and the exhibit reads like a game of visual telephone. For example, one artist believed the infant was a boy, despite Hajian’s description of a baby girl.

Hajian herself interpreted the story three times, once through writing, once through textiles, and again in the compilation of a hand-bound, limited edition book cataloging the project. She saw firsthand how fiction suggests a story without committing to it, how language, like art, is a lens to the truth, not the truth itself.

“Even in real life, we don’t know how much we’re embellishing in our heads,” she said. “When I try to fact check my memory, I’m shocked by how much it morphs. Art morphs too.”

Eilertson, who also contributed to the show, said she painted an Armenian goddess that wound up looking Brazilian.

“But it’s O.K. It’s all art therapy. It turns into something you don’t intend it to be,” she said.

Art writers use words to interpret meaning, to tease out themes like multicolored threads. If you’re reading this, you’re interpreting, too, contributing to the weave. And when you look back, meta-magic will happen. You’ll remember a story about this story, a fiction about artists narrating fiction about what may or may not be a pomegranate.

When the truth dissolves in extrapolation like this, we all become art-makers. As Eilertson said, “I think that’s just what happens in art. Things become bigger than themselves.”

“Social sculpture is the idea that whenever we’re shaping our own lives to be more beautiful, it’s an intentional act to bring more beauty or well-being into the world,” said Kate Daughdrill, a Detroit-based artist, farmer, and teacher who graduated from UVA.

Daughdrill is one of 20-plus presenters slated to bring social sculpture to Charlottesville’s biannual New City Arts Forum. The 2014 event, titled “Art, Food, and Community,” will be held at The Haven and according to the event website, will “highlight overlapping practices of contemporary art and food systems.” Discussions and performances center on topics like art- and food-based social engagement, land-use art, and food-based sculpture.

“Both food and art bring us to the present, to what we’re seeing, hearing, and experiencing,” Daughdrill said. “The word aesthetic comes from ‘of the senses,’ and so much of food is about the sensual experience of eating and nurturing ourselves. We’re affected, even on a cellular level, when we bring something in to digest it, either for nutrients or aesthetic nourishment.”

When she was a studio art undergraduate at UVA, Daughdrill co-founded The Garage and began to make “living sculptures,” works that utilize the sculptural forms of edible plants. Since moving to Michigan for Cranbook Academy of Art’s MFA program, she also cultivates creative social projects like Detroit SOUP, a community dinner program that awards micro-grants to artists and inspired Charlottesville SOUP and meals-as-arts-incubators around the country. Last summer, she formed a creative CSA that distributed art objects as well as produce from her garden, an experiment mirrored by The Bridge PAI in the fall of 2013.

“For me, it’s the daily acts of caring for myself and other people and doing it with intention and care,” said Daughdrill. “Art has a unique role in claiming what matters, of saying, ‘this is meaningful,’ and bringing the next layer of wonder to those experiences. Whether that’s setting a table or arranging a house—even how I stack the wood I use to heat my home feels like the art of the everyday to me.”

In addition to reaching new community members, Daughdrill works to nourish neighborhood intimacy. In partnership with artist Mira Burack, she developed Edible Hut, a community gathering space in Detroit’s impoverished Osborn neighborhood. The hut, which has an edible, living roof modeled on Jefferson’s rotunda, “claimed that space for something positive versus negative,” Daughdrill said. “The neighborhood wanted a beautiful, safe space for the community to share, and this allowed us to reclaim a public park that had been abandoned and neglected.”

Daughdrill’s own neighborhood gathers around her studio, a renovated house and vacant lot-turned-agricultural operation called Burnside Farm. Once a week, she hosts weekly meals for her community. “Eating food with other people is one of the most natural ways to be together,” she said, and it forges community in the face of universal struggles.

“[Like Detroit,] there is poverty and need in Charlottesville,” Daughdrill said. An event like Charlottesville SOUP at the New City Arts Forum is one way to address it. When participants eat their communal meals, they’ll donate admission fees to a philanthropic arts project selected by community vote.

This is the sort of deliberate, fundamentally creative act that, for Daughdrill, helps elevate and give meaning to daily life. “For all our differences, the similarities are what I come to,” she said. “Human beings want to connect to themselves and each other and plants and something higher than themselves. And growing food and eating it on Sunday nights with my neighbors is one of the most profound experiences I can create.”

When Andy Friedman enrolled in the Rhode Island School of Design, he devoted himself to Venetian oil painting, a skill so intricate that each work takes an average of three years to finish.

“I knew that after college I would have to get a job, and I wanted to know the feeling of complete and utter pride in a work I painted by hand while I still had the time to devote 18 hours a day to doing it,” Friedman said.

As graduation approached, he applied the final coat of varnish to his single work of art—and ruined it. “That is when I discovered country blues [music] and my relationship with a more truthful vision of perfection materialized,” said Friedman.

The career that followed has included musical performance, illustration, cartooning, and writing. A journey that began in New York, crisscrossed the country, and will touch down at Miller’s on March 4, when Friedman reads true stories from his life on the road before Matt Lorenz performs with his throat-singing one-man band, The Suitcase Junket.

Lorenz, who initially invited Friedman to perform songs with him, conceded to let him read unpublished essays instead. “It’s a testament to how artistically adventurous [Lorenz] is,” Friedman said.

In his own life, Friedman shifts art forms for utility’s sake. “The mediums themselves are nothing but tools,” he said, “like you’d choose a paintbrush or pencil. Painting is a tool, photography is a tool, and the English language is a tool for me to use at my discretion. If I need to write a story, I’ll write a story.”

After graduating, Friedman worked at The New Yorker, and ended up in the office of cartoon editor Bob Mancoff. He began selling his own cartoons intermittently, and once his first illustration for the magazine was published, he took a leap of faith.

“The slideshow poet industry was hiring,” he told me over the phone from his home in Brooklyn. We both laughed. “With the prospects of maybe doing more illustration and selling a cartoon here and there, I thought I’d supplement that income by travelling around the country offering a slideshow performance I had developed.”

Slideshow poetry combined live music with visual art projections. “I didn’t know how to play guitar, never sang a note in my life,” he said, but he taught himself the basics, got busy writing tunes, and toured with a self-published book of drawings and Polaroid photos that he sold like an album.

He spent nights in hotel rooms drawing after performance venues closed. As his client list grew to include Rolling Stone, Playboy, and The New York Times, his body began to protest. “I got three hours of sleep, drank a lot of coffee, and I didn’t really know how to play the guitar,” Friedman said. “So every night my fingers would bleed, and I started to feel it in my hands. For a while I knew life without the possibly of drawing, and it scared me into health.”

He stopped touring two years ago, digging into home life in Brooklyn and his own reflections of life on the road. “If I’m not here, then everything that I learned, all the stories go with me. That’s what’s motivating me, the desire to get it down,” Friedman said.

But this work isn’t a novel, he reminded me. It’s a way, like singing or painting, to tell stories from his life. “Any artist can do anything they want to do at any given time,” he said. “The art world that I see is just a celebration of that idea.”

“When people think of the word threesome, they think of one man and two women, and they think of the man getting pleasured by the women,” said Tif Robinette, a self-declared feminist. “But here we have three really strong female artists from the state of Virginia reacting to and tearing apart ideas of the ideal woman.” Robinette is one of three artists, including Susan Jamison and Sharon Shapiro, whose performances, sculptures, drawings, and paintings are part of Second Street Gallery’s February exhibit “Threesome.”

“All of us love that title,” she laughed. “It turns the whole notion of what a threesome is on its head.”

The city’s oldest non-profit contemporary arts space typically showcases two artists in separate spaces each month, but “Threesome” stretches throughout the gallery and intermingles the work of all three artists. “This show is an improvisational conversation between Steve [Taylor, the gallery’s executive director], the artists, and me,” said Tosha Grantham, Second Street’s new curator. Though Grantham’s first curated show will premiere in September, she’s implementing the current season while arranging the next.

“Threesome” is not a collaboration between artists but rather a gathering of like-minded themes. “The exhibit uses three distinct vantage points to explore contemporary femininity in contemporary art,” Grantham said. “How women’s sexuality is placed either in pop culture, in other media such as film, or against a gendered or male gaze.”

The works are full of beauty and tension, a conflict inherent in female sexuality. “They find or create power from what could otherwise be uncomfortable circumstances,” Grantham said, noting that each artist works beyond the “sanitized femininity” popular in our culture. “None of them shy away from challenging subject matter, which is refreshing especially when it comes to woman and power or femininity and control.”

Susan Jamison uses egg tempera painting and sculptural forms to explore an intentionally feminine perspective. Her paintings most often feature a female character appearing alongside animals, a woman with a face replaced by a medical illustration or skin covered in hot pink flowers. Jamison also embellishes found objects like vintage lace, anchors, horse hair, and women’s clothing to provide feminist social commentary.

“In this exhibition, my piece ‘Drowning Dress’ is covered in lead fishing weights and embroidered with the word ‘Farewell’ around the neckline,” she said. “It is meant as an homage to the feminist writer Virginia Woolf who drowned herself in a river by placing heavy rocks in her coat pockets.”

Sharon Shapiro’s paintings and drawings highlight the complications of desire, gender, and sexuality through doubling and transforming female figures. “I take screen shots with my iPhone, manipulate them, and work from those images in my painting,” Shapiro said. She focuses on character-driven films like Blow Up (a 1966 film about a London photographer who may have witnessed a killing) or personal narratives populated by animal-human composites.

“I grew up in a small town in West Virginia, and we used to go to this shoddy public pool called Harmony Acres,” Shapiro said, describing a painting on display in “Threesome.” “Much as the pool deteriorated, the two figures [in the painting] turn from humans into a pattern disrupted by the woman’s lower half turning into a sheep. It leaves the viewer to wonder if the transformation is literal and the man is committing bestiality, or is it just a metaphor for other sorts of transformations that we go through?”

Symbolism abounds in the show, which features Tif Robinette’s practice of using quotidian objects in unexpected ways. Corn, snakes, and other elements allow her to represent and juxtapose ideas like masculinity and femininity, lightness and darkness, the sacred and the profane.

“I’m really interested in turning the coin upside down and thinking of the things we do every day as either equally or more significant than the rituals that we regard as highly spiritual.” Eating and communication are ritualized activities, she said, but we don’t engage in them with the same awareness we do in church. Her performances and works draw attention to the ordinary. “Salt in the cupboard, the yellow gloves you use to wash your dishes, those very small seemingly insignificant moments in your life, I elevate them.”

Robinette’s work includes provocative performances, the sort Charlottesville galleries rarely see. “I like to use eating roses as a metaphor for being women being in relationships and the beauty and romance and destruction of those situations,” she said. “My performanc-
es tend to have quiet sacred moments and base, bestial moments. I feel like eating roses is one of those, very much like an animal, taking a symbol that we hold in high regard, especially around Valentine’s Day, as a symbol of the purity of love and tearing it apart.”

Robinette’s four-hour live performance, “AINT YOUR GODDESS AINT YOUR BEAST,” debuted during “Threesome’s” First Fridays opening. It was captured on video and distilled into a 15-minute loop for broadcast on a mounted television throughout the show’s run.

“Threesome” is sponsored by Women for Art, a group of women who share a passion for contemporary art and often support Second Street events. “As a gallery, we’re known for showing art that might not otherwise be seen here,” Grantham said, and “Threesome” offers a rare look into largely unexhibited work by area artists who exhibit nationally and internationally.

“Threesome” is also an opportunity for audience participation. “People should know that their opinions and observations are valid,” Jamison said. “Perhaps I have painted an animal that you have seen in your yard, and this creates your own story for my painting. Reading visual art can and should be a more open-ended experience than reading words.”

It seems like an absurd plan to grow a city’s art scene: take the cultural community, run it through two years of focus groups and surveys, and publish six long-range goals (diversity and inclusion, arts education, cultural destination, creative workers, creative placemaking, and cultural infrastructure). It’s a wonky, almost anti-artistic approach. Doesn’t such an effort simply underscore Charlottesville’s willingness to obsessively reformulate intellectual problems rather than to roll up its sleeves to fix them?

Not according to Sarah Lawson, executive director of Piedmont Council for the Arts (PCA). The non-profit arts council used a variety of grants to pay an amount The Daily Progress estimated at $112,000 to an outside consulting firm to generate the Create Charlottesville/Albemarle: A cultural plan, unveiled during a brief ceremony at The Paramount Theater last month. What Lawson and her predecessor Maggie Guggenheimer saw was a lively arts community living hand to mouth on generous, likely unsustainable donations from a small group of patrons.

“The Charlottesville/Albemarle arts community rests on the backbone of two or three people, and it’s not really sustainable for that reason,” said Lawson. “Increasingly, many of the people who founded the arts community and make it so vibrant either passed away or moved away or, for whatever reason, got uninvolved. It’s a very real life cycle, and we wanted to make sure it didn’t result in killing off organizations that we all know and love.”

In 2011, PCA participated in a study conducted by Americans for the Arts called Arts & Economic Prosperity IV. It revealed that the arts and culture industry in Charlottesville and Albemarle generated $114.4 million in annual economic activity, resulting in $9.2 million in local and state government revenues, 1,921 equivalent full-time jobs, and $31.2 million in household income for local residents.

“The study completely shut up anyone who said the arts don’t matter economically,”  said Live Arts Executive Director Matt Joslyn. “We’re a huge industry with a massive economic impact, and Charlottesville and Albemarle would be fundamentally different places if you took us away. It showed that we’re worthy to be at the table.”

Create Charlottesville/Albemarle takes the Arts & Economic Prosperity study one step further by outlining the lifestyle impact and goals of our cultural scene, not just its influence on the local economy. The process, an investment in long-term alignment between the arts community and policymakers, included input from over 1,000 citizens and community leaders and spanned the better part of two years. The 32-page final document is a vision for the future for arts organizations and a well-formulated plea to local government to formally commit to providing funding and infrastructure to the arts community.

It’s as much an inventory as a plan, designed to empower struggling cultural institutions at a time when some high-profile smaller players are feeling the pressure. Vinegar Hill Theatre closed after 37 years of foreign and independent film screenings, citing competition from multiplex conglomerates and increased interest in streaming media. Random Row Books, the dynamic independent bookstore and performance space, had to close its doors to make way for a hotel. Chroma Projects Art Laboratory, a gallery and studio space on the Downtown Mall, closed just a few weeks ago when a confluence of rising rent costs and lessening tourism rendered the for-profit gallery unsustainable.

“I do think the city could have helped a little more,” said Deborah McLeod, the curator at Chroma. “Helping to promote fine art places or giving more opportunities for free parking to encourage tourism. I feel like they could have helped me more, because I feel like I was giving something important to Charlottesville.”

All three organizations were for-profit and therefore ineligible for non-profit funding, but they also, as Lawson put it, suffered from a lack of governmental response.

“We need to recognize certain resources as cornerstones of the community,” Lawson said. “And help either relocate them or integrate them into the planning process rather than paving over them.”

But not every leader in the local arts community thinks more infrastructure is the answer. Some are simply worried that as the city becomes more expensive, it’s pricing out its creative class and turning towards art tourism instead of creativity for answers.

“I think Charlottesville lost sight of how important it is to maintain a creative base and make damn sure that artists can be a part of the community,” said Greg Kelly, the former executive director of The Bridge Progressive Arts Institute. “LOOK3, the Virginia Film Festival—those large scale productions are great, but the underground DIY thing was slowly being tapped.”

Maintaining a thriving arts scene outside an urban center appears incredibly difficult. It’s a competitive, subjective, and bootstrapping world that thrives on energy and the willingness of artists to live on the margins of the economy. In a way, subsidizing the arts is counterintuitive, even problematic. If the scene can’t survive on its own, the reasoning goes, perhaps it shouldn’t exist at all.

On the other hand, art has never existed without patronage to support it. Those who remember the early days of the art scene in Charlottesville know it was based on cheap rent and benevolent landlords. The independent bookstores and contemporary galleries helped to yield the area’s current quality of life and revitalize its Downtown. Without a vibrant art community, its reputation as a cultural center and artistic haven will evaporate.