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Lost and found: Victory Hall Opera explores boundaries in The Forgotten

Victory Hall Opera’s The Forgotten merges two scary operas into a modern fairy tale of cultural exploration. Photo by Celena Cox, courtesy Victory Hall Opera

The story of “Hansel and Gretel” is a familiar one: the hungry children of a poor woodcutter are lost in the woods when they stumble upon a house made of gingerbread and sweets, enticing to their eyes and empty bellies.

The house belongs to a witch who lures the children inside and captures them, intending to fatten them up so she can roast and eat them later. But Hansel and Gretel outwit the witch (who perishes in her own fiery oven), and the children stuff their pockets with the witch’s jewels and treasure before finding their way home.

Like most folklore and fairy tales, “Hansel and Gretel” has been adapted many times, in many languages, each version differing slightly from the next. This week at Light House Studio, the Charlottesville-based Victory Hall Opera adapts Engelbert Humperdinck’s 1893 opera Hänsel und Gretel into an experimental version of the story, one that considers modern anxieties about the self and the other, about innocence lost and awareness found.

Inspired by the Halloween zeitgeist that captures imaginations at this time of year, VHO wanted to stage an opera with “genuinely scary material” for its fall production, says VHO artistic director Miriam Gordon-Stewart. Hänsel und Gretel was one choice. Gian Carlo Menotti’s The Medium is another.

Written and set in the wake of World War II, The Medium is a two-act tragic opera about a fraudulent psychic (Baba) who ropes her daughter (Monica) and a mute servant (Toby) into leading grieving clients through fake séances. During one séance, Baba has an experience she cannot explain; it terrifies her and drives her mad.

Gordon-Stewart and Brenda Patterson, VHO director of music, noticed similarities between the two operas: Both are fairy tales with a boy and a girl as lead characters. “A fairy tale has never really been about ghosts or witches. It’s always been about the ‘other,’” says Gordon-Stewart. Another point of convergence: Both could be set in the woods—in our woods.

Gordon-Stewart and Patterson weave strands of each opera together into a single production called The Forgotten, drawing the first part from Hänsel und Gretel and the second from The Medium. The actors who sing Hansel and Gretel (Patterson, a mezzo-soprano, and Nancy Allen Lundy, a soprano based in New York state) also sing Toby and Monica, respectively, and other actors double up on roles as well.

In The Forgotten, Hansel and Gretel are overprotected, privileged, smartphone-obsessed private school kids living in a luxury housing development on the outskirts of Charlottesville. When they’re sent into the nearby woods, it’s the first time they’re out of their highly-controlled environment: They are “completely mystified” by being in nature and being unsupervised, says Gordon-Stewart.

In the production, the woods serves as a meeting place for two seemingly disparate worlds. The idea is that if you walk through the woods of Charlottesville, you might end up in the county, and possibly meet someone who has a very different experience of living in Virginia, says Gordon-Stewart. “I think we’re all aware of the fact that Charlottesville is a bubble within a very different culture…and I think there are a lot of fears, from both sides of the border, about that,” she says.

Lundy, who sings Gretel and Monica, appreciates the “very, very creative” approach VHO has taken in exploring this theme that has both immediate and global implications. She relishes the depth the narrative gives to her characters, particularly Monica, who, Lundy says can come off as “trite, girly, and silly.” In The Forgotten, Lundy feels Monica’s devastating arias so deeply she says she barely has to do any acting.

VHO has also incorporated elements of the Charlottesville area’s own (and true) fraudulent psychic story into The Forgotten. For a while, Sandra Stevenson Marks claimed to be a psychic and offered “Readings by Catherine,” including palm, tarot, astrological, and spiritual readings, from a rented house on Route 29. She knowingly stole more than $2 million from five people, pleaded guilty to the charges brought against her, and in November 2016 was sentenced to 30 months in prison.

Gordon-Stewart wanted to add a bit of “genuine magic” and a truly supernatural atmosphere to The Forgotten, and so VHO asked Light House Studio filmmakers—who are about the same age as the Hansel, Gretel, Monica, and Toby characters—to create films about the woods that are part of the production, along with the score from the live chamber orchestra.

Just as The Forgotten explores fears of difference, the unfamiliar and the unknown, so does VHO. The company does not deliver expected opera performances, says Gordon-Stewart, and that’s the point. “In order for audiences to really engage, to really genuinely feel something in the theater, they have to be disarmed,” she says. “They have to experience something unexpected, and if I’m giving them what they expect, then there is part of them that is not awake.”

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Arts

Strange lot: The Bridge fills with curiosities in new exhibition

Throughout October, the “Gallery of Curiosities” at The Bridge Progressive Arts Initiative is the setting for a variety of events, such as experimental music performances, a horror film screening, a Halloween party, trick or treating, and more. Photo by Martyn Kyle

On a sultry First Fridays evening in early October, The Bridge Progressive Arts Initiative gallery glows gold beneath the dark, overcast sky. People flock to the warmly lit building to see the “Gallery of Curiosities.” Outside, near the door, there’s a small table draped with a white cloth and adorned with candles, where Leslie M. Scott-Jones (a C-VILLE contributor) reads tarot cards for those who opt to sit across from her.

Inside the gallery, Elyse Smith spins fur from a visitor’s beloved pet into yarn, and all around her, floor to ceiling and wall to wall, hang hundreds, perhaps even thousands, of curiosities, oddities, and objects, each item begging more questions than it answers.

In a thick frame sprouting from the wall, the chalky, fragile white skeleton of a two-headed snake. On a table, an apocalyptic diorama; on another table, a pinhole camera. Sprouting from the floor, a mermaid tail. Stored in a cabinet are slender, corked glass vials of animal whiskers and porcupine quills. Human teeth. A loved one’s ashes.

There are planters made from grinning baby doll heads with all manner of cacti, succulents, and leafy greenery poking out the top. One wall holds nine lidded glass jars, each containing a red tomato in a different state of moldy, liquefying decay. Immediately above it are nine more jars containing chocolate Hostess cupcakes, each alarmingly well preserved.

Inspired by the cabinets of curiosities and wunderkammers of Renaissance and Baroque Europe, as well as contemporary museums like the Museum of Psychphonics in Indianapolis and the Museum of Jurassic Technology in Los Angeles, the “Gallery of Curiosities” is at The Bridge through the end of the month.

The show seeks to elicit a number of reactions from visitors, says Alan Goffinski, director of The Bridge. What is all this stuff? Where did this come from? Is it really from Charlottesville? Who are the people who collect these things?

“Curiosity is this force within us, this natural thing that we’re born with, that we take on as children, that points us toward the unknown and pulls us into a head space of authentic opportunity for learning and growth,” says Goffinski, and this exhibition is a place to exercise, or perhaps rediscover, that force.

The Bridge put out a call for submissions on its website, via email, social media accounts, and even Craigslist, urging folks to submit things they might have on display in their living rooms, attics, and cellars. More than 50 people from the Charlottesville area contributed items, ranging from Fraternal Order of Police memorabilia to Richard Nixon swag.

Tobiah Mundt contributed felted fantastical creations that she describes as a “sculptural representation of the creatures [found] in the place between asleep and awake.”

Hattie Eshleman’s pinkish-reddish-brownish bodily organ brooches, shiny and moist- looking, are a rumination on the inside turned out. “I would love for the viewer to imagine if they had extra organs other than the heart, liver, lungs, etc.,” says Eshleman. “What might those be? Fear? Intuition? An organ that stores forgotten memories?”

Visitors can test their telepathic connection with another person using the same experiment that Upton Sinclair (author of Mental Radio, a book on telepathy) and his second wife, Mary Craig Sinclair, used. Renee Reighart set up the experiment on a table with side-by-side stations, complete with instructions and suggestions for how to clear one’s mind and prepare to send or receive an image to the person on the other side of the divider. It’s “freaky” when it works, she says, but even when it doesn’t, it’s about the wondrous discovery of potential synchronicity and connection with another person.

In the gallery bathroom, there’s the Actuator, researched and developed by artist and musician Will Mullany, who describes his creation as a “proto-conscious mechanical being that guests are invited to interact with.” Mullany displays his research as well, hoping visitors will “set aside their base human inclination to filter their perceptions through logic and reason and accept the ultimate divine logic of the Actuator into their hearts.” And since it’s tucked away in the bathroom, he says, “it offers a sort of serenity and seclusion for these private revelations.”

In most cases, “you won’t be able to tell…what’s tongue-in-cheek and how much of it is fiction, or how much the truth dabbles in fiction along the way,” says Goffinski. For instance, did Ian Coyle’s belly button really produce that much lint—on display in an 8-inch by 10-inch oval frame—in two months’ time?

Coyle says yes; “even in a year’s long creative block, my tummy kept producing works of art.” But still, questions remain.

At its core, the “Gallery of Curiosities” is “an exhibit for Charlottesville, for the quirkiness that exists in our community,” says Goffinski. The show’s power lies in those who’ve curated it, he says, and it affords us a look into the character—both hidden and otherwise—of our friends and neighbors.

“It’s so damn interesting to learn about people in a show-and-tell sort of way,” says Goffinski.

Check out The Bridge’s calendar for a full listing of Halloween-y events related to the “Gallery of Curiosities” exhibit.

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Arts

Musical return: Andrew Neil Maternick lets the truth flow on Merry Go Round

Andrew Neil Maternick, who goes by Andrew Neil, performs songs from his new record, Merry Go Round, on October 19 at The Front Porch. Photo by Sanjay Suchak

“I’m a pretty sentimental guy,” says Andrew Neil Maternick as he settles in to a rust-colored tweed recliner that belonged to his grandmother. With a gentle hand and a look of delight on his broad face, he lifts up the woolly fabric of the armrest to show off the retro design of the chair’s buttons and dials. “Pretty cool, huh?”

He loves this chair, he says. Maybe he’ll write a jingle about it for La-Z-Boy. He’d like to write a jingle for any company, really—“Beautiful Mess,” a song from his new album, Merry Go Round, might work for Swiffer, or maybe Bounty, he jokes. The song is about seeking out beauty in an increasingly messy world, but it could apply to paper towels too, he says with a grin. “Why not?”

Maternick, 30, knows how to write a catchy song, but he’s not quite sure how he got so good. Growing up in Northern Virginia, he took a handful of guitar lessons, but his interest in the instrument was a fleeting one. Though he occasionally made up songs with his younger brother, Kyle, music was hardly Maternick’s focus—a highly competitive athlete, he was recruited by West Point to play Division I lacrosse. Even after withdrawing from the academy to deal with some mental health issues, he still planned on a career in the U.S. Marine Corps.

In April 2009, a car accident resulting in a traumatic brain injury derailed that dream. “A lot of doors…closed,” Maternick says about that period in his life. He’d been struggling with anxiety, depression, and bipolar disorder.

Not long after the accident, he started writing songs. At first, he composed on a keyboard, then picked up a guitar again in spring 2010. He spent a lot of time filling spiral-bound notebooks with poetry and sleeping on the floor.

“I vividly remember that,” says Maternick’s father, Ray. “I was really upset.” Ray kept telling his son to “get a real job,” and he would look at him and say, “But, I’m an artist.”

Andrew Neil Maternick’s brother, Kyle, did the artwork for his brother’s debut record, Code Purple.

“Are you kidding me? You’re not a musician; you’re not an artist. You never trained for this,” Ray would retort, refusing to listen to the songs.

Over the next few years, Maternick had a number of psychotic episodes. During one in July 2013, he stabbed Kyle in the forearm with a kitchen knife, “thinking he was an impostor in an armored suit,” Maternick writes in the liner notes to his 2017 album, Code Purple. “I wanted to cut him out.”

His mother called the police, and he was charged with malicious wounding, resisting arrest, and assault on a police officer. After a short hospitalization at Western State Hospital in Staunton, Maternick spent a few months in a jail cell before he was found not guilty by reason of insanity, and committed to Western State for a three-year stay.

While at Western State, Maternick, who is an entirely self-taught musician and doesn’t compose using standard chords, continued writing songs, tracking them to an old battery-powered TASCAM tape recorder. He gave them to his parents when they visited.

From those recordings, Ray, who had long resisted both listening to his son’s music and acknowledging his mental illness, began to hear what Maternick had to say in his lyrics.

“He changed me,” says Ray. “I used to be slightly to the right of Genghis Khan. And he made me see things that I never saw before. He made me begin to see compassion. He made me begin to see what value people have, no matter what they’re thinking, what their color is, anything. He ingrained that in me with his music.”

The music also helped his son find himself, to rediscover his identity after thinking it gone for so long. “It’s truth flowing out of me,” Maternick says.

He left Western State in spring 2017, and around the same time released his debut record, Code Purple. The songs confront isolation and loneliness, mental illness and recovery, pain and ugliness, and how important it is to see that as a truth that people experience.

Since then, Maternick’s moved into a group house and has become a regular at The Local restaurant’s open mic night. He’s written hundreds more songs, some of which made it on to his second record and first studio album, Merry Go Round, released earlier this month.

Daniel Benayun, a Boston-based pop artist, created the custom painting used for Merry Go Round.

The new songs are happy-go-lucky (“In the Air”), political (“Divide and Conquer”), contemplative (“Sorry Kyle”), encouraging (“Merry Go Round”). Maternick says that every feeling is a different type of ink that wells in the heart, and he used a wider variety of inks on the new record. Code Purple was mostly written in the ink of pain, and the contrast between the two albums is palpable.

Maternick chalks it up to the fact that Code Purple was very much a solo effort, and Merry Go Round, produced at Ravensworth studios in Scottsville by Andy Waldeck, features a full band comprised of Waldeck on bass and electric guitar, Nathan Brown on drums, Gina Sobel on flute, and Jack Sheehan on saxophone. The songs are Maternick’s, but he no longer played them alone.

“I wish you could know me now that I know me,” he sings on “I Wish.” The song outlines what Maternick considers his next big step: “I’ve got to be brave enough to make connections again with those people, to let them know me again,” he says, “It takes bravery, reaching out, loving people, reaching out again.”

Maternick says that music saved his life, mended his relationship with his family, gave him “a dream to pursue, and a way to contribute,” and he’s eager to see where it leads him.

A while back, he wrote the lyric, “Music makes a difference in this Jell-O world,” insisting that through music, we can find community in an uncertain, shaky place.

“I definitely believe in some sort of fate,” Maternick says. “It was very painful, my life. But I’m very happy that this has been the result of some of it. Some of the most beautiful trees are the ones that have been hit by lightning and they still manage to grow back.”

Andrew Neil Maternick celebrates his new album, Merry Go Round, with a show at The Front Porch on Friday, October 19.

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Arts

First Fridays: October 5

Michael "Doc" Doyle's show, "Drawings from Jail," is on view at the New City Arts Welcome Gallery during the month of October. Photo by Martyn Kyle

Michael “Doc” Doyle believes that the hardest thing you experience in life is your best chance to find out who you are.

For Doyle, a carpenter who studied metal sculpture in art school, that chance came in the form of jail time.

After battling addiction and depression, Doyle attempted suicide in such a way that he was charged with felony eluding, and because that act was considered a public danger, he was sentenced to more than a year in jail. He spent time in a psych ward, where a counselor introduced him to mindfulness. Upon returning to jail, he began meditating, practicing yoga, reading, and drawing. Art became part of his therapy—he’d ask the universe to send him an image as a means to understand and process what he was thinking and feeling, however difficult it was.

“These images feel gifted to me,” says Doyle of the few dozen pen-on-paper drawings exhibited in his show, “Drawings from Jail,” on view this month at the New City Arts Initiative’s Welcome Gallery. They are allegorical images of the psyche, exhibited semi-chronologically beginning to the left of the gallery’s entrance.

“Melancholia” is among the pieces on view in the show.

One of the drawings, “Melancholia,” was inspired by a 1514 engraving of the same name by German Renaissance artist Albrecht Dürer. A huddled figure hugs his knees to his chest, his back to the viewer. He’s surrounded by a host of symbols: an hourglass (time), scales (justice, balance), a gavel (a sentence), a book (knowledge), a pencil and a drawing (creativity), a sphere (the mystery of life, always right behind you). In the near distance, a tombstone (death), a ladder (a way out), as well as a village (human connection), a radiant sun, and a rainbow—hope.

Many of the drawings Doyle made while in jail aren’t on display; he used some to barter for cigarettes, food, or coffee, and gave away others that meant something to someone.

For Doyle, the show is a final send-off to a finished chapter of his life; he’s ready to move on. He hopes the messages contained in these works will encourage people to stop avoiding and start talking about addiction and depression.

After all, Doyle says, “even though these images are deeply personal, they are universal.” 

October 2018 Gallery Listings

FF Angelo Jewelry 220 E. Main St. “Out of Season,” featuring Mae Read’s oil painting meditations on permanence/impermanence, perceptions of beauty, and solitude. 5:30-7:30pm.

Annie Gould Gallery 121B S. Main St., Gordonsville. An exhibition of works by William Van Doren and Erica Lohan, focusing on distant and intimate points of nature.

FF The Bridge PAI 209 Monticello Rd. “Gallery of Curiosities,” a community-curated wunderkammer showcasing the unique, bizarre, fanciful, sacred, ill-defined, celebrated, historical, alternative, supernatural, and otherwise curious collections and creations of central Virginia. 5-9:30pm.

FF Chroma Projects 103 W. Water St. “Embodying a New Narrative: A Visual Discussion between June Collmer and Aidyn Mills,” an exhibition of photography in which Mills chose her own poses for Collmer’s lens. And in the back room, “Drawing Together: Five Bay Area artists Reunite in Charlottesville.” 5-7pm.

FF CitySpace Art Gallery 100 Fifth St. NE. The Feminist Union of Charlottesville Creatives hosts its premiere exhibit with visual art and live performances from a variety of artists, including Candice Agnello, Mihr Danae, Eileen French, Sam Gray, Sri Kodakalla, Sabr Lyon, Jiajun Yan, and others. 5:30-8:30pm.

Create Gallery at Indoor Biotechnologies 700 Harris St. “Faces at Work,” an exhibition of Blake Hurt’s 40 small oil-on-canvas portraits of people who work at 700 Harris St. Opens October 12.

Crozet Artisan Depot 5791 Three Notch’d Rd., Crozet. “Copper Abstractions: Etched & Verdigrised Copper Art,” featuring work by Cathy Vaughn.

FF C’ville Arts Cooperative Gallery 118 E. Main St., Downtown Mall. “Fall Into the Arts,” a group show of original oil paintings, hand knit items, fused and stained glass, wood works, jewelry, and more. 6-8pm.

FF Dovetail Design + Cabinetry 309 E. Water St. “Blame,” featuring oil-on-canvas works by Adam Reinhard. 5-7pm.

FF Fellini’s Restaurant 200 Market St. “Italian Memories,” an exhibition of watercolors by Linda Abbey. 5pm.

The Fralin Museum of Art at UVA 155 Rugby Rd. “Reflections: Native Art Across Generations”; “Excavations: The Prints of Julie Mehretu”; “Unexpected O’Keefe: The Virginia Watercolors and Later Paintings,” opening October19; “Highlights from the Collection of Heywood and Cynthia Fralin,” opening October 19; and “Oriforme” by Jean Arp.

FF The Garage 100 W. Jefferson St. “Black and White and a Little In Between: 2018 Abstractions,” an exhibition of work by Sarah Trundle that explores a constantly shifting process of obscuring and defining, of complicating and simplifying. 5:30-7:30pm.

FF Kardinal Hall 722 Preston Ave. An exhibition of work by Jesse Keller Timmons. 5:30-8pm.

Kluge-Ruhe Aboriginal Art Collection 400 Worrell Dr. “Freshwater Saltwater Weave,” a series of glass works by contemporary urban-based Arrernte artist Jenni Kemarre Martiniello; “Beyond Dreamings: The Rise of Indigenous Australian Art in the United States,” revealing the ways in which, since 1988, Indigenous Australian artists have forged one of the most globally significant art movements of our time; and “Experimental Beds,” in which Judy Watson removes the whitewash from concealed histories.

Les Yeux du Monde 841 Wolf Trap Rd. “Out of the Light Into the Light,” an exhibition of still-life paintings by art historian, critic, philosopher, and painter David Summers, closing October 5; and “John Borden Evans: Blue Moon,” an exhibition of Evans’ otherworldly landscapes, opening October 13.

Louisa Arts Center 212 Federicksburg Ave., Louisa. “Rhythm and Light,” featuring 2-D and 3-D works by amateur and professional artists.

Loving Cup Vineyard and Winery 3340 Sutherland Rd., North Garden. “Nippy Autumn Holidays,” an exhibition of work by the BozART Fine Art Collective.

FF McGuffey Art Center 201 Second St. NW. In the Sarah B. Smith Gallery, “This Strange World,” an exhibition of wet plate photography of fairy tales, monsters, and retaining walls, as well as portraits from the ongoing “People of Charlottesville/Know Your Neighbor” project, all by Aaron Farrington; in the Downstairs North Hall Gallery, “The Bonnet Maker,” a series of live photographs by Will Kerner and Rochelle Sumner, conceptualized and installed to tell the narrative of an Old German Baptist Brethren woman; in the Downstairs South Hall Gallery, “A Retrospective on the Escafé Operas,” oil on canvas murals by Dominique Anderson; in the Upstairs North Hall Gallery, a group show of works created during McGuffey figure drawing sessions; and in the Upstairs South Hall Gallery, “Paintings and Sculpture: Recent works in 2 and 3 dimensions” by David Currier.” 5:30-7:30pm.

FF Milli Coffee Roasters 400 Preston Ave. Ste. 150. “The Mind Blossom,” featuring mixed-media photography and paintings by Frank Donato. 7-10pm.

FF New Dominion Bookshop 404 E. Main St., Downtown Mall. An exhibition of pencil drawings by Jane Skafte. 5-7pm.

FF Radio IQ 216 W. Water St. An exhibition of floral paintings and landscapes by Nancy Wallace, and Joe Sheridan’s pencil-and-charcoal drawings of the chairs he’s designed. 5-7pm.

FF Roy Wheeler Realty Co. 404 Eighth St. NE. An exhibition of intuitive process paintings by Shirley Paul that explore, among other things, suspension of fear, expectations, and the analytical brain. 5-7:30pm.

FF Second Street Gallery 115 Second St. SE. In the main gallery, “water. poison. drink. dive.,” an exhibition of paintings, works on paper, and puppets by Lana Guerra, through October 19; in the Dové Gallery, “siren x silence,” paintings by Madeleine Rhondeau. 5:30-7:30pm.

Sentara Martha Jefferson Hospital 500 Martha Jefferson Dr. An exhibition of five landscape paintings by impressionist artist Lee Nixon. Through October 9.

Shenandoah Valley Art Center 122 S. Wayne Ave., Waynesboro. The 47th annual “Virginia Fall Foliage Art Show,” featuring work from about 150 artists from across the country. Opens October 13.

FF Spring Street Boutique 107 W. Main St., Downtown Mall. “The World of Color,” an exhibition of Christopher Kelly’s acrylic and mixed-media works on canvas and wooden board. 6-8pm.

FF Studio IX 969 Second St. SE. An exhibition of new work, mostly paintings focused on the human form, by Cate West Zahl. 5-8pm.

Thomas Jefferson Memorial Church Unitarian-Universalist 717 Rugby Rd. “Organic Geometry,” featuring paintings by Judith Townsend. Opens October 7.

FF Top Knot Studio 103 Fifth St. SE. “Keep It Like A Secret,” mobile photography by Chelsea Hoyt. 5-8pm.

FF Welcome Gallery 114 Third St. NE. “Drawings from Jail,” an exhibition of Michael “Doc” Doyle’s pen-on-paper works drawn over the course of a year spent in jail, exploring themes from isolation to redemption. 5-7:30pm.

FF First Fridays is a monthly art event featuring exhibit openings at many downtown art galleries and additional exhibition venues. Several spaces offer receptions.

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Arts

Time to play: After nearly a decade, Nathaniel Star returns to the stage

"Stay ready so you don't have to get ready," says Nathaniel Star. The soul singer and songwriter is ready to get back to performing live. Photo by Amy Jackson Smith

Nathaniel Star gets most of his ideas in the shower. It’s where he ruminates on a beat, hums melodies, and devises lyrics.

When he knows he has something good, he’ll hop out of the shower, wrap himself in a towel and dash, water dripping all over the floor, into his studio to record it.

“I’ll be recording wet,” he says over pita-wrapped falafel, a cup of Moroccan stew, and a mug of “Soul Soother” tea at Twisted Branch Tea Bazaar.

He laughs while describing his song-making process, noting that while other musicians might use candles, incense, or lush fabrics to create a certain in-studio mood, all he needs is “a microphone, my computer, and some software. I don’t need candles.”

Star (a moniker, not his real name), who will play his first local live show in about a decade at The Front Porch on Saturday, grew up on South First Street and has been making music his entire conscious life. At first, he harmonized on gospel songs with his mom and sister; then he wrote country-esque songs with titles like “Hey You” on an electric guitar; and as a home-schooled teen, he snuck over to the Music Resource Center, back when it was on the UVA Corner, to rap.

Those raps, Star says, were “good from a lyrical standpoint” but also “extremely violent,” and he felt it wasn’t music he could put out into the world. If it wasn’t something his religious mother’s ears could hear, he wouldn’t release it.

Inspired by singers and songwriters like D’Angelo and Bilal, Star later sang and played guitar in local neo-soul act Acoustic Groove Trio. “Everyone [in] the audience making out, because it was real sensual music,” he says, laughing. Acoustic Groove Trio broke up about 10 years ago when the percussionist and bass guitarist moved out of town. Star stopped performing, but he continued making music.

Star released his debut solo album, Collide-A-Scope, in December 2016, and two EPs, Nat-Blac Presents: EH-SUH-TER-IK and C.R.A.C.K., this year. He works with Vintagebeatwitsoul, making beats for other artists, and he writes music for documentary films, including Tanesha Hudson’s forthcoming A Legacy Unbroken: The Story of Black Charlottesville, directed by Lorenzo Dickerson and produced by Sarad Davenport. Star has also written music for Maxine Jones (a founding member of En Vogue). By day, he’s an elevator mechanic.

All the while, he’s waited for the right moment to return to the stage. “It’s time, it’s time. It just felt right again,” he says.

“I breathe music and bleed lyrics. You can’t live without breath and blood,” Star says of his songs about life and love, songs that are influenced by black culture and by African culture, by the potential of music to heal.

“Ghetto Physics,” off of Collide-A-Scope, is a song about overcoming, and “Via Dolorosa” is a song that compares Jesus’ walk to his crucifixion to black people’s walk through life. “Everything imaginable, in a wicked way, was done to Jesus right before they killed him. Everything imaginable, in a wicked way, has been done to black people the world over,” says Star. “But in the end, of course, it’s triumphant.” Jesus rose, says Star, and in the song, he and others will, too. “Stab me, shoot me, do whatever you can, but ultimately, I will rise again,” he says.

Star plays with genre on all of his records, oscillating between neo-soul, 1980s and ’90s R&B, funk, go-go, soul, and rap, sometimes blending the closely related genres together. He likes to make people think, including double, even triple meanings in many of the record and song titles, and in the lyrics, too. On the C.R.A.C.K. track “Respect the Shooter,” Star could very well be singing about shooting a gun, or shooting drugs. But he’s actually talking about a guy who’s taking a shot with his girl.

“You need to make people feel,” says Star. “A lot of music now just gets you amped. There’s nothing wrong with that, but I like a full scope of emotions—get hyped, but feel vulnerable, too. Feel like you wanna go march down the street. Feel emboldened to do.”

Star records lyrics on the fly so he can capture that full scope of feeling, and he doesn’t mess with the words much after the fact—he might switch parts around, or lay down some harmonies. “If you can create from that place, that’s the purest form,” he says. “How do you refine that?”

And while that purity, that genuine reflection of a moment, is important to Star as a musician, there’s more to it. He looks down at his bowl of Moroccan stew, chock-full of vegetables, then looks back up, inspired.

“Music should be an onion,” he says earnestly. It should be of the earth. It should be strong and sharp and robust. It should taste good, and it should make you cry. There should be layers in layers in layers. “It’s seasoning,” says Star. “And even when it’s gone, it lingers.”

Nathaniel Star and Kinfolk play The Front Porch Saturday, October 6.

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Arts

Band together: Wild Common’s music knows no constraints

Wild Common (L to R) Brennan Gilmore, Davina Jackson, Nate Leath, Atreyu Jackson, Dhara Goradia, Rob Hubbard, and Bryan Holmes, plays a 5:30pm set at Tomtoberfest on Saturday, September 29 at IX Art Park. Photo by Carla Kasun

In the yard of Brennan Gilmore’s farmhouse outside of town, a jagged line of trees lie on their sides, torn from the ground by a recent tornado, chunks of red dirt still clinging to the roots. In the distance, mist settles in over the mountains, and the whole scene feels quintessentially Virginia, a feeling underscored by the arrival of Gilmore’s Wild Common bandmates to practice.

One by one, cars ramble down the dirt driveway and musicians amble through the doorway, greeting each other with handshakes and hugs, grabbing beers from the fridge and filling glasses of water from the tap. A couple of hounds trot around, collar tags tinkling high over instrument cases being unclipped and unzipped.

There’s master fiddler Nate Leath, who won the adult bluegrass fiddle contest at the Galax Old Fiddlers’ Convention when he was just 11 years old; soul, funk, and reggae singer Davina Jackson, who used to sing backup for The Wailers; Jackson’s son, Atreyu Jackson, a rapper and the latest addition to the band; keyboardist Bryan Holmes, and jazz bassist and composer Dhara Goradia. Drummer Rob Hubbard, who’s played everything from bluegrass to reggae, can’t make it—he had a dentist appointment earlier in the day that sounds like it required a lot of drilling.

The band’s big enough for practice to feel like a party.

Wild Common first came together in this very farmhouse about a year ago, when Gilmore, Davina Jackson, Leath, and Hubbard convened to work out some songs to play at a rally for then-gubernatorial candidate Ralph Northam. Northam’s people called Gilmore, who’s had careers in both music and politics, to put together a bluegrass band for an October 19, 2017, rally at the Richmond Convention Center, where former President Barack Obama would be on hand to endorse Northam.

Cover art by Madeleine Rhondeau

But bluegrass “is not the most diverse music out there,” says Gilmore, and for this rally, he wanted to put together a band more representative—musically, socially, racially—of a diversity he knew would be reflected in the rally crowd.

Gilmore, Jackson, and Leath recall that first gig well. Thousands of people crowded toward the stage to get the best view of Northam and Obama, while the band warmed up in a corner of the auditorium. When Jackson sang the first line of “A Change is Gonna Come”—“I was born by the river in a little tent”—the crowd shifted toward the sound.

A few people gasped, says Gilmore, “and everybody shut up and listened to Davina sing. That’s the power she has over a room.”

Jackson pauses while setting up her music stand to recall the memory—she grins, raises an eyebrow, and nods slowly at the thought.

After the gig, the group convened at a Richmond bar to talk about turning the act into an actual band. They needed a bass and keys, and Goradia and Holmes, respectively, came to mind immediately. “We purposely tried to find as diverse a group as we could, from different musical and cultural backgrounds, with the idea that we would have these songs, and then all of us would bring in our own traditions, our own styles, musical genres, and then see what came out of it,” says Gilmore.

Wild Common thought about dubbing itself an “Afro-Appalachian” act but even that felt too constricting. After all, genre doesn’t actually mean anything; it’s more limiting than it is descriptive. And so band members are quite satisfied when someone approaches them after a show to say, “I don’t know what to call your music.”

Ultimately, what matters most is the individual musician and the chemistry among them—“those unclassifiable elements of music that express from someone’s personality,” says Gilmore.

Wild Common plays songs about life and about love (“Downhill Specialist”), some of them told through the perspective of Daniel Leek, a young Sudanese refugee Gilmore met in Africa. Songs like “Mama Played the Snare Drum” and “The New Sudan” consider what it was like for the halcyon days of Leek’s youth to be interrupted by war.

Cover art by Ken Horne

The songs typically begin in a Gilmore- devised melody and chord progression, maybe some lyrics, too. From there, each band member puts his or her own fingerprint on it.

“It’s challenging, but it also feels very natural,” says Goradia of the resulting sound that’s a little bit of many things—bluegrass, country, jazz, folk, rock ‘n’ roll, reggae, funk, and soul.

It’s “a nice bed to walk through and see what happens,” says Leath, “and it’s always a lot of fun.”

Perhaps most importantly, adds Jackson, “everybody gets along,” and that’s evident from the way the band’s pre-practice banter oscillates between complimenting and teasing.

“That’s the biggest thing right there,” says Leath, nodding with enthusiasm as the Jacksons page through lyric sheets, Gilmore picks out a melody on his guitar, Goradia thumps a quiet line on her bass, and Holmes taps out something twinkly on the keyboards.

In Wild Common, everyone has their say. It’s the best kind of party, one where everyone’s invited.

Wild Common plays a 5:30pm set at Tomtoberfest on Saturday, September 29, at IX Art Park.

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Arts

Weight lifted: Juliana Daugherty finds release with Light

Juliana Daugherty's September 14 appearance at Twisted Branch Tea Bazaar has been postponed due to weather, but her album, Light, is good rainy day listening. Photo by Eze Amos

Between sips of seltzer and small handfuls of Chex Mix, Juliana Daugherty lovingly runs her hand along her cat Monday’s back. “I’m still kind of shocked that I managed to get it out in the world,” she says, eyeing a thick cardboard box at the bottom of a bookshelf. It’s full of vinyl copies of her debut record, Light, and she’s kind of shocked, because a few years ago, she hadn’t thought to make an album.

But when Daugherty decides she’s going to do something, she does it, to prove to herself, and “maybe to other people,” that she can.

The daughter of a viola player and a trumpet player, Daugherty, 30, began harp lessons at age 4, practicing on her own terms, and refusing her teacher’s preferred methods. She bounced from harp to piano to classical guitar before trying flute and deciding to get serious about woodwinds.

In college, she took an introduction to poetry class and decided that if it went well, she’d get a minor in poetry—not only did she get the minor, she earned an MFA in poetry from UVA.

After years of playing flute in local indie-folk bands Nettles and The Hill and Wood, Daugherty realized she was the only bandmate without a side project, and figured that as a poet and a musician, she had the skills to be a songwriter. Daugherty decided to become a songwriter, working late into the night on melodies and chords, then fitting lyrics on top of them.

Perhaps even more surprising to Daugherty (but not to any listener of her music) is that Light, which was produced by local musician Colin Killalea and released in June by Western Vinyl, isn’t just out in the world—it’s been featured on popular music websites such as NPR Music’s “All Songs Considered” and Stereogum, and critics have received it warmly.

Stereogum’s Chris DeVille says, “there is no shortage of artists making music of this ilk today, but few are doing it so captivatingly.”

Lars Gotrich of NPR writes, “I just want to curl up in a circle of pillows and stare upwards at eggshell paint that could so easily be cracked by the quiet and contemplative poetry Daugherty sings with gentle, but aching lilt.”

Creative endeavors are how Daugherty makes sense of her world, her life, and she doesn’t actively choose what she writes about. “Whatever has been in my brain is what’s going to come out, and whatever I’m trying to understand is what’s going to manifest itself,” she says.

In her artist bio, Daugherty writes, “I wrote this album partly to strip mental illness of its power,” and that is the part that many critics have focused on, noting how refreshing it is to hear someone speak about depression, sadness, and melancholia so openly, so beautifully.

Light is that, but it is mostly a record about love.

Of course love is “well-trod territory” for a songwriter, says Daugherty, and it irks her that many consider it a trite song topic. “For me, so much of my life is consumed by feelings about other people and interactions with other people, not just in romantic relationships but in all of my relationships, with friends and my family, and with strangers that I pass and imagine things about.”

On “Revelation,” Daugherty sings about her parents, imagining what it’s like to love someone over so much time, to know them so well and yet not really at all: “Someday I know the bonds that keep us will be broken. / We may outrun our bodies any moment. / And the mouth of revelation will not open; / I don’t know you—there’s no time.”

“Sweetheart,” is about a relationship that wasn’t much fun for her, that in hindsight is more toxic than it seemed, and what it’s like to belong to oneself once again, or for the first time. “California,” Daugherty’s favorite on the album, is about having to find a different way to go about your love for a person after your romantic relationship has ended.

Love is such a small word for all of the many, big things it means, and Daugherty will keep walking down that well-trod path because it is a worthy path to tread. Love is “something that’s endlessly interesting and mysterious, and it’s endlessly relevant,” she says. It is what defines us, what drives us and holds us back; it is the most important thing in the world, says Daugherty. Love is the light that we all move toward.

Many hands make Light work

Artist and photographer Tracy Maurice designed the cover and liner notes art for Light, and indie-rock fans have likely seen her work for Arcade Fire’s Funeral and Neon Bible, among others.

Daugherty intentionally titled her record after the seventh track, which contains the line, “Almost every life/ grows fiercely towards the light,/ and if there is a light, you will.”

The album art’s sequence of spheres, some dark and opaque, some light and transparent, others evoking both weighty stones and gaseous planets, is a helpful conceptualization of contrasts present in the music.

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Arts

First Fridays: September 7

Tim O’Kane has made a career as a figurative painter, an artist capturing people napping on couches, teacups sitting on countertops, and bowls brimming with eggplants, all in a hyperrealistic style.

But viewers of “One Intention in a Troubled World,” O’Kane’s September show at Chroma Projects will see a different facet of the artist’s work. The series features objects wrapped in paper and sitting in boxes, variously concealed and revealed; it explores in O’Kane’s signature style the abstract subject matter of dreams and dreaming.

O’Kane says the series developed intuitively between 2008 and now, and while it’s hard for him to discern exactly when he had the idea, he says it could have started in New York, with the purchase of an assortment of objects in a Chinese store. O’Kane noticed how the cashier carefully wrapped each individual object in newspaper covered in Chinese characters that reminded him of the lines on some stones he found in Sicily.

Back in his studio, he arranged objects in paper (some is printed with Japanese translations of his own poetry) and in boxes. He says that as the series of enigmatic still lifes progressed over the decade, the concept became more abstracted, more surreal, an exercise in discerning “significant meaning that’s outside the idea of figurative work.”

In “Night Yields,” a box floats above a sheet of creased, dark blue paper that’s been folded and unfolded, like the night. The box, which O’Kane calls “a tangle of things” presents to the viewer a mystery: What’s inside? But, because the box is a painting, there’s no way to open it.

For O’Kane, wondering what’s inside the box is a mystery akin to waking up knowing that you’ve dreamed. Perhaps parts of the dream linger and you try to make sense of it as it sticks with you throughout the day, in good ways or in bad. The dream is both real and not real, it means something and yet nothing at all. It’s a significance that, even when we think we can see it clearly, we can never truly possess.

Next Week

There’ll be lots to see when C-VILLE looks at art from inside the gallery. What do curators consider when filling local walls? Who decided to place that sculpture in that corner? What are we not seeing in local art?

FF Angelo Jewelry 220 E. Main St. “Out of Season,” featuring Mae Read’s oil painting meditations on permanence/impermanence, perceptions of beauty, and solitude. 5:30-7:30pm.

Annie Gould Gallery 121B S. Main St., Gordonsville. An exhibition of works by William Van Doren and Erica Lohan, focusing on distant and intimate points of nature. Opens Sept. 8.

Art on the Trax 5784 Three Notch’d Rd., Crozet. A show of Frederick Nichols’ four decades of work, all concerned with beauty and picturesque landscape. Opens Sept. 8.

Batten Institute at the Darden School of Business. “Luna Moth,” a mural by Christy Baker; and “Small Graces,” an exhibition of photography by Bill Mauzy. Opens Sept. 12.

FF The Bridge PAI 209 Monticello Rd. Artists Jum Jirapan, Karina Monroy, and Aidyn Mills have put down the ocular lens and taken up the heart, the mind, and the body to create and celebrate art in this joint exhibition of the work that they’ve developed in The Bridge’s collaborative residency. 5:30pm.

Buck Mountain Episcopal Church 4133 Earlysville Rd., Earlysville. “Buddha Cat and More: Mixed-Media Drawings and Book” by Susan McCulley.

FF Chroma Projects 103 W. Water St. “One Intention in a Troubled World,” featuring a collection of paintings by Tim O’Kane that centers on around the wrapping of things. 5-7pm.

FF CitySpace Art Gallery 100 Fifth St. NE. An exhibition featuring work from VSA Art artists. 5:30-7:30pm.

Create Gallery at Indoor Biotechnologies, 700 Harris St. “The Livestock Marker Show Continues,” an exhibition of Kathy Kuhlman’s work made from phototransfer and livestock markers on paper or clayboard.

Crozet Artisan Depot 5791 Three Notch’d Rd., Crozet. “Crystals, Textures, and Flowing Gazes,” featuring pottery by Leah Olivier. Opens Sept. 8.

FF C’ville Arts Cooperative Gallery 118 E. Main St., Downtown Mall. “A Passion for Purpose,” an exhibition of pottery by Nan Rothwell. 6-8pm.

FF Dovetail Design + Cabinetry 309 E. Water St. Featuring Brian Geiger’s resin-poured works exploring the boundaries between fluid and solid. 5-7pm.

The Fralin Museum of Art at UVA 155 Rugby Rd. “In My Room: Artists Paint the Interior 1950-Now”; “Reflections: Native Art Across Generations”; “Excavations: The Prints of Julie Mehretu”; and “Oriforme” by Jean Arp.

FF The Garage 100 W. Jefferson St. “Hole in the Wall,” a one-night-only popup exhibition featuring large-scale abstract works from Chattanooga, Tennessee, artist Addie Chapin. 5:30-7:30pm.

Kluge-Ruhe Aboriginal Art Collection 400 Worrell Dr. “Beyond Dreamings: The Rise of Indigenous Australian Art in the United States,” revealing the ways in which, since 1988, Indigenous Australian artists have forged one of the most globally significant art movements of our time; and “Experimental Beds,” in which Judy Watson removes the whitewash from concealed histories.

Les Yeux du Monde 841 Wolf Trap Rd. “Out of the Light Into the Light,” an exhibition of still-life paintings by art historian, critic, philosopher, and painter David Summers.

FF McGuffey Art Center 201 Second St. NW. “Verisimilitude,” a selection of abstract works on canvas by J.M. Henry that echo ghosts, flags, and shields, in the Sarah B. Smith Gallery; and the 27th consecutive Central Virginia Watercolor Guild annual juried exhibition. 5:30-7:30pm.

FF Milli Coffee Roasters 400 Preston Ave. Ste. 150. “Braveheart,” featuring acrylic paintings on canvas by Kaitlin Jungles. 7-10pm.

FF New Dominion Bookshop 404 E. Main St., Downtown Mall. An exhibition of paintings by Uzo Njoku. 5-7pm.

Northside Library 705 Rio Rd. W. “Fragile Eden,” a photography show by Gary Powell.

FF Roy Wheeler Realty Co. 404 Eighth St. NE. An exhibition of work by Sara Gondwe, who uses melted crayons and metallic fabric paint to create abstracts, trees, florals, fish, and more. 5-7:30pm.

FF The Salad Maker 300 E. Market St. A show of digital art by J. Perry Fitzhugh, an artist making full use of current technology without succumbing to it. 6-7:30pm.

FF Second Street Gallery 115 Second St. SE. In the main gallery, “water. poison. drink. dive.,” an exhibition of paintings, works on paper, and puppets by Lana Guerra; in the Dové Gallery, the “Teeny Tiny Trifecta” group show featuring small-scale works in a variety of media by more than 70 artists. 5:30-7:30pm.

Sentara Martha Jefferson Hospital 500 Martha Jefferson Dr. An exhibition of five landscape paintings by impressionist artist Lee Nixon.

Shenandoah Valley Art Center 122 S. Wayne Ave., Waynesboro. Featuring work from the BozART collective. Opens Sept. 8.

FF Spring Street Boutique 107 W. Main St., Downtown Mall. Original acrylic paintings and giclée on canvas prints by Jack Graves III. 6-8pm.

FF Studio IX 969 Second St. SE. “Don’ttalk to strangers,” a series of portraits of artist Richard Needham’s fellow humans, captured with a Pentax 67 medium-format camera. 5-8pm.

The Great Frame Up 1860 Rio Hill Ctr. Entries in a photography contest to benefit the Rockfish Wildlife Sanctuary.

Thomas Jefferson Memorial Church Unitarian-Universalist 717 Rugby Rd. “Abstract Meditation on Geology,” featuring paintings by Shirley Paul. Opens Sept. 9.

FF VMDO Architects 200 E. Market St. “Main Street: Two Artists’ Viewpoints,” a show of photography by Vicenzo Lupinetti and Steve Wilcox. 5:30-7:30pm.

FF Top Knot Studio 103 Fifth St. SE. “An Artist’s Process,” a show of mixed media work by Sri Kodakalla. 5:30-7:30.

The Wayne Theatre 521 W. Main St., Waynesboro. “13 Perspectives,” an exhibition of contemporary fibert art by members of the Washington, D.C.-area group New Image.

FF Welcome Gallery 114 Third St. NE. “She Said, He Said,” featuring Valencia Robin’s vibrant, lyrical paintings and Matt Smithson’s bold, surreal illustrations. 5-7:30pm.

FF WriterHouse 508 Dale Ave. “Abstract by Intuition,” acrylic and multi-media works by Philip Martin. 5-7pm.

Woodberry Forest School, 898 Woodberry Forest Rd., Woodberry. “Coming Together,” a show of large oil paintings by Richard Wyvill and a composite piece of unique canvases by the Firnew Farm Artists’ Circle.

FF First Fridays is a monthly art event featuring exhibit openings at many downtown art galleries and additional exhibition venues. Several spaces offer receptions.

Categories
Arts

Drawing attention: Uzo Njoku’s The Bluestocking Society colors outside the lines

In The Bluestocking Society coloring book, Uzo Njoku portrays women doing both everyday and extraordinary things, showing women that there is no limit to who they can aspire to be. Photo by Amy Jackson

A few months ago, artist Uzo Njoku was in the market for a new coloring book.

She noticed that most coloring books geared toward adults, like the ubiquitous Enchanted Garden, featured densely outlined flora and fauna, medallions, and mandalas, and that most coloring books for children contained cartoonish figures.

Njoku, a UVA studio art major who paints large-scale works of dark-skinned subjects (most of them women) against bright, bold-patterned backgrounds referencing Ankara fabrics, sought a different type of coloring book—one with more realistic figures, but still with the density of pattern and sense of magic that makes coloring a therapeutic activity.

But she couldn’t find what she wanted, so she decided to draw and publish her own. The result, The Bluestocking Society, has sold more than 1,000 copies since it was released last month, and Njoku has consignment contracts with bookstores all over the East Coast, including New Dominion Bookshop and Telegraph Art & Comics here in town; the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in Richmond; and Clic Bookstore & Gallery in New York City.

Each page of The Bluestocking Society shows a different aspect of femininity, with particular focus on women of color.

Njoku, who was born in Lagos, Nigeria, and has lived in the U.S. since she was 7 years old, says she wants to create art that is “meaningful…impactful,” especially for women and people of color in her own community, at UVA and in Charlottesville, two places where she says women and people of color do not always feel welcome.

Artist Uzo Njoku wants her coloring book to be both therapeutic and educational. In addition to drawing the women in the book, she researched their lives and accomplishments for a one-page biography included next to each woman’s page. Photo by Amy Jackson

With her paintings, Njoku aims to show how women and people of color are valuable, that they have voices that deserve to be heard. But she’s aware that not everyone can afford to purchase a painting or a print to hang on their wall at home and remind them of that message, so a coloring book was an accessible way to offer her work.

Njoku chose a title that invokes the Blue Stockings Society, an informal women’s social, intellectual, and educational movement founded and led by salonist and literary critic Elizabeth Montagu in mid-18th-century England. Members of the Blue Stockings Society championed the importance of education for women, and it inspired Njoku to include contemporary women like Malala Yousafzai, the Pakistani activist who at age 15 spoke out against the Taliban’s ban on girls’ education and, not long after that speech, survived an assassination attempt on her life and now continues her work fighting for girls’ education.

Njoku wants her coloring book to be both therapeutic and educational. In addition to drawing the women in the book, she researched their lives and accomplishments for a one-page biography included next to each woman’s page.

Njoku also presents every woman as her own person, because she believes that too often, they are discussed only in the context of men’s lives. Take, for example, Dolores Huerta, a Mexican-American labor leader and civil rights activist who co-founded the National Farmworkers Association (later United Farm Workers) with Cesar Chavez, the name and face more commonly associated with the movement.

Or Yoko Ono, a groundbreaking multimedia artist, musician, performance artist, filmmaker, and peace activist (John Lennon was her husband). “She’s amazing on her own,” Njoku says of Ono, just like every woman.

In addition to Yousefzai, Huerta, and Ono, there’s decorated tennis player Serena Williams, artist Frida Kahlo, political activist and writer Angela Davis, and sprinter Cathy Freeman, the first Aboriginal Australian woman to compete in the Olympics, in 1996. “And of course, I had to include Beyoncé,” says Njoku.

Njoku also included drawings of women with no specified identity—women graduating from college and graduate school, an Habesha, women cooking, mothers with their children. She included a drawing of a pregnant teenager, because in society’s eyes, young mothers are talked about as a sad thing, but “there’s beauty in it. You had a child. You brought a being into this world,” and it’s worthy of celebration and respect, says Njoku.

She drew women with specific facial features and body types, because to her, it’s not enough to present a blank page where a woman’s skin can be colored in any hue—brown, dark brown, tan, peach, blue. Even in the line drawings, she wanted to identify these women as women of color—with, for example, black facial features and black hairstyles.

Before one even gets to the drawings, the first page of the book includes a blank frame with the numbers 1 through 5, urging the person reading it to make a list of five things they like about themselves.

At first, Njoku imagined women and girls as the audience for The Bluestocking Society, but she quickly realized the coloring book is for everyone.

The Bluestocking Society urges people of all genders to see these women, and all women, for who they are and what they are capable of. Women contain multitudes, Njoku’s coloring book says, and all women—from the 16-year-old mother to Oprah Winfrey—are equally inspiring.

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Arts Uncategorized

Vocal exercises: Singer Nay Nichelle promotes positivity

R&B and pop singer Nay Nichelle opens for Vibe Riot at this week’s Fridays After Five at the Sprint Pavilion. Photo by Yolonda Jones

Nay Nichelle likes to write outside. There’s something inspirational about natural sunlight, she says, especially at sunrise and sunset, when the light changes quickly and just so. It’s hard to put the reason for the inspiration into words, she says, but those moments often lead to lyrics for the R&B and pop singer’s next song.

“Nature is a safe haven for me,” she says. Like most of us, she gets caught up in technology, in social media, and all of the accompanying emotional and intellectual stresses. When she takes the time to be present in nature—in the mountains, at the beach, even taking a sunset car ride with the windows down—she’s able to listen to herself and just be.

Charlottesville’s mountain setting is still somewhat new to Nay Nichelle, who grew up in Choppee, South Carolina, and moved to Charlottesville in 2015. And while nature has only been inspiring her music for a few years, music has been a centerpiece of her life for a long time.

She regularly sang in church with her grandmother (who herself was a singer), and her mom had a solid collection of R&B, old-school hip-hop, pop, and country CDs that they listened to in the car. Nay Nichelle often snuck into her mom’s room and rifled through the jewel cases and toted her favorites—Lauryn Hill, Shania Twain, Marc Anthony, Carlos Santana—back to her own room, where she’d listen to the music for hours.

On a friend’s recommendation, she started singing more seriously in college and eventually wrote her own lyrics to original beats.

Nay Nichelle writes most of her lyrics when she’s feeling down. It’s when she feels best able to express her genuine self, and she doesn’t sugarcoat what she’s feeling. Take, for example, “But I Made It Tho,” off her 2017 release The Seeker VII. Written at Beaver Creek Park during a particularly difficult period in her life, the song captures how on that day, she very acutely felt the heavy weight of depression and the physical and emotional exhaustion that comes with carrying it around. But there she was, writing lyrics and melodies, making it through the day.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LLeOHmV4ns8

The singer says she writes for herself and “for the next person who’s maybe going through it,” because you never know who might need the encouragement. “Dealing with depression is really hard, and you don’t want to expose it as much to people…because they don’t [always] know how to take it,” she says. But if more of us are familiar with mental illness and mental health, perhaps we’ll know how to better care for and understand those who face it.

This isn’t to say that all of her songs discuss depression—she has songs about joy, songs about love. Some, like “No War,” another track off The Seeker VII, are inspired by black history and culture.

Nay Nichelle believes that those who have the talent and the opportunity to make music are obligated to use their platform for good, and she’s troubled by artists who use good-sounding music to send a negative message. Think about it, she says: Music is everywhere. We listen to it at home, in the car, at work; it’s in commercials, on television shows, playing overhead in malls and grocery stores. The question for her is, What positive message do I want to send?

“I’ve always wanted to use my platform to bring attention to the issues at hand,” she says, and thanks to an Adele “Hello” parody gone viral (see sidebar, below), her platform is sizable. At publication time, her Facebook page had more than 101,000 likes, and more than 15,500 people follow her Instagram account. And her audience keeps growing: She recently received social media props from singer Macy Gray, who liked and shared one of Nay Nichelle’s videos.

Nay Nichelle is passionate about bringing attention to issues of LGBTQ+ rights, of racial and social justice, especially where black women are concerned. “The silencing of black women is a problem,” she says, and so she’s currently working with frequent collaborator Doughman on a song to help amplify these women’s voices. She holds the megaphone not just in her music, but in her commentary, too: She often reminds and informs her social media followers that the whole conversation about Charlottesville’s Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson statues was started by a young black woman, local teen Zyahna Bryant.

Music is “a way of being more vocal,” of lifting people up with words and with spirit, with kindness and hope, says Nay Nichelle. And once the beat’s on and the singing’s begun, it’s not hard to get people to listen. “People love music,” she says. “Of course they’ll listen to it.”

Going Viral

In January 2016, Charlottesville-based singer Nay Nichelle hoped to nab tickets to Adele’s Washington, D.C., concert. But tickets sold out in a matter of minutes, and those lucky enough to get them later sold them online for hundreds, and, in some cases, thousands of dollars. Nay Nichelle decided to ask Adele herself for a favor…by writing some new lyrics to the star singer’s hit “Hello.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wTaBMTIKFsk

“Hello, Adele, can you hear me?/ I’m in Charlottesville, Virginia, dreaming/ But I can’t pay that price/ I gotta pay for rent, gotta pay for light/ I gotta pay for WiFi,” Nay Nichelle sang in her comical plea that was also apt commentary on outrageous concert ticket prices.

“Hello from the parking lot/ I’m so glad I got a close spot/ ‘Cause I can’t see you, but I know you are here/ A hundred damn dollars/ Adele that ain’t fair.”

“Hello From the Parking Lot” went viral—the video received millions of views, millions of shares. Nay Nichelle was interviewed by a variety of entertainment websites, including BuzzFeed, about her parody, and even heard from Adele’s people. She didn’t get the concert tickets, but she did gain a bigger audience for her original music.