Lorenzo Dickerson premieres his fifth documentary, "3rd Street: Best Seats in the House" on Thursday at the Paramount Theater. Photo by Eze Amos
Lorenzo Dickerson is always chasing down stories that he heard as a kid. “Stories I heard who knows when,” he says, local stories he now feels compelled to share with local audiences. His fifth documentary film, 3rd Street: Best Seats in the House, tells one such story—that of the Third Street side entrance to The Paramount Theater, when the theater was (legally) segregated. Black moviegoers were forced to use a side entrance and sit in the balcony (though those seats offered the best view, local artist Frank Walker notes in the film).
A tour of the Paramount in fall 2017 sparked the idea. A guide mentioned that the theater wasn’t sure how to best tell the story of that entrance, but Dickerson knew immediately. He shot more than 20 hours of interviews with black Charlottesville and Albemarle County residents, and combed through interviews conducted by Jane Myers in 1995 that have sat, unused, in the Albemarle Charlottesville Historical Society archives. Dickerson’s film premieres at the Paramount on Thursday. In advance of the screening, he sat down with C-VILLE to talk about the film, and what he hopes it can accomplish.
C-VILLE: When did you first hear about the Third Street entrance?
Lorenzo Dickerson: As a child. My father loves westerns, and his favorite film of all time is a western, Shane. The first time he saw it was when my grandmother took him to the Paramount to see it. He was 6 years old or so. [He told me] that he went in through that entrance, sat in the balcony, and saw that film.
When you started the project, what was your idea for the film?
The initial idea was really for people to tell their stories. What was it like to use that entrance?…And also, what segregated spaces were like in Charlottesville in that time period: The Lafayette Theatre, the Jefferson [Theater], the Woolworths, Timberlake’s. The University Theater, where you couldn’t go at all.
How did you decide who to interview?
I was trying to find people who could tell different stories, not only about that segregated entrance but about what that experience was like. For my previous film, Albemarle’s Black Classrooms, I interviewed Marcha Howard about her going to and teaching at Burley [which was Charlottesville’s black high school during segregation]. During that interview, she mentioned going to the Paramount and looking over her shoulder into the balcony after it was desegregated, sitting in the bottom, feeling weird about that. I always had that in the back of my mind.
Bernice and Kenneth Mitchell tell their love story, how they would go on dates at the Paramount, and how Kenneth at one point passed for white. …Phil Jones talks about coming in from Albemarle County on the back of a dump truck with eight other people or so.
The Reverend Nate Brown—I’ve known him my entire life, and to me, he’s the greatest storyteller ever—he has [used] a wheelchair his whole life. And at a family funeral, I had this moment, like, “Whoa. If you were handicapped in any way, and African American, what would you do?” So I asked him. He never went, because he couldn’t.
It’s likely that these people will be familiar to the audience watching the film.
That was the point, really, for people we know to tell these stories. …I hope that by watching it and being in that space, that you would think of it differently as you leave the theater that evening. And the next time you go to any of the shows at the Paramount, that you may think about that space differently, [that it’s not] just a theater on the Downtown Mall.
Think about it differently how?
What did it feel like to be sitting there watching a film where you were forced to sit in the balcony due to Jim Crow, and you were never watching anyone that looked like you there on the screen? You may have gone to Timberlake’s to get ice cream before the movie—and you could purchase it. The person working there, or making the food, may have been African American. But then you had to come outside to eat it.
I’m hoping that people will really feel, even just for a moment, what that experience was like. To understand that the experience that we have now is nothing like the experience they had at that time. Billy Byers mentions that he didn’t know that the front door even existed. Or that there were seats under the balcony, because [up there], all you can see is what’s forward. Your experience is completely different if you’re African American. It’s not simply, “you’re sitting up here instead of sitting down here.” It’s a lot more to it than that.
What got cut from the film that you wish you could have kept in?
I was going to interview a [black] woman and her white friend, and the friend had some type of health stuff going on. But they were going to be on camera, together, talking about walking to the Paramount, together, as friends, then getting to the Paramount and having to go their separate ways. And then after the film, getting back together and walking back home.
Leslie Scott-Jones, Ray Smith, and David Vaughn Straughn star in Hambone, the Charlottesville Players Guild’s Afro-futurist adaptation of Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Photo by Cara Walton
Let’s pretend for a minute. It’s sometime in the not-too-distant future. Charlottesville is a thriving black kingdom, free of the white gaze and white corruption, and comprised of various hamlets, including Vinegar Hill, Starr Hill, and between them, Gospel Hill, the kingdom’s seat and center of spirituality.
Such is the premise of Hambone, an original, Afro-futurist telling of Shakespeare’s Hamlet by local all-black theater troupe the Charlottesville Players Guild.
You know how Hamlet goes: King Hamlet has died. His son, Prince Hamlet, returns home to mourn, only to find that Queen Gertrude has taken up with the dead king’s brother, Claudius. The king’s ghost visits Hamlet with a message: Claudius killed him, and young Hamlet must avenge his death. In the process, young Hamlet goes mad (or does he?).
And while the play is technically fiction, much of what Hambone delves into in the Jefferson School African American Heritage Center auditorium is real.
The Charlottesville Players Guild’s desire to rework Hamlet came about during the troupe’s summer 2018 Macbeth adaptation, Black Mac. The cast became particularly interested in familial relationships among those characters, and Hamlet came up as another play rife with family drama.
The troupe decided to make Hamlet into “the ultimate black family drama,” one that showcases “the spectrum of black family,” says Leslie Scott-Jones, CPG’s creative director who adapted the script and also plays Queen Gertrude. Director Shelby Marie Edwards chose to focus the production on grief, specifically “the way grief is looked at from the African continuum.”
“One of the ways we incorporate an African aesthetic is how the characters deal with death, how we frame death within the show,” says Edwards. “I don’t want to give away too much, but it’s not like they die and that’s it,” she says, because in the African diaspora, one’s ancestors are always present. It’s not life and death, Edwards explains, but rather “life, death, and transformation.” Take King Hamlet’s ghost—whose message for his son drives much of the plot—as just one example.
When Hamlet/Hambone (played by David Vaughn Straughn) so famously asks in his soliloquy, “To be, or not to be?,” he contemplates life and death. But in Hambone, it’s less a question of physicality and more one of spirituality: Will he accept grief as a part of life and continue on, not just breathing but actually living? Or will he allow grief to consume his soul and render him essentially lifeless?
What’s in a name?
Why call this adaptation Hambone? Some folks might know “hambone” as an African American style of dance that involves slapping one’s own body to create a rhythm (it’s also called the Juba dance, or, originally, the Pattin’ Juba). But it was also used as a derogatory term for black performers. “So, that’s the perfect name for this [production], because [Hamlet] performs madness for certain people to elicit a response,” says Leslie Scott-Jones, who adapted the script. “It’s also a commentary on code-switching.”
Many of the CPG’s creative choices for Hambone add new and interesting layers. They meld African American vernacular English with Shakespeare’s early modern English. Ivan Orr has composed an original soundtrack —which he describes as hip-hop as it might sound in the future —that helps establish the mood and propel the story forward.
Horatio, Hamlet’s best friend, typically staged as a man, is a woman, and Hamlet is in love with her, despite the fact that he’s betrothed to Ophelia. His friends Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are also women. That could explain Hamlet/Hambone’s intuition, and why he can communicate with his father’s spirit, says Scott-Jones. And what does all that say about Hamlet/Hambone’s relationship with his mother, Gertrude?
King Hamlet and Claudius are twins (both played by Ray Smith)—which raises new questions (and probably a few eyebrows) about Gertrude’s hasty marriage to Claudius, itself complicated by the fact that in this production, Gertrude is pregnant. And that raises all sorts of questions about heirs and future kings.
David Vaughn Straughn plays the title role in Hambone. Photo by Cara Walton
The CPG has also added a griot, “an African storyteller who holds wisdom,” explains Edwards, a role played by Brenda Brown-Grooms, a local pastor renowned for her sermons. Brown-Grooms grew up in Charlottesville, and her family attended one of the black churches located on Gospel Hill.
This is yet another way in which the substance of Hambone is quite real, particularly for Charlottesville’s African American communities. Gospel Hill and Vinegar Hill are physically gone from present-day Charlottesville, majority black neighborhoods razed by the city in the mid-20th century in the name of “urban renewal.” And Starr Hill, another such neighborhood, is starting to disappear, too, thanks to gentrification (and, it can be said, the whiteness that the Charlottesville imagined in Hambone has managed to escape).
While these neighborhoods are physically gone, their presence remains—in people, stories, photographs, in Hambone, and in grief. Black Charlottesvillians still mourn these losses. These neighborhoods lived, they died, and now they are transformed.
“I want to have a real, cathartic moment on stage,” says Edwards, one that can work in service of transformation for actors and audience alike. “I always want the audience to leave a little bit more healed than when they began,” she says. “I want the audience to un-learn any conceptions, consciously or unconsciously, they might have about what people in black bodies can do.”
See Hambone, the Charlottesville Players Guild’s Afro-futurist adaptation of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, at the Jefferson School African American Heritage Center August 22 through September 1.
Musician and poet David Cloud Berman died on August 7. Image: Bobbi Fabian
On Friday, July 12, a new David Berman record hit store shelves.
Recorded under the moniker Purple Mountains, it’s an eponymous 10-track offering that marked the end of a decade-long hiatus for Berman, whose Silver Jews lyrics made him an indie rock icon, admired by critics and music fans alike.
But just weeks after he returned, he was gone. Berman died Wednesday, August 7. He was 52.
Berman’s music—that Purple Mountains record; the EPs, singles, and six albums he made with Silver Jews between 1989 and 2009—and his published poetry collection, Actual Air, earned him a devoted following. In local indie rock and radio circles, both past and present, stories about Berman himself loom as large as the music he made.
It was in Charlottesville that Berman started writing songs, when he was a UVA undergraduate in the late 1980s and, legend has it, singing into friends’ answering machines, and creating music with fellow classmates and future indie rock idols Stephen Malkmus and Bob Nastanovich of Pavement.
At UVA, Berman was an Echols Scholar who worked hard on his poetry and, according to Nastanovich (who co-founded Silver Jews along with Berman and Malkmus in New York in 1989), garnered the attention of English department professors “who viewed him as a peer.” In addition to his coursework, Berman hosted a show on WTJU and washed dishes at Eastern Standard. “He played hard, too,” says Nastanovich.
Not only was Berman very handsome, he was usually the tallest person in the room, one of the easiest to spot, says his friend and classmate Sandra Wade, and one of the easiest (and most delightful) to talk to.
“He was sharp as a tack, and could really see things in a way nobody else could. Even simple things,” says Wade. It’s what made him a good writer, and it’s what made him a good friend.
“It’s what I’ll remember him most for, his kindness,” says Rob Sheffield, Rolling Stone’s pop music critic who lived in Charlottesville in the 1990s and, like Berman, had a show on WTJU.
Berman once brought a magnetic, plastic, balancing bird to a show at Tokyo Rose. It was “the kind of toy grandmas buy at the craft store for a couple of bucks, but it was so cool” in its defiance of gravity, says Sheffield. “All night long, David let anyone take a turn holding this magic plastic bird. He said, ‘Think of all the time and money and energy you could spend on trying to impress somebody—but you could never do as good a job as this cheap little bird!’”
That sums up “a lot of his extravagant, excessive, exhausting benevolence,” says Sheffield. “DCB was kind to me, in a way that seemed extreme and bizarre until I heard more stories about how kind he was to friends and strangers.”
“He was very generous with his time,” says Darius Van Arman, founder of Jagjaguwar Records who was in his young 20s when he met Berman, a few years his elder, here in Charlottesville. “I was trying to figure out my place in the world, and I really looked up to certain labels and artists—they all felt impenetrable to me. And David made me feel like I belonged in it. He was a mentor, and he gave me great confidence at a time when I was trying to figure out where I fit in in the world.”
Berman’s the one who encouraged Van Arman to send a copy of the first Drunk CD to a reviewer at Melody Maker magazine, which resulted in a slew of orders from music distributors. “That was one of the first moments Jagjaguwar got out in the world,” says Van Arman.
Berman was kind and generous, and he was also hilarious. “A wit, a provocateur, a savant, a wise guy and a good friend,” says Gate Pratt, who played noisy, staticky pop songs with Berman in a project called Ectoslavia, and continued collaborating with Berman for years afterward.
David Berman in 1988. Photo courtesy of Aaron Margosis
He doled out monikers like “Sheila Tackya” for fellow WTJU DJs (in this case, Nastanovich’s wife), was a rather talented cartoonist, and had running commentary on everything from bathroom bugs to rats and fornicating cats. Kylie Wright, Berman’s classmate, close friend, and Ectoslavia bandmate, remembers one night when a stray cat walked into the Red House on 14th Street, where Berman lived with Wright and some other friends. The cat “fucked his girlfriend cat,” says Wright, and Berman quipped, “We’re gonna see the results of that.” Weeks later, the cat returned with a litter of kittens behind him.
The Red House was a source of pride for Berman, says Nastanovich. Berman “felt like an outsider [at UVA], which he was,” and at the Red House, full of fellow outsiders, the strongly-opinionated Berman “became the fearless leader of a proper ‘freak scene,'” he adds. “People were drawn to him because he was often captivating.”
Berman’s poetic and songwriting prowess are well-documented, says Pratt, but “lesser known are his many other interests that made him a truly interesting and quixotic character. In true renaissance fashion, David had a deep interest in many other obscure topics: perfumery, food photography, classic country, bric-a-brac, collage, fantasy football, practical jokes, deep internet wormholes, and other incongruous arcana,” including presidential trivia.
“On his trip this week from Chicago, his car broke down on the highway in the middle of the night, the difficulty compounded thanks to his Bush Sr.-era flip phone and lack of the ubiquitous smart phone GPS that the rest of us take for granted,” says Pratt. “After a harrowing night of trekking the highway on foot, finally getting his car towed, finding a hotel and later renting a car, he finally made it to his intended destination of Brooklyn. When I quizzed him about the details, he recounted the hassles of the road, the curse of his flip phone and the guile of the tow truck driver who innocently delivered him to a muffler shop to have his clutch repaired (the nerve!). Despite the headaches and inconvenience, David was inexplicably pleased with the adventure to do the simple fact that he had broken down in the Ohio hometown of Rutherford B. Hayes.”
This week, Berman, backed by most of the band Woods, was to begin a North American Purple Mountains tour. Wade and Wright had tickets to see their friend play in Philadelphia on August 12, and when they told him as much, Berman wrote back in an email: “stick around after the show to say hi. i’ve sworn to / come out after the show and shake hands and say hello / instead of stealing away immediately after which is my wont.”
That was a big deal for him, says Wade, because the self-deprecating artist was also “so shy.” And yet, he spoke openly and candidly of his sadness, of his struggles with drug and alcohol addiction, in so many interviews. “He just lays himself bare for the world to see. He was fearless about wrestling with his demons in his art, and his public conversations,” says Wade, who suspects that was part of Berman’s magnetism.
“As much as he put himself out there, he was a pretty insular guy,” says Chris Hlad, filmmaker, photographer, C&O cook, and longtime friend who occasionally served as Berman’s tour documentarian. Hlad believes that duality is part of why it may have been difficult for David Berman to be David Berman. “He was an individual who channeled true godhead, and that’s a rough place to be, because it’s not a common thing.”
Hlad was set to accompany Berman on a few Purple Mountains tour dates this month, his camera in tow. “The world is a fairly dark place these days,” he says, and in many ways, Berman was “an antidote to so much of what’s out there.” Maybe, says Hlad, because Berman experienced so much darkness—including depression—in his own life.
“His mile-wide frown and his mile-wide smile were coming from the same place and both could be heard in all those songs he wrote,” says Sheffield. “It was inspiring he came back to make his great Purple Mountains record, after so many years away.”
And of that Purple Mountains record, Hlad says, “I don’t think he could have made a greater artistic effort. He wasn’t burned out, in some flophouse, at the end of his rope. He was firing on all cylinders. It’s so personal, and so revealing. It’s like Blood on the Tracks, but a much better record. And I’ll stand on Bob Dylan’s coffee table and tell him that.” (But for the record, Hlad’s favorite is The Natural Bridge, Berman and Silver Jews’ “Virginia record,” released in 1996 and mostly written during Berman’s stay in Steve Keene’s house in Keswick, where Hlad once DJed a memorable Hanukkah party thrown by Berman.)
“I wish that, if he had had that better view of how much good he did in the world, and how much he lifted each of us up, and how important his words and music were, he’d be happier,” says Van Armen.
Charlottesville-based poet and songwriter Guion Pratt [no relation to Gate Pratt] of Nettles counts Berman among his influences.
“‘All my favorite singers couldn’t sing’ (from Silver Jews’ “We Are Real”) has long been some of the most crucial permission I’ve ever felt as a songwriter,” he says. “I never overlapped with David in Charlottesville. By my calculations, while he was graduating from UVA, I reckon I was just learning to speak. I was learning to speak and he was writing lines like, ‘There’s gonna be a truce / but first you gotta set your horses loose.’ What makes a good singer, anyway? And what does it matter when you can speak like that?”
“Through his creative output he led by example in inspiring us all to embrace and champion a punk rock DIY ethos masked in new wave cool, fearlessly pursuing deep artistic truths delivered in deceptively simple fashion,” says Berman’s onetime bandmate and steadfast friend Gate Pratt. “Despite making it seem effortless, David secretly labored over every note and line, reworking everything to conform to his impossibly exacting standards. And we’re all the better for it.”
Richmond artist Hamilton Glass brings art and history together in two bright murals that capture the industrial vibe of Harris Street. “My hope is that it raises some questions,” says Glass. Photo by Eze Amos
Head south on Harris Street, cruise past Napa Auto Parts and Sarisand Tile. Hug the first curve in the road before The Habitat Store, and there on the left, above the roof of Intrastate Pest Control, the dusty rumble of Allied Concrete cement mixers in the near distance, you’ll see it: a mural.
Spools of thread, a railroad crossing signal and an old-fashioned steam locomotive, a hand holding a hammer ready to strike an anvil: Icons of a bygone era are juxtaposed with a modern, almost architectural sprinkling of bright orange, yellow, blue, and red rectangles.
It’s one of two new murals painted on the building at 1216 Harris St. Together, they’re meant “to give some recognition to the industrial history of the neighborhood, and the people who work here and have their livelihoods,” says Dr. Martin Chapman, owner of the building and founder of Indoor Biotechnologies, who funded the pair of murals.
A few years ago, Chapman heard Steve Thompson from Rivanna Archaeological Services give a talk about the history of the neighborhood, including the Silk Mills Building at number 700, Rose Hill Plantation, and Booker T. Washington Park—all referenced on the second of the two new murals.
Chapman wanted to bring more awareness to that history, and to how Harris Street is presently home to a variety of industries—Intrastate Pest Control is right next door to male birth control developer Contraline, which is next to an entrance to Allied Concrete. He also wanted to bring public art into the neighborhood and knew just the person for the job: Richmond- based artist Hamilton Glass.
In the last half decade or so, Glass has made a significant contribution to Richmond’s mural boom. At last tally, he had painted more than 150 public murals throughout the city (he’s stopped counting).
Glass grew up in West Philadelphia, surrounded by public art. Graffiti was everywhere, and in the 1980s—when he was a kid—initiatives such as Mural Arts Philadelphia helped transform the City of Brotherly Love into what some say is the unofficial mural capital of the world.
Though Glass was a creative kid who appreciated and admired the murals and did plenty of paintings of his own, he never thought he’d be the one to paint a mural. The opportunity to do so came during the Great Recession of 2007-2009, when Glass, who trained as an architect, lost his job and decided to focus on his art while he looked for another full-time gig. Someone saw his work and asked him if he wanted to do a mural.
It was then that he fell in love with the process. “The end result is for everyone else,” he says, but the process is for him—even when it involves standing on a roof during some of the hottest, sunniest days of the year (as it did for this particular project). “If murals were all snap your fingers, quick, make a good mural, I don’t think I’d be doing it,” he says.
Glass’ style shifts slightly from mural to mural—some are more realistic, others are dreamlike, or abstract. “I don’t want to put my style in a box,” he says, and the composition and execution of each mural depends on the content.
Hamilton Glass is one of the artists who has contributed to Richmond’s recent mural boom. Now, we have some of his work here in Charlottesville. Photo by Eze Amos
All of Glass’ murals have some sort of architectural element to them—the creation of space via shape and movement—and all of his murals are extremely colorful. “I’m really into color theory,” he says. Glass has also exhibited work at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts and the Virginia Museum of History & Culture (where he met Chapman).
For the two murals at 1216 Harris St., Glass had complete creative control over the compositions, though he consulted with Chapman and with Thompson to get up to speed on the varied history of the neighborhood.
“My hope is that it raises some questions,” says Glass of his work on Harris Street. Some people might look at the pair of hands holding knitting needles wrapped in pink yarn and wonder where the knitting factory is (or, more accurately, was). He hopes others will wonder about the Rose Hill Plantation, and Google it when they get home. “If people are asking that question, to be honest, that’s a big thing,” says Glass. “Then people are looking into the neighborhood and what was here before now.”
Whenever possible, Glass gets local folks involved in the mural painting process. Once the image is laid out on the wall, he’ll tag sections and shapes with the colors so that other folks can fill them in. For the mural facing the parking lot (not the rooftop mural), Glass had some help from local chapters of the Wounded Warriors Project and the Boys & Girls Club. “If this mural is going to live in their community, why shouldn’t they have a stake in it?” asks Glass.
Perhaps that’s the Philly in him. “The power of art has really influenced me. I thought about the murals that I saw, growing up in Philadelphia, and they were all community-based,” he says, adding that being constantly surrounded by art helped him understand “the power that [lies] in creative placement.”
And if Glass can be, for at least one kid, the example he never had—the example of a working artist, making a living while making work that can have a positive effect on his community—he’s all for it.
“If I have a chance to get people involved in the power of art,” he says, “Why not?”
Rayne MacPhee’s “Swarm,” an exhibition about the plight of the honeybee, is on view at the New City Arts Welcome Gallery through the month of August. The show includes this piece, "Chicago Covered in Honeycomb." Image courtesy the artist
Rayne MacPhee thought her dad was having a midlife crisis. Apropos of nothing, he’d announced to the family that he was going to start keeping bees in their Greenville, South Carolina, yard. The next weekend, there they were: A few hives and thousands of honeybees.
MacPhee didn’t pay much attention to her dad’s new hobby until she saw the inside of a hive with her own eyes. “It was instant magic,” she says about what she saw: an apiary metropolis full of activity, like a golden, amazing-smelling New York City, she says. “It’s so busy. And the buzz…it does something to you.”
She may have thought beekeeping was her dad’s midlife crisis, but it turned out to be her passion. About a decade later, MacPhee’s not only keeping honeybees in her Charlottesville-area yard, she’s making artwork about them. Her first local solo show, “Swarm,” is about the plight of the honeybee, and it’s on view at the New City Arts Welcome Gallery through the month of August.
Artist and beekeeper Rayne MacPhee with some of her honeybees. “The buzz…it does something to you,” she says. Image courtesy subject
Perhaps you’ve heard the news: Honeybees are dying at record high rates in America. According to a Bee Informed Partnership survey released in June of this year, between April 1, 2018 and April 1 2019, beekeepers reported losing about 40.7 percent of their managed honeybee hives, on top of a 40.1 percent loss the previous year.
It’s due to a constellation of reasons, including global warming and climate change; increased use of insecticides; and the increased prevalence of cell phone towers, whose signals have been shown by some studies to interfere with how bees communicate and navigate. And then there’s colony collapse disorder, a still-mysterious phenomenon in which worker bees suddenly abandon their colony, leaving behind a vulnerable queen and some nurse bees to care for the baby bees.
We should be concerned, says MacPhee. Managed honeybees contribute $20 billion to the value of U.S. crop production, according to the American Beekeeping Federation. Blueberries, cherries, apples, and broccoli are almost exclusively pollinated by honeybees, and almond trees are entirely dependent on them. No honeybees, no almonds.
So, you want to help the bees…
You don’t have to keep hives to help out honeybees—you can start by just reconsidering your lawn. Think about it: Unless you’re raising cows or other grazers, you don’t really need all that grass. Bees love trees, says MacPhee, so consider planting a few more of them. Or plant a small pollinator garden that doesn’t require much tending, but can be very beneficial for honeybees and your own olfactory pleasure—aromatic lavender and basil are a good place to start, says MacPhee. Here in the Charlottesville area, a lot of folks spray for mosquitoes (understandable), but those chemicals can harm helpful insects (like honeybees). Instead of spraying, try prevention first—eliminating places around your home where water can collect, or putting up a bat house (bats eat thousands of mosquitoes a day).
MacPhee keeps two or three hives at a time, and she says that each has its own personality—some are pretty chill, others are more aggressive about her presence near the hives—and cleverly-named queen (Bee-yonce, Bee-thoven). Every year for the past few years, she’s lost half her hives. And since each hive can house up to 16,000 bees, that’s tens of thousands of bees, dead.
“I started to get really, really angry about it,” she says, in part because, as a backyard (non-commercial) beekeeper, she forms the sort of relationship with her hives that some people might have with their cats or dogs. MacPhee herself does not use insecticides, but because honeybees can fly distances of up to three miles, if anyone within a three mile distance sprays their lawn with, say, Raid Yard Guard, MacPhee’s honeybees can be affected.
In her anger, MacPhee wondered: What would bees do if they could take their revenge on us? They’d cover cities in honeycomb, she decided. Hives are rather city-like, after all.
MacPhee took a series of urban plans—including Boston, Los Angeles, and Chicago; Siena, Italy; and Aleppo, Syria—and drew thousands of hexagons atop them to build bulbous, globby, two-dimensional honeycomb in pencil and India ink rather than beeswax. They’re oddly beautiful and curiously compelling. They’re also fairly large (about four feet by six feet), so the viewer has no choice but to confront these honeycomb cities and the message contained therein, that the bees are dying and we need to do something about it.
The same goes for the pieces incorporating taxidermied bees. As MacPhee’s hives have died over the years, she’s preserved the bodies of bees from her favorite hives and affixed them to pieces of paper in such a way that they mimic honeybee flight patterns. “I want someone to look at it and really face their impact here. You can’t avoid it when you’re looking at, well, dead [bee] bodies,” she says.
“Swarm” is about bees taking their revenge on humans (the ones who use the aforementioned insecticides that are so dangerous to bees’ existence), but there’s something hopeful about it, says MacPhee, in that it imagines how honeybees could reclaim their homes that have been stolen from them.
MacPhee knows a little about reclaiming what has been taken. She says of this work, “it was the first time in my life that I ever made work that was truly my own…a concept born out of thinking and working, and I wasn’t trying to emulate anyone’s style,” and a big chunk of it was stolen, along with her car, earlier this year. Her car was recovered but her work was not, and she had to begin all over again. But her idea remained, and she could continue on. Honeybees, she fears, might not be so fortunate.
As Welcome Gallery visitors move through “Swarm,” MacPhee hopes they consider their own human relationship to nature, however conflicting and complex it may be. “Nature is beautiful. It’s volatile. It’s precious. It’s destructive,” all at once,” she says. And while these realizations can be overwhelming, “Swarm” is a swell reminder that when tackling big problems, looking at art is often a good place to start.
Rayne MacPhee’s “Swarm,” an exhibition about the plight of the honeybee, is on view at the New City Arts Welcome Gallery through the month of August.
"Memorial," an immersive audio-visual installation, at Chroma Projects Gallery. Image by Bolanle Adeboye
Openings
Chroma Projects InsideVault Virginia, Third Street SE. “Memorial,” an immersive audio/visual installation by Bolanle Adeboye, Richelle Claiborne, and Leslie Scott-Jones, with music from Lou “Waterloo” Hampton and Mike Moxham, that considers the African American perspective and makes space for communal creation, remembrance, awareness, and compassion. 5-7pm, performance at 5:30.
CitySpace 100 Fifth St. NE. “Gone But Not Forgotten: Unearthing Memories at the Daughters of Zion Cemetery,” featuring photos from the Holsinger Portrait Project. 5:30-7:30pm.
C’ville Arts Cooperative Gallery 118 E. Main St., Downtown Mall. “Brilliant Botanicals,” featuring earthenware jewelry textured with pressed plants by Jennifer Paxton. 6-8pm.
Eichner Studios Gallery 2035 Bond St. #120. A show of work by Anita Severn and a number of local artists working in a variety of media. 6-8pm.
The Garage 100 E. Jefferson St. “Remedios caseros,” featuring Karina Monroy’s works in acrylic paint and embroidery thread on muslin. 5-7pm.
IX Art Park 522 Second St. SE. “Start to Finish,” an exhibit of spray paint, oil, and acrylic paintings, each with a solvable maze, by Bernie McCabe. 7-11pm.
New Dominion Bookshop 404 E. Main St., Downtown Mall. “Poetry in Color,” an exhibition of watercolor calligraphy and oil and acrylic paintings by Terry M. Coffey. 5-7pm.
Thea Gahr at Studio IX
Studio IX 969 Second St. SE. “Wellspring,” featuring 12 original Risograph prints by Justseeds Artists’ Cooper- ative members, each exploring our contemporary relationship to water. 5:30-7:30pm.
VMDO Architects 200 E. Market St. “Wanderings and Wonderings,” a show of original paintings and drawings in a wide variety of media by Lindsay Knights. 5:30-7:30pm.
Welcome Gallery 114 Third St. NE. “Swarm,” Rayne MacPhee’s exhibition about the plight of the honeybee, presented in graphite, ink, and bee taxidermy on paper. 5-7:30pm.
The Women’s Initiative 11o1 E. High St. “Serenity,” a show of watercolors, acrylics, and oils by Terry Coffey. 5:30-7:30pm.
Other July shows
Albemarle County Circuit Court 501 E. Jefferson St. An exhibition of work by members of the Central Virginia Watercolor Guild.
Annie Gould Gallery 109 S. Main St., Gordonsville. Work by Joan Griffin, Frances Dowdy, Anne de Latour Hopper, and 30 other artists, both local and national, through August 11; and a show of work by Linda Verdury opening August 15, 5-7pm.
David Amoroso at Carpediem Exhibit
Carpediem Exhibit 1429 E. High St. A perpeptual group exhibit, this month including works by David Amoroso and Nina Ozbey. Opens August 18, 2-5pm.
Crozet Artisan Depot 5791 Three Notch’d Rd., Crozet. “Romeo Glass,” a show of blown glass by Minh Martin. Opens August 10, 1pm.
C’ville Coffee 1301 Harris St. “Cosmic Views,” featuring oil and acrylic paintings on canvas by Patty Ray Avalon. Opens August 1.
The Fralin Museum of Art at UVA 155 Rugby Rd. “Of Women, By Women,” an exhibition curated by the university’s museum interns that explores the power inherent in the act of taking a photograph; “Asian Art from the Permanent and Select Private Collections”; “Otherwise,” exploring the influence of LGBTQ+ artists, opening August 9; “Time to Get Ready: Fotografia Social,” opening August 9; and “Oriforme” by Jean Arp.
Jefferson School African American Heritage Center 233 Fourth St. NW. “Ernest Withers: Picturing the Civil Rights Movement 1957-1968,” a show of 13 works from the African American photojournalist best known for capturing 60 years of African American history in the segregated South.
HotCakes Gourmet 1137 Emmet St. Ste. A, Barracks Road Shopping Center. “Local Landscapes,” featuring work by Julia Kindred, through August 17; and “Wake the Dreamer,” featuring watercolors by Kari Caplin, opening August 18.
Kluge-Ruhe Aboriginal Art Collection 400 Worrell Dr. “Shane Pickett: Djinong Djina Boodja (Look At the Land that I Have Traveled),” featuring work by one of western Australia’s most significant contemporary Aboriginal artists; and “With Her Hands: Women’s Fiber Art from Gapuwiyak: The Louise Hamby Gift.”
Les Yeux du Monde 841 Wolf Trap Rd. “Landscape Reimagined & Summer Sculpture Show,” featuring the work of 27 painters and 10 sculptors who take landscape as their subject or use their art to literally inhabit and intersect with nature, through August 11; and “Arrivals,” by Sanda Iliescu, opening August 24, 4:30-6:30pm.
McGuffey Art Center 201 Second St. NW. In the Sarah B. Smith Gallery, “Un-Becoming Peter Allen,” a show of works in colored pencil and collage that explore the nature of identity; in the North and South and Downstairs Hall galleries, the McGuffey member artists summer group show.
Spring Street Boutique 107 W. Main St., Downtown Mall. “Aerial Colors,” featuring mixed-media pieces by Remmi Franklin.
Sri Kodakalla at Thomas Jefferson Memorial Church Unitarian-Universalist
Thomas Jefferson Memorial Church Unitarian-Universalist 717 Rugby Rd. “Entries of Thought,” featuring the wood and fiber works of Sri Kodakalla. Opens August 1, 11:30am.
Vitae Spirits Distillery 715 Henry Ave. “Winding Down,” a show of work by Judith Ely. Opens August 5.
First Fridays is a monthly art event featuring exhibit openings at many area art galleries and exhibition venues. Several spaces offer receptions. To list an exhibit, email arts@c-ville.com.
After three years of writing and recording her own material, as well as being featured on a slew of local rap tracks, R&B and neo-soul artist Reagan Riley performs her first-ever solo sets this week. Photo by Bua
On the enclosed patio of the Twisted Branch Tea Bazaar, Reagan Riley reclines into a stack of jewel-toned pillows scattered on the bench behind her as grey-white wisps of fruit-flavored tobacco vapor curl through the afternoon air, dissipating into a thin haze that’s more sunshine than hookah smoke. The room’s hardworking window A/C unit hums while Riley takes a sip of a matcha cooler—a deep, emerald green iced tea with a slight vegetal flavor, recommended by the tea house owner for its ability to take the edge off of a July afternoon in Charlottesville. Riley deems it “so nice.”
The whole scene is chill as fuck and therefore the perfect setting for Riley to discuss her electronic/neo-soul music.
Riley was raised in Charlottesville by musician parents—mom’s a singer and flutist, dad’s an a cappella singer and trumpet player—who encouraged their only child to pursue any and every creative interest: painting, drawing, poetry, singing. She’d always loved singing along to R&B and rap tracks and, in 2016, at age 18, stepped into the recording booth herself. Since then, she’s sung the hook on a slew of local rap tracks and appeared onstage with her collaborators. She’s released a good amount of her own original material, too, including the Summer Complex EP (2016), the Grown Since full-length album (2018), and a number of singles. After three years of writing and recording, Riley will perform her first-ever solo set on Wednesday night at The Garage (and her second on Sunday at IX Art Park). So, what’s taken her so long?
The short answer, says Riley, is fear. But the long answer—the real answer—is that Riley, just 21, has been taking her time finding her sound and herself.
“I’m an introvert,” says Riley. “I’ve always been kind of shy,” a singer who stepped into the booth not necessarily with the intention of sharing her work with others, but to grow confident in her voice and her lyrics.
Music “makes it very easy” for Riley to express whatever she’s thinking or feeling. “I’m always writing about my experiences, so in that sense, it’s always just my truth, however that comes out,” she says.
What comes out, says Riley, is a style that’s “definitely R&B, neo-soul-like. Chill vocals, kind of sensual and sexy. I don’t have a super big voice; my thing is more of a vibe. It’s a mood.” She’s been compared to Syd Tha Kyd (from The Internet) and SZA, and she says she feels a bit of vocal and vibe kinship with local indie folk-pop artist Kate Bollinger.
Riley sings on several local projects including the hook on Sondai’s “Silver Linings,” and on “Shadow,” off CLARKBAR$’ Tasty project. She’s collaborated with Keese a number of times.
“Reagan is dope,” says Keese. “Her style is unique. All you have to do is send her the track, she’ll write and come up with her own ideas. She turns a good song into a great song.”
Riley likes to mix up her process. Sometimes she’ll get a line in her head, write it down, and the next day, incorporate it into a song. Sometimes, she’s in the mood to write poetry instead, but when she looks back on it weeks or months later, it sounds like pretty good lyrics.
“I try not to do it the same way every time,” says Riley. “I think that’s dangerous…being creative is just being in the now, and if you’re caught up on doing something a certain way, you might miss up on an opportunity for something beautiful and organic to happen.”
Sometimes she hears the perfect beat—either given to her by a producer, or sourced from YouTube—and will have a song on the page in 10 minutes, without a change. That’s how it went with “Weekend,” her newest single, recorded after Riley hadn’t sung into a mic for about a year.
“It’s good to be back,” Riley declares at the start of “Weekend,” which is about the aftermath of a relationship that she was ready to end. It’s a song about self-rediscovery, Riley’s realization that she can’t lift people up if someone’s holding her down. It’s the kind of song that you might put on the stereo of a convertible as you drive a little too fast on a beachside highway, experiencing the freedom of movement that’s in your ears.
“The End,” another of Riley’s recent Spotify releases, is about her ability to see through bullshit. “This foamy sticky humidity, I look right past what eyes can see,” she sings at the start of this song. It’s an acknowledgment of how far she’s come already, and how past relationships have shaped her future—as a person and as an artist hoping to connect with her audience.
And right now, that means stepping into the spotlight as a solo artist on stage (with a little help from her rapper friends, at times), fear be damned.
Music “feeds me,” she says, settling deeper into the pillows and taking a sip of the matcha cooler. “It feeds my soul. It makes me happy, in the simplest sense. It’s good for me. And I’m always trying to do things that are good for me.”
Reagan Riley will perform her first solo sets this week: she’s at The Garage Wednesday, July 24, and at IX Art Park Sunday, July 28.
UPDATE: Wednesday, July 24, 11:15am. The show at The Garage has been cancelled.
The Live Arts Teen Theater Ensemble brings love and light to its production of Rent, on stage through July 28. Photo by Martyn Kyle
Before every rehearsal and every performance, the cast and crew stand in a circle. They hold hands, close their eyes, inhale deeply, and exhale fully. “I am light,” they say. “I am love. I am here. I am light. I am love. I am here.” They repeat it over and over, until everyone feels ready to take the stage in the Live Arts Teen Theater Ensemble’s production of Rent.
That affirmation is intended to keep the cast and crew grounded and present, moving them forward into a richly emotional performance with energy and positivity “so that they can accomplish what they need to accomplish,” says director Ti Ames. And with this particular production of Rent, there is much to accomplish.
Rent is one of the most successful pieces of American musical theater to date. With music, lyrics, and book written by Jonathan Larson, the play was first produced in 1994, and in 1996 began a 12-year Broadway run. The musical (often classified a “rock opera”) nabbed four Tony Awards and a Pulitzer Prize, and in 2005 was made into a feature film.
Even if you haven’t seen Rent, chances are you’ve heard someone, somewhere, singing “Seasons of Love” (and had it stuck in your head for the rest of the day). But for those who are unfamiliar with the musical, Rent is about a group of bohemian friends living in Manhattan’s East Village at the start of the 1990s, during the HIV/AIDS crisis.
Cast member Greyson Taylor has heard arguments that, 25 years after its debut, “Rent is dying, or that Rent isn’t important anymore,” that the stereotypes of the LGBTQ+ community the musical explores are no longer accurate, or that the HIV/AIDS crisis is behind us, or that the tale of bohemians trying to make art and pay their rent in a gentrifying Alphabet City is a tired one. But the arguments for Rent’s irrelevance are misguided says Taylor, because, at its core, “Rent is about love. And Rent’s about family,” two universal and eternal aspects of the human experience.
None of the adolescent cast, nor its 24-year-old director, were born when Rent first hit the stage. Yet, in the musical, they’ve found a place to tell their own stories, of many backgrounds, races (actors of color make up more than half of the cast), genders, and sexualities, all experiencing the ups and downs of life together.
Director Ti Ames, who at 24 is not much older than the cast, grew up doing theater at Live Arts. This is the first production Ames has directed at the theater. Photo by Martyn Kyle
A production like Rent “can fall into the trap of being presented in the same way over and over again,” notes Taylor, but “when someone like Ti steps in and creates a completely new way to tell the story, it’s a whole lot easier for people to stop and listen.”
Ames’ artistic choices make this production unique. At the start of the play, the book dictates that “two thugs” should chase after the character of Tom Collins, and in this production the “two thugs” are two white cops. The character of Angel Dumott Schunard (Taylor’s role), typically staged as a drag queen, is here gender fluid.
Ames has actor Camden Luck playing the famously problematic Maureen Johnson as a TERF (trans-exclusionary radical feminist) who inappropriately touches the afro of her girlfriend, Joanne Jefferson—something that happens to Mo Jackson, the actor playing Joanne, all the time in real life.
In this production, the characters of Mark Cohen (played by Jakobh McHone) and Roger Davis (played by Thad Lane), dap whenever they see one another, an intentionally chosen gesture that Ames hopes will help normalize platonic affection between two young black men. And April, Roger’s dead girlfriend usually only mentioned by name, is instead an on-stage character whose actions are unexpectedly (at least, to Roger) mirrored by another character.
Ames incorporates Africana elements, such as call-and-response, constant breaking of the fourth wall, and the presence of ancestral spirits. This has been particularly interesting for Taylor, because for his character, Angel, it means that when (spoiler alert) Angel dies, Angel isn’t really gone. “She’s still just as much a part of everyone’s lives,” continuing to help them believe in love, he says. “That’s probably what hit me the most.”
“I am so proud of these kids,” says Ames, who has been constantly moved by the ways in which the actors have plumbed their own emotional depths to bring the characters to life in a way that forces close examination of both difficult issues like racism, homophobia, and loss, as well as joyous experiences like friendship, falling in love, and sharing a first kiss. They’ve taken risks, they’ve pushed themselves. They build each other up. They’ve learned to take breaks when they’re feeling overwhelmed, and to be wholly present with one another on the stage. Plus, “they can sing their little butts off,” says Ames with equal amounts affection and respect.
The Live Arts Teen Theater Ensemble rehearses Rent. Photo by Martyn Kyle
This is technically the Rent: School Edition, but the cast would be loath to have their production passed off as “just a teen show.”
“Everyone in this show is well-equipped…capable of displaying the massive amounts of emotion that come behind this show,” says McHone, who is so committed to Rent and his castmates that he drives an hour and a half each way, from his hometown outside of Harrisonburg, to be in this production.
Taylor wants “everyone to leave the theater with a heightened sense of awareness” of the work yet to be done around the many themes addressed in Rent.
It’s what the cast has done, adds McHone, and these are lessons the cast expects to take with them even when the stage lights go down.
That, and the fact that they are light. They are love. They are here.
The Live Arts Teen Theater Ensemble brings love and light to its production of Rent, on stage through July 28.
Photos by Rufus W. Holsinger | University of Virginia Library Special Collections
DNA. Deoxyribonucleic acid. Two chains coiling around one another, a spiral ladder of genetic material we inherit from our parents. It informs, on a biological level, who we are—how our bodies develop, both inside and out—the strength of our heart muscles and the shape of our bones, the color of our eyes, our hair, our skin.
Not long ago, DeTeasa Brown Gathers, born and raised in Charlottesville, wanted to find out more about who she is. She started piecing together her ancestry online, and she sent in her DNA for analysis with the hope that it would connect her with even more relatives of many generations, ones she didn’t grow up knowing about, and enlarge her family tree.
Then, a message appeared in Gathers’ inbox on the ancestry website. “I have a picture,” wrote Ashley Irby, who at that point was a total stranger to Gathers. It was a photo of Peggy Ragland Brown Spears, Gathers’ great-great grandmother.
When Gathers, who didn’t know much about her great-great grandmother, finally saw the photo, she saw something the DNA alone couldn’t possibly have provided. “I saw my family deep in her face,” says Gathers. “So many family members resemble her.” It made the work of researching her heritage more immediate.
A number of folks living in Charlottesville today can trace their lineage back to people in these photographs. “I saw my family deep in her face,” says DeTeasa Brown Gathers of the first time she saw this photograph of her great-great-grandmother, Peggy Ragland Brown Spears (seated, and photographed here with her second husband, Joe Spears, in July 1914). “So many family members resemble her.” | Photo by R.W. Holsinger. University of Virginia Special Collections Library
Peggy was born sometime in the 1840s, and whether she was born into slavery or freedom, Gathers isn’t sure. Peggy had at least one, maybe two or three, children by her first husband, Abram Brown, Gathers’ great-great-grandfather. Abram died and Peggy married Joe Spears, and had at least seven more children with her second husband.
In 1914, Peggy and Joe Spears, both of whom are thought to have worked at UVA hospital, had their portraits taken in the West Main Street studio of one of Charlottesville’s most well-known photographers, Rufus W. Holsinger. Holsinger photographed them together, with Joe standing behind Peggy, who was seated in a wooden chair, and also took a picture of just Peggy.
As Gathers did her research, she found one of those photos, the same one Irby had shared with her, and was surprised to learn that it lives in Charlottesville, in the University of Virginia Library collection. These portraits are just two of the 611 (known) images that Holsinger took of Charlottesville-area African Americans in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. In an era in which most public portrayals of African Americans were caricatures or images that reinforced their subordinate status, these portraits, in which subjects could control how they were presented, offer a compelling counterpoint. Now a new local initiative, the Holsinger Portrait Project, is bringing them out of the UVA Library archives and into public view.
Currently, 32 of these portraits are on display on UVA Grounds, printed to vinyl and zip-tied to the chain link construction fencing surrounding the Memorial to Enslaved Laborers across the street from Bodo’s on the Corner.
Until the end of summer, passersby can happen upon the portrait of Peggy and Joe, see their faces, look into their eyes, and perhaps begin to understand a more complete, more true history of the Charlottesville area.
It’s a safe bet to say that most Charlottesvillians have seen a Rufus W. Holsinger photo. The black-and-white pictures have been used time and time again for a nostalgic look at life in and around Charlottesville from about 1891 to 1930, the years Holsinger operated his studio at 719-721 West Main St.
The Holsinger Studio Collection is an invaluable visual resource: more than 10,000 glass plate negatives and a handful of prints carefully preserved (and even digitized) by the University of Virginia Library.
Yet “this collection has never been used in the way it ought to be,” says John Edwin Mason, a UVA professor who teaches African history and the history of photography.
Most uses of the Holsinger Studio Collection (including the book Holsinger’s Charlottesville, published in 1978 and re-printed in 1995) do a “horrible job of representing the collection as a whole,” says Mason, who serves as co-director of the Holsinger Portrait Project. The photographs that have been reprinted and displayed have tended to be those that portray a very specific, very white image of Charlottesville. What has been neglected, and therefore not widely seen, are the hundreds of portraits of local African Americans, who chose the way in which Holsinger’s camera would capture them.
Those photographs, Mason says, offer “a way into the African American community here that is not defined by oppression and racism,” but instead by the ways in which these individuals chose to define themselves. In many ways, these few hundred portraits of African Americans from all walks of life speak for themselves: “Here I am,” they say.
But to further understand their effect, and why thisproject can be so important to re-shaping how Charlottesville tells its history, it’s helpful to have some context.
“Photographs are slippery things, and it is, in fact, not legit to try to read somebody’s mind in a photograph,” says UVA professor John Edwin Mason. There’s no telling for certain whether, say, a furrowed brow is from feelings of deep-seeded anger, a recent sneeze, or the result of some fleeting thought. One can’t make assumptions, he says, even based on things like clothing and accessories. Take, for example, this portrait of Minnie McDaniel. To look at her, you’d think she was a woman of means, wearing a patterned and expertly tailored dress so fine “it’ll knock your socks off,” says Mason. But careful research revealed that she was likely a seamstress, “a woman who really knew how to make a dress.” As for her equally fine hat? Mason thinks she may have had a hatmaker friend. | Photo by Rufus W. Holsinger. University of Virginia Special Collections Library
These images were made during the Jim Crow era of racial segregation, disenfranchisement, and hideous violence against black people in the South. It was a time when American visual culture perpetuated stereotypes against black people, which can be seen in the Holsinger collection itself, in photos of the all-male, all-white UVA Glee Club in blackface, for example, “enacting the stereotypes against which the black clients are having representations made,” says Mason. “And those images were not just images, but they were knowledge; they were a kind of knowledge about who African Americans were supposed to be. That was false knowledge, but a lot of people believed it.”
When Holsinger’s black clients entered the photography studio, these caricatures were almost certainly on their minds, says Mason, so it is very important how they chose to present themselves, how their photographs, “without being overtly political, completely contradict those kinds of images.”
African Americans, one or two generations removed from slavery, were defining themselves against these stereotypes, as “New Negroes.” Though the New Negro Movement is typically associated with the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s, the term and the ideology were in circulation after the Booker T. Washington-edited book, A New Negro for a New Century was published in 1900.
It was certainly in circulation in the Charlottesville area, says Mason, pointing to an article published in February 1921 in the Charlottesville Messenger, a local black newspaper (of which few known copies and clips survive). Written by George W. Buckner, born and raised in Charlottesville and at the time a successful businessman in St. Louis, “The New Negro: What he wants,” reflects the spirit and purpose of the movement:
“…The New Negro of Charlottesville wants: 1. Teachers’ salaries based on service not on color. 2. A four year high school. 3. Representation on City Council. 4. ‘Jim Crow’ street cars abolished 5. Representation on School Board. 6. Better street facilities in Negro districts.
“We are tax payers and law abiding citizens. We know our strength and will accept nothing short of justice!”
What’s more, says Mason, “the idea of the New Negro was not some airy-fairy thing that was only for intellectuals and activists and artists. Ordinary African American citizens felt it too.” They wanted “the kinds of things that were denied to African Americans, especially African American women: beauty and grace, style, fashion.”
“It was about self-determination and self-definition,” Mason says, “but it was also a political claim, that, ‘because we are people of dignity, strength, and respectability, you damn well better give us our rights of citizenship.’ And you can see that in these portraits. These are portraits of the New Negro.”
Mason has known about these portraits since the 1990s, when Scot French, then assistant director of the Carter G. Woodson Institute for African-American and African Studies at UVA, curated a small exhibition of them at Minor Hall. Mason thought about the images frequently, and what could be done with them; he knew they should be seen by more people.
William “Bill” Hurley, photographed in 1909, was the longtime coachman for former Charlottesville mayor J. Samuel McCue. In February 1905, McCue was hanged at the Old County Jail after being convicted of shooting and killing his wife, Fannie Crawford McCue, at their Park Street home. Hurley testified at the trial. Here, it appears as though Hurley is holding a lit match to light the cigarette dangling from his lips, but it’s likely Holsinger added the flame to the end of the match after the fact—a little bit of old-time Photoshop, if you will. The match would probably have burned out long before the exposure (30 seconds to one minute) would have finished. | Photo by Rufus W. Holsinger. University of Virginia Special Collections Library
Then, in 2016, Mason served on the Blue Ribbon Commission on Race, Memorials and Public Spaces, the task force assembled by Charlottesville City Council to address community concerns about the statues of Confederate generals Robert E. Lee and “Stonewall” Jackson downtown.
“[It] had me thinking about how history is often told without words, and through images,” says Mason. There are few words directly attached to the Lee and Jackson statues, and yet they tell a particular story, one that suggests that these are valorous, courageous men who are to be honored and respected for the cause for which they fought: the Confederacy. “Those statues embody that ‘Lost Cause’ interpretation of the Civil War,” says Mason, an interpretation of history the commission did not accept.
Mason and others on the commission started to ask: How do we counter that powerful visual storytelling? How do you get another story, one that tells a more inclusive history—one that not only includes but celebrates local black citizens—out into the landscape? And without bronze, granite, or other prohibitively expensive materials?
One answer, thought Mason, could be these Holsinger portraits. Fayett Johnson in his military uniform, photographed not long after the Armistice. A preacher holding a Bible. Susie Smith in furs. Dr. Ferguson with his two children. Lena at the window. Viola Green holding her Jefferson Colored/Graded Elementary School diploma showing that she’d completed eighth grade, the highest level of education available to black Charlottesvillians at the time. Peggy Ragland Brown Spears seated in a chair, her husband, Joe, standing behind her. A young man and woman standing side-by-side, holding hands, fingers intertwined. A man in work overalls.
Mason began talking with various folks at UVA and in the broader Charlottesville community about ways to get these images out into the immediate physical landscape while also making the digitized versions more easily accessible.
And so the Holsinger Portrait Project began. Mason co-directs the initiative with Worthy Martin, a computer scientist and director of the Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities at UVA. Martin’s been working on building out the preliminary website for the project and thinking of ways these photographs and their accompanying biographical and geographical information can be most effectively presented online.
The Holsinger Portrait Project isn’t just about the images. It’s about the people in them, their descendants, and their place in local history.
Figuring out even just the name of a sitter can be labyrinthine, says research lead Julia Munro, because “a lot of times, the history of Charlottesville erases their presence, the average [people] who lived here at the turn of the century.” Munro, an expert in the early history of photography, and others are sifting through scores of primary documents to find and verify even seemingly small details.
On March 9 of this year, the Jefferson School African American Heritage Center placed a number of the Holsinger portraits of local African Americans on public display for a “family photo day.” Those who attended the event perused the images, learned how to preserve their own family photos and accompanying stories, and even helped identify some of the individuals in the pictures, information that will help the Holsinger Portrait Project in the long-term. | Photo by Eze Amos
The Holsinger Studio ledgers are helpful, as they contain the name of the person who paid for a particular portrait, and on what date. But the person who paid for the photograph isn’t always the person depicted in that photograph—sometimes a family member, or an employer, might have footed the bill. Once they know who paid, researchers can start to suss out who the sitter might be via census records, the Charlottesville City Directory from 1914-15 (which has an asterisk next to the name of every African American person listed), records from the John F. Bell Funeral Home, which once stood in Vinegar Hill (and relocated to Starr Hill after the city razed Vinegar Hill, a thriving black neighborhood, in the mid-1960s in the name of “urban renewal”), and the archives at the Jefferson School African American Heritage Center.
Andrea Douglas, the Heritage Center’s executive director, is also involved in the project, and in March, she helped organize a “Family Photo Day” event at the JSAAHC, where folks could come in and see prints of some of the photos on display. If attendees recognized anyone in the photographs—and a few people did—they jotted down notes (which are posted on the project website, and which Munro hopes to verify) on what they remembered about those people. Some folks brought in their own family photos, or information they’d gathered in researching their family trees, to see if any faces and names matched, or were somehow connected, to those in the Holsinger photos.
Charlottesville resident Melvin Flanagan Jr. leafs through one of the flip books full of portraits during Family Photo Day at the JSAAHC. | Photo by Eze Amos
“Along the way, people have been keeping records” that with some careful work can be pieced together to tell the story, says local realtor and researcher Edwina St. Rose. St. Rose is a member of the Preservers of the Daughters of Zion Cemetery, a group working to identify those people buried in the African American cemetery at the corner of First and Oak streets. She and others, including researchers Jane Smith and Bernadette Whitsett-Hammond, use resources like ancestry.com to find census documents as well as birth, death, and marriage certificates, and comb through newspaper archives (especially those of black newspapers like the Richmond Planet, the Washington Bee, even the New York Age) for mention of Charlottesville and its residents.
The Daughters of Zion established the two-acre cemetery in 1873 as a place to bury Charlottesville-area African Americans, a response to the segregated burial policies of nearby Oakwood Cemetery. The land was regularly used for burials in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the same era that these photographs are from, and the preservers estimate that up to 1,000 people could be buried there. As of May 2019, the group has identified 273 of those people by name. One of them is Henry Martin, who was born into slavery at Monticello in 1826, and after emancipation worked for many years as a janitor and bell ringer at UVA; one of Holsinger’s portraits of him is part of the current outdoor pop-up exhibition on Grounds.
St. Rose says that so far, they’ve figured out that 10 or so of the people buried in the cemetery were photographed by Holsinger, and she imagines there are more. In August, the group will mount an exhibit of some of the photographs at CitySpace, called “Gone But Not Forgotten.”
St. Rose was born and raised in Charlottesville, and, like DeTeasa Gathers, has ancestors in these images. In her personal collection, she has a Holsinger Studio photograph of her great-grandparents, William L. and Harriet Brown. And in the collection at UVA Library, there is a picture of their children, William F. (St. Rose’s grandfather) and Charles H. Brown, both wearing barber coats and standing outside their father’s barber shop on what is now University Avenue.
“It’s very exciting” to see them in the collection, says St. Rose. “I’m sure they’re happy to know that people have not forgotten them.”
This research isn’t necessarily easy, but it is necessary. And it’s necessary to get it right, not just for accuracy, but out of long-overdue respect for the individuals, says Munro. Putting even just a name to a face can be a revelation.
Just ask DeTeasa Gathers.
When Gathers looks at her great-great-grandmother Peggy’s face, a flurry of thoughts floats through her mind. She thinks of her own mother, the late Charlotte Virginia Bowles Brown, a nurse who was not allowed to pursue her studies at UVA because of her race, and was granted alumni status for her service to the university—working as a nurse in both newborn and geriatric care—after her death in February 2018. She understands that perhaps Charlotte hesitated to talk about her own life and their family history because it was too painful.
She thinks of her brother, Vic Brown, who has worked for UVA for 36 years, a musician lauded for his bass chops in the Chickenhead Blues Band and the First Baptist Church band. She thinks of her sons, including DeAndre Bryant, a third-year student at UVA and an outside linebacker for the Cavaliers football team.
She thinks of her recent pilgrimages to Winneba, Ghana, and to the Equal Justice Initiative in Montgomery, Alabama. She thinks of her own career, 17 years working in medical coding and billing for the UVA Department of Surgery, and her work as the finance administrator at First Baptist Church (where her husband, Don Gathers, is a deacon). She thinks of her grandchildren, and how she can’t wait to share this family knowledge with them. She thinks of how all of this and so much more can be traced back to Peggy, and how much value Peggy brought to the community herself and through her descendants.
“There’s just so much going on around that picture, and sometimes, it all makes sense,” says Gathers.
There’s a lot of sense to be made, for many other people and for the city and the county, via these photographs.
Portrait of a young woman, thought to be Maggie Barbour, taken in 1918. | Rufus W. Holsinger. University of Virginia Special Collections Library
The pop-up exhibit at UVA is serving as a “proof of concept” for how they might display the images in longer-term, more permanent outdoor public spaces, says Mason. They’re still envisioning how this might come to fruition, but weather-resistant vinyl prints, tied to fencing or posted to walls, might work. And wouldn’t it be something, he says, if they could be painted as murals on the exterior sides of buildings.
Mason also hopes that fine prints of the portraits, as well as carefully researched descriptions of the sitters similar to the ones appearing online, could be displayed in permanent andsemi-permanent exhibitions at UVA, the Jefferson School, and other popular community gathering places.
Creating a close, personal connection to “this history that’s a hundred years old now” is one thing these portraits do really well, says Mason. “They connect us to that past, because, the people—even if we’re not related to the people in these portraits, they look like us. We can imagine them sitting across the table from us,” he says.
In a way, they are, looking out at us from their current spot on the fence, filling in gaps in Charlottesville history that have been covered up until recently, telling their descendants and their descendants’ neighbors more about who we are.
And, says Gathers, “we should all know who we are.”
A portrait of the artist
Rufus W. Holsinger | University of Virginia Special Collections Library
The Holsinger Portrait Project is also looking into how typical, or atypical, Rufus W. Holsinger was compared to other commercial photographers in the area, and of his time. Active as a commercial photographer from at least 1891 until about 1930, he photographed people from all walks of life—black, white, rich, poor. People wanted to look as good as possible in their portraits, notes UVA history professor John Edwin Mason, and for some, that meant jewels and furs; for others, a work shirt under an old jacket with a frayed pocket. Holsinger offered “a range of print styles that would have been priced accordingly,” from ones smaller than a playing card and mounted on ordinary board, to ones about 9-and-a-half by 7 inches in size, mounted on finely embossed and gilded boards.
It might be tempting to think, based on the fact that he took hundreds of portraits of African Americans, that Holsinger was unique, or that he was “some sort of racial liberal,” says Mason. But there’s no evidence of that; in fact, when Holsinger served on City Council, he supported an ordinance to segregate Charlottesville neighborhoods. (It was tossed out of court for infringing on property rights, though racial covenants effectively segregated many neighborhoods for generations anyway, and those effects are still felt today.) Perhaps Holsinger, who also served as the president of the Chamber of Commerce, was simply a smart businessman. “And yet, he cooperated, collaborated, with his sitters, with his customers, on creating these images that depicted them the way they wanted to be depicted,” says Mason, adding that one thing that does set Holsinger apart is the artfulness of the portraits he shot.
“Requiem for a Reef” is one of the works on view in Tina Curtis’ “Radiolaria & Reef” at Second Street Gallery’s Dové Gallery through June 19.
Image courtesy of artist
Do you know where your oxygen comes from?
Trees, shrubs, grass, sure. But scientists estimate that at least half (and maybe even up to 85 percent) of all oxygen on planet Earth comes from phytoplankton, one-celled plants that live on the surface of the ocean, gobble up ocean nutrients and sunlight, then photosynthesize, producing oxygen.
Phytoplankton are so tiny, the human eye can only see them via microscope. And, through July 19, abstracted in paint in Tina Curtis’ “Radiolaria & Reef,” on view in the Dové Gallery at Second Street Gallery.
“With this body of work, the inspiration for me was the living abstractions in our world’s delicate oceanic ecosystems,” says Curtis—the small things that make up the vast ocean, systems such as the siliceous ooze (sediment made up of the mineral skeletons of tiny protozoa called radiolaria) on the deep ocean floor, and coral reefs, which depend on the branch-like, silica-bodied phytoplankton (a “signature” in all of Curtis’ works) for food.
Some of the pieces, such as “Osaka” and “Okinawa” celebrate the extraordinary beauty of these ecosystems, but for Curtis, celebrating that life-sustaining beauty wasn’t quite enough. Human activities such as dynamite fishing in combination with global warming have destroyed more than a quarter of the ocean’s documented reef systems. “I was motivated to bring awareness of our ocean’s plight not by simply painting pretty pictures but by depicting such events as coral bleaching and dead and dying reef systems,” she says, pointing specifically to the pieces titled “Requiem for a Reef” and “Grey Barrier Reef.”
Curtis hopes visitors to “Radiolaria & Reef” will understand that her work is meant to convey a “sense of calm” while also expressing a “sense of urgency” to act to save these systems that we have a place in, too.
First Fridays: July 5
Chroma Projects InsideVault Virginia, Third Street SE. “Raymond Berry: Pages from a Journal of Days,” featuring expressive landscape paintings. 5-7pm.
CitySpace 100 Fifth St. NE. “The Best of the Best,” featuring work from the Charlottesville Camera Club. 5:30-7pm.
C’ville Arts Cooperative Gallery 118 E. Main St., Downtown Mall. “Pots for Purpose,” featuring functional and artful pottery by Trina Player. 6-8pm.
Eichner Studios Gallery 2035 Bond St. #120. The work of 11 local artists working in a variety of media. 6-8pm.
Fellini’s 200 Market St. “InnerEvolution,” a show of work by Lea Bodea. 5:30-7pm.
The Garage 100 E. Jefferson St. “Watershed,” featuring nostalgia-invoking watercolors by Ginger Oakes. 5-7pm.
McGuffey Art Center 201 Second St. NW. In the Sarah B. Smith Gallery, “Un-Becoming Peter Allen,” a show of works in colored pencil and collage that explore the nature of identity; in the North and South and Downstairs Hall galleries, the McGuffey member artists summer group show. 5:30-7:30pm.
Spring Street Boutique 107 W. Main St., Downtown Mall. “Aerial Colors,” featuring mixed-media pieces by Remmi Franklin. 6-8pm.
Studio IX 969 Second St. SE. “Six Pan: Smoked Paper and Wash Studies,” featuring work by Cidney Blaine Cher. 5:30-7:30pm.
VMDO Architects 200 E. Market St. “Community Collective,” a show of works by a variety of artists, to benefit The Haven Day Shelter. 5-7pm.
Other July shows
Albemarle County Circuit Court 501 E. Jefferson St. An exhibition of work by members of the Central Virginia Watercolor Guild.
Annie Gould Gallery 109 S. Main St., Gordonsville. Work by Joan Griffin, Frances Dowdy, Anne de Latour Hopper, and 30 other artists, both local and national.
Carpediem Exhibit 1429 E. High St. An exhibition of Lillian Fitzgerald’s plein air paintings, Lily Erb’s sculptures exploring restraints, and Elizabeth Geiger’s paintings of familiar objects.
Crozet Artisan Depot 5791 Three Notch’d Rd., Crozet. “The Art of Whimsy,” a show of mixed-media jewelry by Stephen Dalton. July 13, 1pm.
The Fralin Museum of Art at UVA 155 Rugby Rd. “Pompeii Archive: Photographs by William Wylie,” through June 9; Vanessa German’s installation, “sometimes.we.cannot.be.with.our.bodies,” through July 7; “The Print Series in Bruegel’s Netherlands: Dutch and Flemish Works from the Permanent Collection,” through July 7; “Of Women, By Women,” an exhibition curated by the university’s museum interns that explores the power inherent in the act of taking a photograph; “Asian Art from the Permanent and Select Private Collections”; and “Oriforme” by Jean Arp.
Jefferson School African American Heritage Center 233 Fourth St. NW. Through July 13, “Simply: The Black Towns,” a series of images by Jamelle Bouie, New York Times columnist and political analyst for CBS News, of the remains of African American towns founded after Emancipation; and opening July 27, a show of 13 works by Ernest Withers, made between 1957 and 1968.
Kluge-Ruhe Aboriginal Art Collection 400 Worrell Dr. “Shane Pickett: Djinong Djina Boodja (Look At the Land that I Have Traveled),” featuring work by one of western Australia’s most significant contemporary Aboriginal artists;“Beyond Dreamings: The Rise of Indigenous Australian Art in the United States,” through July 7; and “With Her Hands: Women’s Fiber Art from Gapuwiyak: The Louise Hamby Gift,” opening July 18.
Les Yeux du Monde 841 Wolf Trap Rd. “Landscape Reimagined & Summer Sculpture Show,” featuring the work of 27 painters and 10 sculptors who take landscape as their subject or use their art to literally inhabit and intersect with nature.
Northside Library 705 W. Rio Rd. “Summertime: A Group Multimedia Art Exhibit” featuring work by the BozART Fine Art Collective.
Second Street Gallery 115 Second St. SE. In the main gallery, “Lady Painters: Inspired by Joan Mitchell,” featuring paintings by Isabelle Abbot, Karen Blair, Janet Bruce, Molly Herman, Priscilla Long Whitlock, and two original works by American abstract expressionist Joan Mitchell; and in the Dové Gallery, “Radiolaria & Reef: Our Ocean’s Living Abstractions,” featuring paintings by Tina Curtis. Through July 19.
Shenandoah Valley Art Center 122 S. Wayne Ave., Waynesboro. The SVAC members’ annual judged show.
Thomas Jefferson Memorial Church Unitarian-Universalist 717 Rugby Rd. “The Garden Show,” featuring the paintings of Tomas Manto. Opens July 7 at noon.
University of Virginia Health System Main Hospital Lobby 1215 Lee St. “In the Garden,” a show of watercolors by Marcia Mitchell.
Yellow Cardinal Gallery 301 E. Market St. “Looking Toward the Light,” paintings reflecting the joys of summer light by Karen Collins, Lizzie Dudley, Anne French, Jane Goodman, and Carol Ziemer. Opens July 12 at 5pm.
First Fridays is a monthly art event featuring exhibit openings at many area art galleries and exhibition venues. Several spaces offer receptions. To list an exhibit, email arts@c-ville.com.
