Artist-musician Thomas Dean started his own imprint, Infinite Repeats, as a way to document and preserve great independent music being made in the commonwealth. Photo Credit: Tristan Williams
Thomas Dean takes unusual pleasure in digging through crates of junky records.
It’s partly the aroma of acidic paper inserts mingling with that of musty cardboard sleeves. It’s partly weirdo cover art, bonkers band names, and eyebrow-raising (or head-shaking) album titles.
But mostly, it’s the music. Dean loves the thrill of sliding a random slab of vinyl out of its sleeve, placing it on the turntable, and finding a really cool rock ‘n’ roll song or, even better, an album full of them. They’re often songs from 25, maybe 30 years ago, hiding in plain sight in a thrift store dollar bin because neither the band nor the label has big-name recognition. Music that, if it hadn’t been pressed to wax, very likely would be completely forgotten.
Dean also loves the idea that, decades from now, someone might be digging through another crate of records and find one released on his record label, Infinite Repeats, toss it on the platter, and say, “Hey! This is cool!”
That’s entirely possible, because Dean, a musician, DJ, and screen print artist who’s been a fixture in Charlottesville independent rock music for close to 20 years, is releasing some pretty cool music, most of it local, on the newly-minted Infinite Repeats.
It might be fair to say that the idea for Infinite Repeats started spinning when Dean was growing up in Lynchburg and skipping school at lunch to drive up to Plan 9 on the Corner, where he and his friends would flip through records and scope out flyers for upcoming shows at Trax nightclub.
In 1999, Dean and a bunch of his friends moved to Charlottesville, into a house on Summit Street in Fry’s Spring. They had a band, a “pretty noisy” one, says Dean, and played and hosted shows in their basement. He’s gone on to play in Order, Invisible Hand, New Boss, Orange Folder, and Good Dog Nigel.
Dean has great memories of seeing shows at Trax, Pudhaus, and Tokyo Rose, and later at Dust Warehouse, memories that he can jog with a few band recordings, some photos, and a couple of VHS tapes. But a lot of that music is lost to time, and he often wishes he could hear it again, share it with folks who missed it. It’s something he’s very aware of now, too, as he attends and plays shows at Tea Bazaar, Magnolia House, The Bridge PAI, The Southern, and IX Art Park.
He also wonders about all the Charlottesville bands nobody remembers, or knows about, because they never made a recording—or if they did, it’s sitting on a hard drive in a basement, or in a box of tapes at the back of a closet, or on a CD in a cracked jewel case at the bottom of a desk drawer.
“This town’s had an interesting scene for a long time,” he says. “There are plenty of phases of it that have gone pretty poorly documented. Though there were plenty of people there to enjoy it, I think there was some pretty enjoyable stuff for the folks who missed it, too.”
“So much gets lost,” says Dean, and with Infinite Repeats, he hopes to minimize those losses, and give current fans of these bands something to have and to hold, to take home after a show.
Infinite Repeats’ first official issue, in May 2018, was the vinyl release of New Boss’ No Breeze EP, six songs by Dean’s own indie rock power-pop band. Dean followed it up with The Implied Sunrise, an EP from Parker Emeigh’s Lynchburg-based experimental psych rock power-pop project, Good Dog Nigel, in February 2019. This week, the label releases Cosmic Miasma, a four-song, 7-inch record from Charlottesville punk band Wild Rose.
There are others in the works, too, says Dean, like the Night Prancing LP from his longtime friends, Shrouded Strangers, a Good Dog Nigel full-length, and something from local garage punk band The Attachments.
In some cases, Dean’s had a hand in the recording process as well. Good Dog Nigel, Wild Rose, and The Attachments have recorded their Infinite Repeats releases at Dean’s in-home studio, Studionana, named for a nearby sticker of an anthropomorphic banana wearing sunglasses and playing a guitar. Studionana is actually located in Dean’s kitchen, where there are drums stacked on shelves alongside pots and pans, amps on the counters, guitars leaning on cabinets, microphones standing in front of the fridge, and where the recording console itself isn’t far from the stove. For a long time, Dean didn’t have his own recording equipment (most artists don’t) to get his bands’ music down, and now that he does, he wants to share that wealth.
Infinite Repeats, which presses a couple hundred copies of each release at Blue Sprocket Pressing, a vinyl pressing plant that opened in Harrisonburg in spring 2018, isn’t the only independent label working to get Virginia rock music on the literal record (and cassette tape, and CD). We’ve also got WarHen, Funny/Not Funny, Beach Impediment, and Feel It Records, to name just a few, making sure some of the great music being made in the Commonwealth right now is out there in the world, being enjoyed, and less likely to be lost to the sands of time.
It seems like a lofty goal, and in some ways it is. But it’s not impossible. And, if you ask Dean, (business and money aspects aside) it’s not terribly complicated, either. “I like things by cool people, bands that I like,” he says. “I’m just going to keep watching for things that I like and see what needs to come out in the world.”
Raven Mack created the Sovthern Gothic Fvtvrist Haikv Slam to unite (and reward) people through what he calls “the weird little arts.” Sometimes, comedy wins. Other times, deep, reflective thought prevails at his poetry events, held every other month at the Twisted Branch Tea Bazaar. Photo by
Amy and Jackson Smith
Seventeen syllables. Seventeen syllables to say whatever you want, to say as much, or as little, as you’d like.
Hell, you don’t even have to use all 17 syllables if you don’t need or want to, says poet and artist Raven Mack. That’s just the typical form of a Japanese haiku in the Western world: 17 syllables, divided 5-7-5, among three lines, no need to rhyme. And those who show up to participate in the Sovthern Gothic Fvtvrist Haikv Slam, which Mack hosts every other month at Twisted Branch Tea Bazaar, can approach the poetic form as they choose.
It’s not the kind of poetry reading where a poet stands behind a podium and reads a few selections to an audience of furrowed brows and nodding heads before taking a half-bashful bow to hushed applause. Sovthern Gothic Fvtvrist Haikv Slams can—and do—get raucous.
Mack asks participants to come prepared for friendly competition with 15-20 haiku. They sign up, then take the stage two at a time. A panel of three judges decides the winner, who advances. Sometimes, comedy wins. Other times, deep, reflective thought prevails.
And usually somewhere in the middle of the whole thing, someone delivers a haiku that rocks the entire room. A few lines that pull heavy sighs or roars of laughter, or that elicit table pounding or foot stomping or deep breathing. Mack encourages these audible reactions—he brings vuvuzelas.
After the slam round, there’s a life match (back in April, poet Veronica Haunani Fitzhugh requested it be changed from “death match”) between Mack and a pre-selected opponent. They go head-to-head in 19 judged rounds, sometimes built around a theme. On June 12, Mack takes on Louis “Waterloo” Hampton, an MC and one-half of legendary Charlottesville rap duo The Beetnix.
And finally, there’s a battle royale, in which anyone in the room can step to the stage to show their stuff in this single-elimination round. “Once you unlock the haiku flow, it just comes to you,” says Mack.
The Sovthern Gothic Fvtvrist Haikv Slams borrow from and build upon a form nurtured in the slam poetry scene of the late 1990s and early 2000s by poet Tazuo Yamaguchi, who hosted haiku slams at the annual National Poetry Slam. Mack’s reason for hosting his own series is simple: “It was something I wished existed, that didn’t exist” here, he says.
They’re also based around Mack’s personal philosophy of “Southern gothic futurism,” which comes in part from Rammellzee, the late New York City graffiti writer, hip-hop artist, sculptor, and thinker. According to an Arthur magazine story published after his death in 2010, Rammellzee was interested in the “symbolic value of letters,” and he often wrote in medieval manuscript-esque gothic script.
Mack adds the “Southern” part. “One thing I’ve loved about living in the South is the multicultural aspect that often gets overlooked,” he says. “The whole spirit of Southern Gothic Futurism is that the South is uniquely equipped, in terms of the people who are already here and together, to build whatever is next. A lot of times, people get hung up on, How do we rehab what we already have? I am more interested in building what’s next.”
Mack hopes that his slam stage can function as a microcosm of this richly multicultural place, a space where people from many backgrounds can come together, share their creative work, and have it appreciated, both by the audience and financially. (In order to start convincing people to reward what he calls “the weird little arts” with actual money and not promises of bullshit non-currency such as “exposure,” Mack has secured $100 sponsorships for each slam and pays the various winners for their efforts.)
“Our haiku slams,” says Mack, are about “everybody’s perspectives coming together.” He’s constantly posting event fliers around town and sending personal invites to the slams with the hope of getting new people in the room every time.
“Art has helped me overcome a lot of self-loathing and lack of self-confidence,” he says. “It’s fun when new people come in and all of a sudden, they love it and find this voice that maybe they didn’t express” before.
The April slam had about a dozen competitors, plus an audience, and Mack hopes to see a similar—or even better—turnout Wednesday night at the Tea Bazaar. It’s grown into a bit of a scene, he says, with people driving all the way from southwest Virginia to compete. He’s never sure who will show up, or if silly will top serious. But he’s sure of one thing: “Every time we do this,” he says, “somebody blows me away.”
Word play
Curious about haiku? Here are a few, all from Sovthern Gothic Fvtvrist Haikv Slam champs.
Monticello High School drama teacher Madeline Michel will receive the 2019 Excellence in Theatre Education Tony Award for her work with the school’s drama program. MARTYN KYLE
Madeline Michel sits on one of the couches lining her classroom, balancing a sparkly gold laptop on her knees as she tells two students about being summoned to the Monticello High School principal’s office.
Principal Rick Vrhovac called her in for a “meeting,” she says, her voice slightly sarcastic as she makes air quotes, “about next year.” Once she got to the office, Vrhovac told her she had a phone call (Michel did not want to sit through a phone call), and that he was going to put her on speakerphone (“super unprofessional,” thought Michel).
The call was to inform Michel that she had won the 2019 Excellence in Theatre Education Award from the Tony Awards and Carnegie Mellon University, an honor that recognizes K-12 drama teachers for championing arts programs in their schools. Michel will accept the award, which comes with a $10,000 grant for the Monticello drama program as well as two scholarships for Michel’s students to attend Carnegie Mellon’s pre-college summer program, at the Tony Awards on Sunday, June 9, in New York City.
“In the principal’s office, of all places!” Michel exclaims, tossing her head back in dramatic exasperation, to giggles from Kayla Scott and Joshua St. Hill, two 2019 MHS grads whom Michel insisted participate in this interview, partly because “they’re so much more interesting than I am,” says Michel, but also because everything Michel does, she does in service of her students.
Michel describes her teaching philosophy as shutting up, listening, watching, finding out what’s important to her students and following their lead, offering encouragement and guidance where and when the teens need it. It’s an approach Michel started developing when she began teaching in 1980 in Baltimore, and one she’s honed over her 12 years at MHS.
“She’s not the typical theater teacher,” says Scott. For one, drama is a year-round commitment: During the summer months, when school’s not in session, Michel leads summer writing groups to encourage students to write, produce, and perform original material.
Secondly, Michel isn’t into staging what she calls “fluff.” Monticello drama productions “have to have something in [them] that relates to a problem we’re facing in our world,” she says, or reflect the experiences and interests of MHS students, who come from diverse backgrounds. In recent years, the program has staged, among other productions, In the Heights, Lin-Manuel Miranda and Quiara Alegría Hudes’ musical with a hip-hop, salsa, merengue, and soul score; Leap of Faith, Alan Menken and Glenn Slater’s musical about a charismatic con man posing as a man of faith; A King’s Story, St. Hill’s original play motivated by the stories of black men who have died as a result of police violence; and #WhileBlack, a play that Scott penned about racial profiling.
“She gives us students a platform to talk about anything that’s on our heart,” says Scott. Another teacher might have told Scott that #WhileBlack was too controversial or that a high school student was too young to write this kind of play in the first place. But not Michel.
“She gives us opportunities we wouldn’t have had [otherwise],” says St. Hill, an athlete who would sing and rap here and there, but didn’t take writing rhymes seriously until he joined the drama program on a whim. “There are so many people that I have to speak for, who can’t speak for themselves,” whose voices are lost, he says.
But the skills Michel teaches aren’t just for the stage. “Theater is really just a form of learning how to express yourself and feel confident in front of other people,” she says. That helps in a job interview, a public speaking engagement, a presentation, or even a one-on-one conversation. “It’s about confidence more than any kind of content,” says Michel. “What can you do without confidence? It’s so hard to live life without a sense of confidence.”
Scott, who will attend North Carolina A&T in the fall, wants to be a pediatric surgeon, and though she has a rather extraordinary gift for acting, writing, dancing, and choreography, she says Michel has never steered her to forsake medicine for theater. In fact, Michel (and her children) have helped Scott with biology homework on more than one occasion. Scott and St. Hill rattle off the names of other MHS students who have come to the drama program and discovered new things about themselves, their peers, and the world in which they live.
“I couldn’t think of a better person” to receive this special Tony Award, says Scott, to wide-eyed nods of agreement from St. Hill, who will attend UVA in the fall and is acting in Live Arts’ summer production of Rent. “She puts all of her students before herself.”
“That’s so sweet,” says Michel, her voice quivering slightly as she touches her hand to her chest before taking out her phone and asking Scott if she wants to see a picture of her Tonys dress.
They coo over the beaded gown before Scott counsels her teacher on what kind of shoes to wear. “No baby heels at the Tonys,” advises Scott, much to Michel’s chagrin.
“See, that’s the best part of my job,” says Michel. “Learning from my students.”
“Women’s Work,” a show by the Feminist Union of Charlottesville Creatives, is at McGuffey Art Center in June. It’s a celebration of art made by women, says artist Sam Gray, a show that “thumbs its proverbial nose at traditional gender roles and the belittlement that women and our work have experienced throughout history and in our current moment.” Pictured is Annie Layne's "#22."
On view at McGuffey Art Center this month is “Women’s Work,” an exhibition featuring 18 artists who belong to the Feminist Union of Charlottesville Creatives, or F.U.C.C.
Sculptor Lily Erb and painter Sam Gray founded the group in 2017 with the “hope to create space and opportunities for female and gender-queer artists to share their time, journeys, inspiration, support, and experience,” says Gray.
“Women’s Work” is F.U.C.C.’s second show, and each artist was encouraged to share anything she wanted.
Annie Layne’s embroidered pieces almost exclusively focus on women, she says, “some realistic, most fantastic, all unapologetic of who they are and how they present themselves to the world.” One of the works, “#22,” won a prize in a juried show and was censored in another, when a “board could not quite get behind 22 representations of vulvas,” says Layne.
Textile and mixed-media artist Dawn Hanson creates pieces that “provide commentary on the war on women, particularly the infringement [upon] our reproductive rights.” There’s “In Ruth We Trust,” which depicts Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg as a saint; “Feminist Freedom Flag,” which replaces the stars on the American flag with birth control pills; and “Take As Directed,” which uses another pack of 28 pills to comment on who should make choices about a woman’s body (nobody but the woman herself).
“Women are natural vessels for love and insight that can empower everyone, not just people who identify as female,” says Laura Lee Gulledge, who, along with Gray, is a co-director of F.U.C.C. “Perhaps women’s real work is to balance out the cultural conversation right now by standing up for telling our stories using our voices our own way. I think that’s worth fighting for.” —Erin O’Hare
Updated at 9am June 5 to correct the reference to artist Dawn Hanson.
First Fridays: June 7
The Bridge PAI 209 Monticello Rd. An exhibition of student artwork in celebration of the creative efforts of the elementary students participating in the smART KIDS afterschool program. 5:30-8:30pm.
Chroma Projects InsideVault Virginia, Third Street SE. “Cry of the Cicada,” featuring black and white photography by Bill Mauzy. 5-7pm.
CitySpace 100 Fifth St. NE. Third graders share art, poems, and writings about local changemakers. 5:30-7pm.
C’ville Arts Cooperative Gallery 118 E. Main St., Downtown Mall. “Going with the Flow,” featuring Ann Stephenson’s explorations of the dreamlike aspects of alcohol ink. 6-8pm.
The Garage 100 E. Jefferson St. “Sound and Symbol,” Lauren Plank Goans’ multimedia exhibit of visual artwork made in service of the music she and her husband create as folk-art band Lowland Hum. 5-7pm.
IX Art Park 522 Second St. SE. A one-night-only black light art show featuring a mural by Madeleine Rhondeau and a dozen other black light works by local artists. 7pm-1am.
McGuffey Art Center 201 Second St. NW. In the Sarah B. Smith Gallery, “Fluid Transformations,” Scott Smith’s photography at the intersection between abstraction and the observed world; in the Downstairs North and South Hall galleries, the annual incubator exhibition, featuring the work of Jennifer Billingsly, Sahara Clemons, Sri Kodakalla, Rayne Marie MacPhee, Miranda Elliott Rader, Frankie Szynskie, and Stephanie Watson; in the Upstairs North and South Hall galleries, “Women’s Work,” an open-themed group show of the Feminist Union of Charlottesville Creatives (F.U.C.C.). 5:30-7:30pm.
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.. 5:30-7:30pm.
Spring Street Boutique 107 W. Main St., Downtown Mall. “June Internazionale,” featuring oil paintings on canvas by Anne Marshall Block. 6-8pm.
Studio IX 969 Second St. SE. “Afro-Virginia: People, Place & Power,” featuring profiles of several leaders behind Virginia’s African American historic preservation movement, using photography, audio recordings, and maps by Virginia Humanities staff members Peter Hedlund, Pat Jarrett, and exhibition curator Justin Reid . 5:30-7:30pm.
VMDO Architects 200 E. Market St. “Into the Light,” an exhibition of photography, drawings and watercolors by Hannah Winstead. 5:30-7:30pm.
Welcome Gallery 114 Third St. NE. “make/shift,” an exploration of identity in photography, embellished textiles, prints, and paper by Mary Lamb, Amanda Wagstaff, and Erin O’Keefe. 5-7:30pm.
WVTF RadioIQ 216 W. Water St. “Seeking Refuge,” featuring work by Brigitte Friedman, Kathleen Free, Judith Minter, Taylor Randolph, Linda Staiger, Virginia Thompson, and Chris Tucker, who examine the question of what refuge means. 5-7pm.
Yellow Cardinal Studio 301 E. Market St. “Looking Toward the Sun,” a show of work by Karen Collins, Lizzie Dudley, Anne French, Jane Goodman, and Carol Ziemer. 5pm.
Other June shows
Annie Gould Gallery 109 S. Main St., Gordonsville. Paintings by Anne deLatour Hopper and tapestries by Joan Griffin.
Carpediem Exhibit 1429 E. High St. A multimedia rotating, expanding exhibit of works by local, regional, and out-of-state artists.
Commonwealth Restaurant 422 E. Main St., Downtown Mall. “Linear Motion,” featuring illustrations by Martin Phillips.
Crozet Artisan Depot 571 Three Notch’d Rd., Crozet. A show and sale of wood bowls by master woodturner Frederick Williamson. Opens June 8, 1pm.
Fellini’s 200 Market St. “Que Vivan Los Animales,” an exhibition of works in acrylic, pen, and watercolor by Natalie Reyes.
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”; “The Print Series in Bruegel’s Netherlands: Dutch and Flemish Works from the Permanent Collection”; “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; and “Oriforme” by Jean Arp.
Jefferson School African American Heritage Center 233 Fourth St. NW. “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.
Kardinal Hall 722 Preston Ave. A show of Sarah Sweet’s paintings of animals.
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 “Beyond Dreamings: The Rise of Indigenous Australian Art in the United States.”
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. Inspired by the “Lady Painters” exhibition at Second Street Gallery. Opens June 8, 5-7pm.
Live Arts 123 E. Water St. A show of light boxes by Bolanle Adeboye. Closing reception June 8.
New Dominion Bookshop 404 E. Main St., Downtown Mall. “The Art of Nina Thompson,” an exhibition of oil paintings.
Shenandoah Valley Art Center 122 S. Wayne Ave., Waynesboro. The SVAC members’ annual judged show.
Thomas Jefferson Memorial Church Unitarian-Universalist 717 Rugby Rd. An exhibition of paintings by Hobby Parent.
WriterHouse 508 Dale Ave. An exhibition of photography by David Cook.
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.
“Simply: The Black Towns” is Jamelle Bouie’s first-ever photography exhibition, on view at The Jefferson School through July 13. Photo: Eze Amos
An all-black town.
An all-black town? It was a stray mention in a book on the 1921 Tulsa race massacre, but Jamelle Bouie was intrigued.
An all-black town. “It got stuck in my craw,” says Bouie.
He found a few local news articles, a mini documentary film, and a couple books on the subject—the dozens of towns founded in Oklahoma by free blacks who’d migrated west after Emancipation—but that was it. For Bouie, a journalist whose work focuses on, among other things, politics and race in America, that wasn’t enough. He needed to know more.
In March of this year, he flew to Oklahoma to see these towns for himself.
Over the course of 72 hours, Bouie visited 12 of the 13 surviving all-black towns and photographed 10 of them. Fourteen of those photos are on view at the Jefferson School African American Heritage Center through July 13.
“Simply: The Black Towns” is Bouie’s first-ever photography exhibition, and his own contribution to the awareness of a history that’s largely unknown.
Rosenwald School in Lima, Oklahoma. Photo: Jamelle Bouie.
Bouie himself is pretty well-known as a writer. After fellowships at The Nation magazine and The American Prospect, he was a staff writer at The Daily Beast and later chief political correspondent for Slate. Currently, he’s a political analyst for CBS News (perhaps you’ve seen him on the “Face the Nation” roundtable) and an opinion columnist for The New York Times. As he puts it, he’s written most days of most weeks for nearly 10 years.
Hundreds of thousands of people read his columns, and the Columbia Journalism Review, in a story by David Uberti published earlier this year, called him “one of the defining commentators on politics and race in the Trump era.”
Bouie is very active on Twitter (@jbouie), where his more than 266,000 followers get a regular dose of his thoughtful perspective on political and social issues national, international, and local (he lives in Charlottesville), mixed in with opinions about books, TV, and cereal (he recently opined that Cinnamon Toast Crunch Churros cereal is superior to regular Cinnamon Toast Crunch. They don’t get soggy right away, he says. “Because they have more surface area, they don’t take in milk as quickly”). Occasionally, he shares a photograph.
Bouie is a much more active photographer than his Twitter—or his Instagram profile, “New York Times columnist. Sometimes photographer”—would suggest. When Andrea Douglas, executive director of the Jefferson School African American Heritage Center, came across Bouie’s photography on Instagram, she was struck by his interest in landscape and curious about “the relationship of that visual language” in the larger context of his critical thinking and writing. Douglas sees Bouie’s photography as allowing his audience “a way to move into another sphere of engaging with his mind.”
When Douglas texted Bouie with an exhibition offer, Bouie agreed right away, though he wasn’t sure what photos he’d show. He’d been pursuing photography for years, but he hadn’t yet thought of it as something that could, or would, be seen beyond social media. “I don’t necessarily think of myself as an artist, in that way,” he says. “Even though I share lots of photos and every so often I think, ‘hey, that’s a strong image.’”
Being asked to exhibit his photography was “intimidating…which is a funny thing to say, because my day job is writing opinion pieces for The New York Times,” says Bouie. “A shocking number of people read these things. But for whatever reason, I can deal with that psychologically. Presenting my photographs to people? Much more intimidating.”
He says his writing, which focuses on “American history and the history of racism and class,” has “been described as a little opaque, and not entirely scrutable. And the photography is, in a real way, something that is much more personal.”
Of course it is. Photography shows where the artist has been, what he concerns himself with, what catches his eye, what he’s thinking about. It can say a lot about the person who stopped in his tracks, raised the camera to one eye, squinted through the viewfinder, and clicked the button. That’s not nothing.
A hotel in Boley, Oklahoma, one of the images from Bouie’s exhibit, “Simply: The Black Towns.”
Like most people, Bouie first encountered photography casually, using point-and-shoot and disposable cameras. He started pointing and shooting with more intention after graduating from UVA in 2009 with a degree in government and political and social thought, while working odd jobs at the Miller Center of Public Affairs. One of those odd jobs was taking photos at the center’s events, and Bouie was allowed to take the digital SLR camera and lens home to play with after-hours.
Not long after, Bouie started working as a journalist. He bought his own slick digital camera and used it, again, as most people would: to take snapshots on personal and work trips, “nothing very serious,” he says. And then his now mother-in-law gave him a film SLR camera.
Shooting film on an all-manual camera got Bouie thinking about the art of photography. Bouie says the “finiteness” of having, say, 36 exposures in a single roll of 35-millimeter film, made him contemplate what he wanted to photograph: If he had just 36 exposures, which 36 did he want to capture? And why? Photography was no longer just pointing and shooting.
Bouie was living in Washington, D.C., at the time, and he started the habit of taking his camera everywhere he went. He’d wander around downtown D.C. to practice framing shots, spotting interesting portrait subjects and getting comfortable asking complete strangers if he could take their picture. In 2017, he signed up for darkroom classes at Capitol Hill Arts Workshop to learn how to develop film and make his own prints.
His teacher, Katherine Akey, was immediately struck by his “passion for the medium. He constantly wanted to try new things, new ways of framing, new cameras, new darkroom applications. That kind of enthusiasm allows for a really fast pace of growth and exploration, like compost on a garden,” says Akey.
Soon, Bouie was spending eight hours a week in the darkroom, developing not just film but his eye.
“I still have a hard time saying that I have any subject,” says Bouie, who, at 32, is young, still new to the medium, and therefore in the process of defining his perspective as a photographer. But he has noticed that there are a few things that always catch his attention: geometries (particularly man-made geometries), symmetry, interplay of light and shadow. He shoots almost exclusively with normal lenses, “something that captures what the human eye sees or focuses on,” says Bouie.
He likes “old stuff.” Maybe that’s cliché, he says—lots of people like old stuff—but he totally gets why. Old stuff is undeniably compelling. For Bouie, the draw is two-fold: it’s the architecture itself and “trying to imagine what something would have looked like when it was loved. When people were doing the best they [could] to maintain it.” He likes thinking about how (and why) a building or an object that was once so lovingly created and maintained, has fallen into disrepair.
“This is a little morbid,” he adds, but there’s something fascinating about thinking about that cycle of care and neglect, of moving on, “as an inevitable thing. And there’s some beauty in that inevitability.”
He prefers to shoot in black and white, in part because he finds color film distracting, but also because, in his opinion, black and white film helps him better emphasize all those aspects that catch his eye: shape, shadow, story.
Bouie’s growing desire to create an intentional body of photographic works collided, “fortuitously,” he says, with his curiosity about the black towns and Douglas’ suggestion for an exhibition.
It was also a chance to combine, in a very concrete way, his journalistic interests with his photographic ones.
At first glance, these photographs might look and feel familiar: black and white images of buildings in various states of disrepair. But the viewer almost certainly has not seen these places, and has not heard the story Bouie’s photographs tell.
After the Civil War, tens of thousands of free blacks migrated to Kansas, which was known for being an anti-slavery state during the war, and “relatively friendlier to free blacks,” says Bouie. And when the Oklahoma Territory opened up in the 1890s (the federal government confiscated some 2 million acres of land from Native American tribes there in 1866), a new wave of black settlers moved there, too, fleeing the oppression and racial terror of the post-Reconstruction South.
The movement was led by two of the black men who had spearheaded the migration to Kansas—William Eagleton, a newspaperman, and Edward P. McCabe, a politician and businessman. Bouie purposefully said their names during his May 11 artist talk for the opening of “Simply: The Black Towns” at the JSAAHC, and read from one of the advertisements in Eagleton’s paper: “Give yourself a new start. Give yourselves and children new chances in a new land, where you will not be molested. Where you will be able to think and vote as you please.”
Bouie also read one of McCabe’s—“Here in Oklahoma, the negro can rest from mob law. He can be secure from every ill of Southern policies”—and a comment from an ordinary person, made in the 1890s: “We as a people believed that Africa is the place. But to get from under bondage, we are thinking Oklahoma, as this is our nearest place to safety.”
Black Southerners were willing to set out for a new land to attain some measure of freedom. What’s interesting, said Bouie during his artist talk, is “that this is the story of Western settlement of the United States in general.”
By 1900, black farmers owned and farmed many thousands of acres of land in the Midwest, and settlers founded more than 30 towns in Oklahoma alone, most of them scattered around the eastern part of the territory. They built homes, churches, schools, hotels, businesses, all with the hope that if they proved themselves hard workers who had attained an amount of political and economic freedom, white people would take notice and extend full rights to black people.
“Think about the people who made the decision to leave the South” and move west, says Douglas. Tens of thousands of people. “The quality and the quantity of that aspiration, it cannot be missed.”
The towns themselves were (and still are) very tidy and orderly, intentionally laid out on grids and full of “beautiful, stately buildings that were showcasing the ability of the people who came here to prosper and survive, and to make something out of what was really nothing,” says Bouie.
The prosperity wouldn’t last. In 1907, Oklahoma became a state, Jim Crow became law of the land, and the racism these people tried to escape in the South caught up to them. Poor weather conditions in the late 1900s meant crop failures for the farmers, and, because of Jim Crow, black farmers couldn’t get the government assistance they needed to weather the economic and literal storm. When the Great Depression hit in the late 1920s and ’30s, black business owners faced extraordinary hardship for similar reasons, and it was “game over for most of these places,” explains Bouie, as many people left the all-black towns for bigger cities like Tulsa and Oklahoma City, once again in search of a better life.
By the 1950s, just 20 of the black towns remained; today, 13. Boley is the largest of them, with an estimated 1,183 residents, and the others have a few hundred residents apiece, mostly older folks, says Bouie, who spoke with a few people in each town he visited: fire chiefs, pastors, people standing near him on the sidewalk.
Boley’s Country Store. Photo: Jamelle Bouie
Bouie sees his photographs of these towns as his contribution, however large or small, to public awareness of them, the people, their history. He sees it as nothing more.
“My conception of myself and what I’m doing [with these photos] is not nearly grand enough to think that I’m preserving this in any sense,” says Bouie, who is also working on an essay about his Oklahoma trip for the Times. He wants people to look at the photograph of Pearlie’s gravestone in Lima, Oklahoma, and see that she died rather young, that she was the wife of Edwards, and maybe think about who Pearlie was and what her life would have been like.
He wants people to look at the photo of Lima’s Rosenwald School, and understand that in the middle of Oklahoma, people once built, with their own hands, a beautiful school in which to educate their children, in a town that they themselves created with the hope of building a better, more prosperous life for themselves and their children. He wants people to think about what it means that the structures he’s photographed are still standing, and that people still live in these towns.
Bouie says that in this way, his photography is not necessarily unlike his writing: he approached this exhibition much as he approaches his New York Times opinion pieces, as works of “considered perspective.” In “Simply: The Black Towns,” he says he is “clearly an observer” offering his own perspective on these towns, a perspective that he says the viewer “should not necessarily take as the perspective on these places.”
Jamelle Bouie. Photo by Eze Amos
Photography teacher Akey still follows (via Instagram) Bouie’s lens, its view encompassing more than the black towns of Oklahoma, and including the built landscapes of Charlottesville, Richmond, Asheville, Seattle, and elsewhere. Akey says of Bouie’s overall body of work: “I think his gaze—and that of his camera—is often very loving and lingering while not giving in to the dark mysticism of Southern landscapes wholesale. I think Southern artists’ relationships to our heritage, land, and mythology is ripe for this kind of change, a change that is evident in Jamelle’s work.”
In hanging the exhibition, Douglas and Bouie chose to present the photographs unframed. Together, the pictures “tell a really meaningful and poignant story,” says Douglas, one that should not be glazed over by frame glass, or anything else. The photos present “a discourse about African American space, a discourse about the past, and what remains,” she adds. “You want that feel to be unobstructed.”
In tracking down this history, these places, says Douglas, Bouie “causes us to understand what it means to reclaim an African American story, the importance and the implication of that work in this moment,” in creating for everyone “a more complete narrative.” And, she adds, this is just the beginning for him as a photographer.
Bouie chose to tell a simplified version of the history on the exhibition tag that introduces the show, and has labeled each photograph with a concise marker of what we’re looking at: “A now-defunct general store for Boley,” or “A resident of Tatums rides his bike down one of the pathways leading to the highway.”
He gives bits and pieces of the history, perhaps so that the viewer can practice seeing what was, and what is. And maybe in that process, they too will get something stuck in their craw.
The exhibition is a different way of presenting the themes Bouie explores in his writing, Douglas says, “this sort of interesting, nuanced, American narrative. And [he is] trying to bring ideas to the [forefront], and a perspective that is not mainstream. And so these places are not mainstream places. They’re off the beaten path. And in some ways, their survival is heroic.”
The story Bouie tells with “Simply: The Black Towns,” with his careful attention to those landscapes, is a “testament to the hope people brought to this, and the story of how these places declined, which is an economic story,” he says. “But also, it’s a story about racism, which says something about the difficulty of trying to build a stable life for oneself in a racist society when you ultimately cannot really escape that.”
That is a story, he says, that’s “extremely American.”
Bolanle Adeboye combines original artwork and digital collage in a unique show of light boxes at Live Arts. Photo by Martyn Kyle
Our ability to look at art—to see color, shape, texture—comes from light.
We’ll spare you an in-depth science lesson, but most basically, light reflects off objects and into the eye. Cells in the retina (at the back of the eye) convert light into electrical impulses, which the optic nerve sends to the brain. The brain then produces the image we see.
“It all derives from light,” says visual artist Bolanle Adeboye. “I’m just fascinated by it.”
Adeboye is always painting light: the way it falls across a child’s cheek, the way it flickers in the night sky, how it traverses the surface of a bubble. And in her newest works, 11 light box paintings currently on view at Live Arts, light illuminates not just these paintings, but the path of her creative journey.
For this untitled series, Adeboye scanned a number of her original paintings and digitally collaged them together into new vignettes. She had the resulting images printed onto backlit film, a thin, transparent plastic material commonly used for those glowing fast-food menus and bus station advertisements. Once she had the prints, she slid them into light boxes—essentially low-profile flat panel ceiling lights ubiquitous in office buildings—for display on the second and third floors of Live Arts, between the large windows overlooking Water Street.
Those familiar with Adeboye’s work will see that many of her usual motifs—sunrises, sunsets, night skies, water, bubbles, forest scenes, flowers, trees, children—are present in this series, combined in new ways, to tell new stories.
In “Park Kids,” a little girl spray paints a sign near a parking garage, a water tower looming large in the background. A little boy kneels on the ground near a sapling growing out of a crack in the pavement—has he planted it, or broken the pavement to make room for its growth? In their eyes, all it takes to turn a parking lot into a park is to “declare it,” says Adeboye. Spray paint the sign and nurture the tree, to make it so. “In real life, nothing is that simple, but the way kids approach problems simplifies them in a way that I think is beautiful, even if it’s not entirely practical,” she says. “And that’s what art is, pretty much.”
Children often create with boundless emotion and without self-consciousness, says Adeboye, and she finds that inspiring—painting children is her constant reminder to do the same.
One example is “Dawn Soon,” which Adeboye made in the wake of her friend (local sculptor) Gabe Allan’s death in March of this year. In it, a transparent, headless man walks alone at night down a thickly wooded path. Adeboye’s not sure why the man has no head—it just happened while she was making it—but she knows the piece is about losing oneself “to the big expanse.” There’s something foreboding and dark about it, she says, but there’s a lot of light, and lightness, too.
As Adeboye created these works—paintings digitized and essentially presented on screens—she says she thought a lot about 3D and special effects used in movies and television, how they “get more and more and more and more intense, with all the motion.” At first glance, the light boxes look like screens. A viewer might expect the moon in “The Players” to spin like a disco ball. Or for the bubbles in the “Sink and Swim” diptych to float to the surface outside the frame as the nearby clusters of neon flowers rock back and forth in the tide. The images are visually still, but we expect them to move, and Adeboye’s interested in that dissonance.
She wondered about the power of having one moment, rather than a whole series of moments, to tell a story. “It’s an exercise in forcing me to try and figure it out: If you’re only going to do one moment, it has to be the right moment,” she says.
And so Adeboye’s work lights up moments that stir plenty of intellectual and emotional movement, a phenomenon of light that is not exactly explicable by science.
What’s more, this experimental series has sparked new creative movement for the artist. Adeboye’s found that she likes working digitally. She can dial down the cyan and boost the magenta on a flower petal and decide whether she likes it or not before hitting delete, a freedom that’s practically impossible to explore in paint. But she can’t imagine leaving painting behind entirely.
“Ideally, I’d always want to ride the line between the two,” says Adeboye, adding that the light box pieces work precisely because the textures are created physically, with paint and the painting surface. The combination of digital and physical media opens up a rather free, very wide, playful world that Adeboye’s game to romp around.
“At this point, I’m just trusting that none of this stuff is a destination,” she says about the light boxes and what viewers might see in her future shows. “The path is so much longer.”
Bolanle Adeboye combines original artwork and digital collage in a unique show of light boxes at Live Arts. She’ll have a closing reception, with a performance by cellist (and Adeboye’s housemate) Wes Swing, on June 8.
A group of UVA students is writing and producing “Erasmus Dagger: An Intergalactic Teleplay,” a radio drama podcast available for listening on major platforms. They have four episodes up now, and after taking a break for the summer, will be back in the fall with more. Image: Amy and Jackson Smith
The sound of spurred boots scuff-clicking across a creaky wooden floor is what did it for third-year UVA student Jess Miller. Sitting alone in front of his laptop, headphones on, ears alert, he’d sifted through a digital library of sound effects to find the right one, the noise that would let the listener of his new podcast know that the sheriff was sizing up the saloon…and its new-in-town owner.
Using audio editing software, Miller dropped the effect into place, and when he listened back, he was convinced: There he was, with the sheriff, in the saloon, on the frontier. In that moment, Miller realized that he could create an entire world with sound alone.
Of course, he knew he wasn’t the first to do it. He’d studied radio dramas, and knew how wildly popular they were in the first half of the 20th century.
And some of them were pretty well done: On October 30, 1938, an adaptation of H.G. Wells’ 1898 novel TheWar of the Worlds, narrated by Orson Welles for his weekly CBS program “The Mercury Theatre on the Air,” managed to convince a significant number of listeners that Martians were invading Earth.
By the 1960s, television caused radio dramas to decline, but the form never went away entirely—in the 1980s and ’90s, the three original Star Wars films were adapted for radio, and NPR’s “Prairie Home Companion” had plenty of dramatic sketches, to name a few.
Inspired by the challenge of audio storytelling (and bored with the proliferation of nonfiction podcasts on topics like economics), Miller, along with playwright Bob Lynch, decided to write an original radio drama podcast—and “Erasmus Dagger: An Intergalactic Teleplay” was born.
“The story tells itself,” quips Lynch.
Here’s the gist: It’s the year 2999. Sheriff Erasmus Dagger and his half-alien sidekick Reginald Zorplon fight to defend their frontier town of New Chicago from evil villain Temeritous “Hotpants” Orlando, who threatens to poison the town’s water supply (and torch his nemeses’ pants). But that’s not all: Much to his surly landlady’s chagrin, Erasmus—the kind of guy who takes eight-hour naps—can’t seem to pay his rent on time…and he’s in love with Anne, femme fatale and proprietor of the local saloon.
It’s “a parody of, and a love letter to, all these old sci-fi, western, and detective dramas,” says Miller, who voices the announcer and the landlady, and writes all of the scripts along with Lynch, who voices Erasmus. Miller and Lynch recruited fellow Shakespeare on the Lawn actors to voice other characters.
“It’s thrillingly imaginative,” says Mailie-Rose Smith, who voices Anne. The actors’ delivery of the words, in combination with well-chosen and well-placed sound effects, give the listener a basic mental picture of what’s going on, and for the rest, “you have to imagine,” she says. “There’s something really exciting in relying on your mind to do that for you.”
The focus on language and word choice affords ample opportunity for clever wordplay that might get lost in a busy visual landscape (listen closely for Anne’s full name). The writers can invent invisible characters (technically, all the characters are invisible), or write an episode around a wild train robbery, situations that would be nearly impossible to create visually with the resources available to the “Erasmus Dagger” crew.
In combining so many genres, they’re able to draw upon well-known tropes for plot and comedic effect.“We’re celebrating and satirizing at the same time,” says Miller. “There’s really no limit to the kinds of stories we can tell.”
Friends keep asking to voice bit parts, and Miller and Lynch are happy to oblige. These minor characters (like Manners, the British butler) add interesting texture to the story. And, for what it’s worth, they have a list of dream guests that include the ghost of Sam Shepard, UVA Dean of Students Allen Groves, politics professor Larry Sabato, physics professor Lou Bloomfield, and English professor Elizabeth Fowler. If UVA President Jim Ryan is game, they have a part in mind for him, too: Erasmus’ supervisor.
They don’t expect “Erasmus Dagger” to be a podcast sensation, or revolutionize the radio drama genre. Maybe it’ll be the second-biggest podcast in America, says Lynch.
Top 10 at least, retorts Jakob Cansler, voice of “Hotpants” Orlando.
Right now, there aren’t many scripted fictional podcasts in production (“Homecoming,” “Welcome to Night Vale,” “The Truth,” and “Limetown” are a few of the more popular ones), as Cansler learned when putting the podcast on Apple Music, Spotify, and other platforms; there wasn’t even a “scripted drama” genre option to tag, he says. And so in making “Erasmus Dagger,” says Cansler, “we’re saying, this is a form of storytelling that we should keep around. We shouldn’t forget about it.”
“It’s so fascinating that audiences can suspend their disbelief this much, and really believe that all of this is happening, when it’s just a few of us sitting in this room for an hour and a half, recording it,” says Miller.
“We want to tell stories,” adds Lynch, “interesting stories, good stories that people get a lot of pleasure out of listening to.”
And they’re having a hell of a good time doing it.
Electric scooters: handy transit alternative or public nuisance? Photo: Eze Amos
They appeared overnight the first Monday in December of 2018, long-necked robots on wheels, lurking in neat rows of three or four on street corners all over town.
Within a few days, the motorized scooters, which don’t have designated docking stations, were everywhere, and wherever.
Now, about five months in to the City of Charlottesville’s electric scooter pilot program with two different companies (Lime and Bird), opinions about the zippy modes of transportation are mixed.
For some, the scooters provide a little perplexing levity. Poet Raven Mack says that they’re always popping up at the bottom of a hill near his Hogwaller home. “[There’s] a steady supply of two to 12 that ebbs and flows, some of which have laid knocked over in the bushes for weeks at a time,” he says. “My children and I joke that they just live there, and breed, and the [kid scooters] run off to have their own lives somewhere else in town.”
The Instagram account @wheresmyscooter is devoted to locally-shot pictures of scooters “where they don’t belong”: discarded on train tracks, broken into pieces on dimly lit sidewalks, stuffed in trash cans.
But others have found the Birds and Limes a handy new means of transport. Ross Schiller, a teacher who also works at a restaurant on the Downtown Mall, recently forgot his glasses in his car before working a restaurant shift. He used a scooter to get to his car—which he has to park pretty far from the mall—and back to the restaurant in just a few minutes, without breaking a sweat or missing a moment of his serving shift.
Once you download the Lime or Bird app, you can use it to locate a nearby scooter. Scan the QR code to “unlock” it for $1, and ride for 15 cents a minute. When you’ve arrived at your destination, use the app to “lock” the scooter and leave it for the next rider.
At night, the scooters are collected and recharged, then put back out in the morning.
A few miles scooter ride costs a few dollars, so it’s cheaper than taking a Lyft or an Uber, and it’s faster than walking. There’s little to no wait time, not to mention more flexibility, so scooting can be more convenient than taking a bus.
While it’s unclear how many people are using the scooters (Lime says it won’t have numbers until the scooters have been in town for a year, and Bird didn’t respond to a request for info), it seems that almost everyone has an opinion.
“I find them a great alternative to public transportation, especially when you don’t want to or can’t drive,” says Ike Anderson, membership coordinator and dance instructor at the Music Resource Center, who says he rides Lime scooters often.
But the account administrator of @wheresmyscooter, who asked to remain anonymous, is opposed to the scooters for a number of reasons, namely that “they allow those with more disposable income to have access to yet another transit service that is inherently exclusionary.”
“We should all be supporting more robust publicly funded transit that serves working-class people and for those without access to transit of their own,” the administrator says. And indeed, scooter usage begins with a smart phone which, let’s face it, is still a luxury item.
Alan Goffinski, director of The Bridge Progressive Arts Initiative, says he understands folks’ concerns about the scooters but welcomes any alternative to a car. “To those who are concerned with them littering the landscape, I say, ‘What about cars’? We devote half the land in any given city to parking space,” he says.
Others are alarmed by personal safety issues, such as people riding scooters on the sidewalks and the Downtown Mall (which isn’t actually allowed), texting while scooting, scooting without a helmet, or scooting while drunk. And increasingly, people are voicing concern over scooters obstructing sidewalks for those who use wheelchairs or other mobility aids to get around.
Docking stations or designated scooter parking areas might help, and a city-wide survey, which collected a couple thousand responses and closed May 1, may suggest more solutions. The pilot program ends July 31, so city councilors must decide before then whether the scooters stay or get the boot. But for now, the jury’s still out.
Scooter tutor
The city has a web page dedicated to scooter regulations and safety suggestions, but we’re left wondering if riders are actually aware of the rules. Here are the basics:
Scooters must be ridden on streets, not on sidewalks or trails (or the Downtown Mall), and riders have to abide by the same laws as motor vehicle drivers in terms of posted traffic regulations, signs, and signals.
When parking your scooter, do not block travel lanes, driveways, fire hydrants, walkways, sidewalk curb ramps, pedestrian call buttons, bus stops, or entrances to buildings (including ramp and walkway railings and ADA door push buttons).
For crying out loud, don’t text and scoot, or drink and scoot. And wear a helmet—that’s a must if you’re under 14, and a should for everyone else.
The Lua Project presents Mexilachian Son: New Songs for An Emerging Virginia Culture on May 11 at Luray’s Warehouse Art Gallery, and on May 12 at McGuffey Art Center. Image: Martyn Kyle
The fandango in Veracruz felt familiar to Estela Diaz Knott.
Under a tent, musicians strummed guitar-shaped instruments of different pitches—requintos, jaranas, and leonas. With their feet, they stomped and scuffed rhythms on tarimas, rectangular wooden platforms that serve as both stage and percussive instrument. They mixed centuries-old verses with ones they made up in the moment. They played son jarocho, a folk style of Mexican son, or song, from the region.
As they played and sang, their audience danced, ate, drank, and laughed. Music and voices drifted through the air, mingled with the smell of smoked carnitas on the grill, and transported Knott, who was there to perform, more than 2,000 miles north, to her hometown of Luray, Virginia.
“Holy shit,” Knott said excitedly to her bandmate Dave Berzonsky. The fandango felt like an Appalachian fiddle festival.
For Knott, the daughter of an indigenous Mexican woman from Juarez, Mexico, and a Scotch-Irish-American man from Virginia, it felt like her two cultures were coming together. Knott and Berzonsky were inspired to blend the music of Veracruz with the music of Appalachia, and they’ve spent the last two decades doing exactly that.
In two performances this weekend, the pair, who live in Charlottesville and perform as Lua Project, will share their newest music in a Virginia Humanities-sponsored project, Mexilachian Son: New Songs for An Emerging Virginia Culture. They’ll be joined by Christen Hubbard on mandolin and fiddle, Matty Metcalfe on accordion and banjo, and Zenen Zeferino Huervo, a poet and singer from Veracruz, on vocals and jarana.
The Mexilachian Son project grew out of a previous Virginia Humanities grant in which Knott and Berzonsky, along with Zeferino and dancer Julia del Palacio, sought to introduce son jarocho music to Appalachian Virginia. This time around, they’re examining how the poetry of son jarocho compares to the poetry of the English, or Appalachian, ballad.
With Latinx immigrants coming to the United States, “This form of music, san jarocho, is beginning to disseminate itself” here says Berzonsky. “And one way to allow that style of music to re-plant itself in a new country is to write stories about this country.”
Knott, Berzonsky, and Zeferino interviewed Latinx immigrants in the Shenandoah Valley and used their stories to write new verses for “La Guacamaya” and “Las Poblanas,” two songs in the son jarocho tradition that have been sung for at least 300 hundred years.
Musically, it wasn’t easy. Appalachian and son jarocho music are based on two different core rhythmic feels (four beats for Appalachian, three beats for son jarocho), and that makes vocal phrasing (in two languages) “rather tricky,” says Knott.
Thematically, they had more freedom. “La Guacamaya” is the word for the blue macaw and is a metaphor for a beautiful woman, and Lua Project’s version celebrates beauty in the Shenandoah Valley, in the form of the happiness of the Peralta Manzanares family, the flowers of Monticello, and apples (not only is “Manzanares” a word for “apple picker,” but co-writer Zeferino visited Virginia during the apple harvest).
“Las Poblanas” is a song about healing. Lua Project’s version examines the political conflict between the Scotch-Irish settlers—who came to the Valley as indentured servants, were promised land after serving their term, then denied that land, over and over again—and the new immigrants, Latinos who come to America to flee violence and poverty and end up working the harsh, emotionally and physically laborious jobs that no American wants to do. It’s a song about being “needed but not wanted…seen but not heard,” they say, and how an older generation’s work and sacrifice can inspire and sustain a younger generation’s dreams.
Through song, these stories are heard and retold, which has been particularly meaningful for Knott, who says that for most of her life, she felt as though she lived on a bridge, running back and forth between Mexican and American cultures, being both and yet neither. Through music, she’s come to realize that she is not on the bridge, she is the bridge. “Bringing those two beautiful, rich, amazing cultures that live in me together is why I choose to make my life’s work through music,” she says.
“I want to sing on behalf of the voiceless, or the ancestor, or the widow too broken to sing,” adds Berzonsky. “…when you hear the songs, you realize the differences among us are not great…that what divides us is often an illusion concocted by those that benefit from that division.”
And with Mexilachian Son, Lua Project insists there’s much to celebrate, too, and in fandango style. “The nature, the cuisine, the music. I want to thread these things together, to bind them, so that we waken ourselves to our shared destiny, our common humanity,” says Berzonsky.
“I realize this is an elevated speech for a couple that writes songs, but nonetheless, that’s the light we are trying to put out into the world.”
Ros Casey's "In Those Days There Was No River Here (A parable in 8 pictures)" is on view at Chroma Projects gallery through the month of May. Chroma has a new location, on the main floor of Vault Virginia, the entrance of which is off Third Street SE, directly across from The Front Porch. Photo by Amy Jackson Smith
Ros Casey gets deep at Chroma
It was only toward the end of painting her latest body of work that Ros Casey understood what it was all about: rising water.
The scenes in her series, “In Those Days There Was No River Here (A parable in 8 pictures),” on view at Chroma Projects gallery this month, are “cast into the future,” says Casey, into a post-disaster world in which humans and animals both wild and domesticated exist in close proximity with one another.
Each painting includes at least one animal, “which seems to feel that whatever has happened has been going on for a long time”; one child, “wanting reassurance of some kind”; and one adult, “implicated and exhausted, somewhat resigned” when faced with the reality of how, by not acknowledging or acting upon the threat of climate change and rising sea levels, he failed to secure a future for his children, says Casey.
The creatures’ expressions drive the series, and Casey chose to render their sadness in serene, undramatic fashion in order to better convey a sense of tragedy. “There’s something really powerful about a passive expression, because it provides a lot more ambiguity, in terms of the interpretation of the story,” she says. “And it contains so much turmoil.”
Casey painted with vivid hues like cadmium red and cobalt blue that create a sort of “irradiated light that feels kind of toxic and poisonous,” she says. The colors, like the world they shape on Casey’s canvases, are so intense that the witness cannot help but look, even though they’re almost too much to bear.
Says Casey, “I’m not so interested in the cataclysmic, movie version of these events as I was in the settling-in phase of the disaster, once it had already happened, and we’re there, and we’re just sort of used to this now.”
Openings May 3
The Bridge PAI 209 Monticello Rd. The Revel auction preview, featuring work by local artists Ryan Trott, Brian Knox, Jum Jirapan, Jesse Wells, Thomas Dean, Sahara Clemons, Allyson Mellberg Taylor, Jeremy Taylor, and others. 5:30pm.
Central Library 201 E. Market St. “The Art of Resilience and Recovery,” a show of hundreds of individually crafted banners showcasing journeys to wellness in the community. 5-7pm.
Chroma Projects InsideVault Virginia, Third Street SE. “In Those Days There Was No River Here (A parable in 8 pictures),” by Rosamond Casey. 5-7pm.
CitySpace 100 Fifth St. NE. Charlottesville City School’s ArtQuest student gallery exhibit. 5:30-7pm.
C’ville Arts Cooperative Gallery 118 E. Main St., Downtown Mall. “The Magic of Fusion,” featuring works in fused glass by Mary Ellen Larkins. 6-8pm.
Dovetail Design & Cabinetry 309 E. Water St. “Fancy of Feast,” acrylic paintings on canvas by Robin Harris. 5-7pm.
Fellini’s 200 Market St. “Que Vivan Los Animales,” an exhibition of works in acrylic, pen, and watercolor by Natalie Reyes. 5:30-7pm.
The Garage 100 E. Jefferson St. “Diaspora,” a series of paintings by Kathleen Free, inspired by people geographically displaced, and the objects and places left behind. 5-7pm.
IX Art Park 522 Second St. SE. ArtIX, featuring 50 pieces of artwork created by 50 different local artists. 7:30pm-midnight.
McGuffey Art Center 201 Second St. NW. In the Sarah B. Smith Gallery, “Melting Point: Contemporary Encaustic Works,” a selection of pieces by mid-Atlantic artists who use encaustic in their work in dynamic ways; in the Downstairs North Hall Gallery, “Still,” oil paintings by Kelly Oakes; in the Downstairs South Hall Gallery, “unknown thoughts,” a Maddie Rhondeau-Rhodes’ show exploring memory as it slips between the real and the imagined; in the Upstairs North and South Hall Galleries, the annual local high school exhibition. 5:30-7:30pm.
Milli Coffee Roasters 400 Preston Ave. “The Long Table,” featuring John Borgquist’s photography of the Milli community. 7-10pm.
New Dominion Bookshop 404 E. Main St., Downtown Mall. “The Art of Nina Thompson,” an exhibition of oil paintings. 5-7pm.
Peacock Auto Service 205 Meade Ave. “The Human Head,” studies in oil and charcoal by Vanthi Nguyen. 6-8pm.
Roy Wheeler Realty Co. 404 Eighth St. NE. An exhibition of experimental works in oil, watercolor, and digital formats by Blake Hurt; and a show of dry pastels on sanded paper by Nancy Galloway. 5-7:30pm.
Spring Street Boutique 107 W. Main St., Downtown Mall. “Land and Sea,” featuring small and large works by Abby Ober. 6-8pm.
Studio IX 969 Second St. SE. “Turbulent Season,” painter Dave Moore’s exploration of springtime as a time of transition, growth, and rebirth. 5:30-7:30pm.
Top Knot Studio 103 Fifth St. SE. “May Flowers,” a show of Cary Oliva’s dream-like floral imagery created with Polaroid transfers. 5:30-7:30pm.
VMDO Architects 200 E. Market St. An exhibition of drawings made by Melissa Goldman, Matt Johnson, Jack Hatcher, Matthew Gordon, and Michael Tucker, UVA’s architectural robotics research group. 5:30-7:30pm.
Welcome Gallery 114 Third St. NE. “Garden Variety,” featuring acrylic works on vinyl by Lou Haney. 5-7:30pm.
WriterHouse 508 Dale Ave. An exhibition of photography by David Cook. 5-7pm.
WVTF RadioIQ 216 W. Water St. “Sediment,” featuring a collection of Amanda Smith’s encaustic paintings and monotypes that evoke escape into tiny worlds. 5-7pm.
Other April shows
Annie Gould Gallery 109 S. Main St., Gordonsville. A show of paintings by Jane Skafte and Sue DuFour.
Art on the Trax 5784 Three Notch’d Rd., Crozet. “The Quiet of Nature,” oil paintings and intaglio prints by Tom Tartaglino. Opens May 11, 2-4pm.
Buck Mountain Episcopal Church 4133 Earlysville Rd., Earlysville. “Energized Spring,” featuring works in melton crayon by Sara Gondwe.
Carpediem Exhibit 1429 E. High St. A multimedia rotating, expanding exhibit of works by local, regional, and out-of-state artists.
The Center 491 Hillsdale Dr. “Being in the Moment,” a show of paintings by Judith Ely.
Commonwealth Restaurant 422 E. Main St., Downtown Mall. “Linear Motion,” featuring illustrations by Martin Phillips.
Connaughton Gallery McIntire School of Commerce at UVA. “Looking In and Looking Out,” featuring works in watercolor, pen, and ink on canvas by Kaki Dimock, and works in acrylic on canvas by Brittany Fan. Opens March 18.
Crozet Artisan Depot 571 Three Notch’d Rd., Crozet. “Being Outside,” a show of oil paintings by Linda Staiger.
The Fralin Museum of Art at UVA 155 Rugby Rd. Vanessa German’s installation, “sometimes.we.cannot.be.with.our.bodies”; “The Print Series in Bruegel’s Netherlands: Dutch and Flemish Works from the Permanent Collection”; “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; and “Oriforme” by Jean Arp.
Java Java 421 E. Main St., Downtown Mall. Acrylics and watercolors by Matalie Deane, and oils by Julia Kindred.
Jefferson School African American Heritage Center 233 Fourth St. NW. “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. Opens May 11, 6pm.
Kluge-Ruhe Aboriginal Art Collection 400 Worrell Dr. “Kent Morris: Unvanished,” a series of digitally constructed photographs that explores the relationship between contemporary Indigenous Australian identity and the modern built environment, through May 5; “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, opening May 14; and “Beyond Dreamings: The Rise of Indigenous Australian Art in the United States.”
Les Yeux du Monde 841 Wolf Trap Rd. “Places in Time,” new paintings inspired by Key West, Maine, and Staunton, Virginia, by Lincoln Perry; and “Interiors and Landscapes,” featuring oil and watercolor pieces by Kathryn Keller. Opens May 4, 4:30-6:30pm.
Live Arts 123 E. Water St. A show of light boxes by Bolanle Adeboye.
Second Street Gallery 115 Second St. SE. In the main gallery, “OBJECTify,” a joint show of work by painters Michael Fitts and Megan Read; and in the Dové Gallery, “Michelle Gagliano: Murmurations,” an exhibition of paintings that also features sculpture by Robert Strini. Through May 17.
Shenandoah Valley Art Center 122 S. Wayne Ave., Waynesboro. An exhibition of mixed media, photography, and film by Staunton artist Angus Carter. Opens May 4, 5-7pm.
Thomas Jefferson Memorial Church Unitarian-Universalist 717 Rugby Rd. “Painting to Heal the Soul,” featuring work by Marissa Minnerly.
