Author: erinohare

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Into the fold: Holly Renee Allen builds on family history in Appalachian Piece Meal

Holly Renee Allen premieres her new album, Appalachian Piece Meal, at The Front Porch on April 26. “It’s my coming home record, a project I’ve dreamt about for four years, maybe even a little longer,” she says. Photo by Eze Amos

Around 11 last Monday night, Holly Renee Allen could hear her son playing guitar in his room, picking out the notes to “House of the Rising Sun” and “Dueling Banjos.” As she listened to her 14-year-old work through the classic songs, she thought about the callouses on her own fingertips, the ones she started building as a teenager, holding six strings to her guitar’s fretboard.

When Allen kissed her son goodnight, she let him know she’d heard him. “Okay, I’d like for you to quit school in the eighth grade, take up the guitar, and go out on the road,” she joked.

Allen’s own story started in this same Stuarts Draft home, where she grew up in a musical family. Her father is a third-generation professional fiddler, her mother sang in the church choir, and growing up, Allen and her two sisters quickly discovered that, if you played an instrument, you didn’t have to wash dishes after supper. On Friday nights, Mr. Allen’s country band performed in local lodges and clubs, and Allen would join him for a song or two.

By age 17, she had been writing and performing her own songs for a few years, and she decided to give Nashville a go. She left home with her country-folk-Americana songs and a couple hundred dollars in her pocket, and established herself in songwriting circles in Nashville and Atlanta. She recorded with the late producer Johnny Sandlin (The Allman Brothers Band and Widespread Panic) and members of the Muscle Shoals Rhythm Section (also known as the Swampers).

On Friday, Allen plays a concert at The Front Porch to celebrate the release of her fifth album, Appalachian Piece Meal. She’ll be joined by Richard Smith, the record’s producer, on guitar; her sister Becky on vocals; Marc Lipson on bass; and Jim Taggart on fiddle and mandolin. Her friend Susan Munson opens the show.

“It’s my coming home record, a project I’ve dreamt about for four years, maybe even a little longer,” Allen says of Appalachian Piece Meal.

At first, Allen wanted to make it a regional project, almost like a compilation album of songs written and played by local artists. When that didn’t come to fruition, she aimed to do a project with her father, but it quickly became clear that her dad, who is 90 years old and still plays fiddle “wonderfully” at home, could not do an in-studio recording session.

Instead, she brought her musician friends —including fiddler Ted Lawhorn, one of Allen’s father’s fiddle students—into the studio with her. It took about two years to make the album, though some of the songs have been in Allen’s repertoire for decades.

Musically, Allen considers herself a songwriter first, and singer and guitarist second. “It’s the thing that I really enjoy doing. Sometimes it’s really easy, and sometimes it’s really hard…but wouldn’t it be cool to have one of those songs where you have a phrase, and that’s the song, and everybody knows it and sings it?” she asks with excitement.

Appalachian Piece Meal is an album about “bridging the gap” between generations, both emotionally and musically, says Allen. Her dad starts it off, via a recording he made in the 1980s on a 4-track reel-to-reel, when he was “100 percent himself,” says Allen.

She wrote “Matt’s Candy,” when she was 17, based on a family story. Allen’s great-grandfather was going to the store, and found a note pinned to his jacket asking him to bring his daughter some of her favorite confectioner’s treats: “Don’t forget Matt’s candy,” it read.

Hear “Matt’s Candy”

Another song, “Big Piney,” is a favorite of Allen’s. It’s the story of a woman who becomes pregnant after her moonshiner father prostitutes her out to his customers. Allen imagined what this woman must have gone through, and the judgment by the people in her small mountain town. That baby turned out to be a long-lost relative of Allen’s mother, a relative she didn’t know about until recently. It turns out, the moonshiner’s daughter had what Allen calls a “Hollywood ending”: She left the mountains, moved to Richmond, got married, and had more children.

Perhaps there’s something in “Big Piney,” too, about the importance of keeping hopes and dreams alive. Making a life in music hasn’t necessarily been easy for Allen. For one, women aren’t given the same opportunities in music as men, particularly when they’re over the age of 30. And while Allen’s working to change that with her Neon Angel Fest female songwriters’ showcase on May 11, it’s going to take much more to change an entire industry.

As a single mom working full-time and taking care of her parents, Allen doesn’t have as much time for music as she’d like. But she persists, for herself, for other women, for the stories carried on in her songs, and for the songs her son might someday play.

“My dream would be to have a big ol’ farmhouse somewhere, where musicians came and went, and I was steeped in music, and my kid could ride around on a tractor, and play guitar in the barn real loud,” she says with a laugh. “And I could write, and hear other people sing, and sing with other people…when you connect with other people doing it, whether it’s an audience or another musician, it feels like sacred ground.”

Holly Renee Allen premieres her new album, Appalachian Piece Meal, at The Front Porch on April 26.

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Birds of a feather: Barkindji artist Kent Morris looks to his past on Australian rooftops

Kent Morris’ “Unvanished” is at Kluge-Ruhe Aboriginal Art Collection through May 5. Photo by Tom Cogill

Kent Morris stands in the lobby of the Kluge-Ruhe Aboriginal Art Collection with a big grin on his face. He’s just in from a birding excursion through Charlottesville-area marshes, and swiping through photos on his phone: here’s a few of a bald eagle, and a few of its nest. Here’s one of a native bird perched in a budding tree, and one of Morris himself, standing in shin-deep water, his digital camera slung over his shoulder.

Morris, a Barkindji artist who lives and works in St. Kilda, an inner suburb of Melbourne, Australia, is in town for his photography exhibition “Unvanished,” on view at the Kluge-Ruhe through May 5. It’s his first full exhibition outside of Australia, and after showing a few more photos, he slips his phone into his pocket and heads into the gallery room.

Standing in the middle of the room, surrounded by colorful, geometric, symmetrical images, he asks if I know what I’m looking at. I do not.

“Birds on roofs!” he exclaims, his laughter echoing out of the gallery.

When I see it, I almost feel silly for not noticing it before—it’s right there.

Boon Wurrung (St Kilda) – Rainbow Lorikeet, 2017. Image courtesy of the artist

“I’m trying to make what’s unseen, seen,” says Morris. “Unvanished” is a story of journey and travel, of connections to country. It is a story of survival via forced adaptation, he says, a story of people whose cultures and histories have been wiped from the physical landscape and survived in objects (such as the shields Morris’ images reference) and in people.

Many Aboriginal language, tribal, and nation groups have strong connections to birds—spiritual, ecological—and with “Unvanished,” Morris adds one of shared experience. Like Aboriginal peoples, birds have been forced out of their habitats by Western culture and urbanization. They perch not on trees, but on roofs.

“We’ll start here,” says Morris, crossing the gallery to stand in front of “Barkindji (Bourke)-Magpie-lark,” an image of a black and white magpie-lark (or peewee) perched on a corrugated metal roof, a blue cable under its foot.

“This is shot on my country, on Barkindji country,” in what is now called Bourke, in the outback of northwestern New South Wales, says Morris.

The peewee is an important figure in the Barkindji creation story. Two traveling rainbow serpents knock the peewee out of his nest and chase him, and in their path leave two rivers, including the Darling River, the lifeblood of the Barkindji people.

While visiting family and walking Barkindji country, Morris spotted a peewee perched on the roof of the local bowling club, which has become a gathering place for Aboriginal peoples in the area. “It was a really classic moment, because, here is the creator, here now, on a contemporary place where we all gather and exchange stories and histories and meet to find each other,” he says.

Some of Morris’ paternal great great uncles and aunts were forcibly removed from their ancestral land by the government, placed on a truck and carted away; his father, like many other Aboriginal teenagers, was fostered by a white family. When Morris walks this land, he feels connected to it, and it pains him to see that there’s “really nothing to recognize” Aboriginal culture here.

Boon Wurrung (St Kilda) – Sulphur-crested Cockatoo, 2017. Image courtesy of the artist

What’s more, Western farming practices are destroying the Darling River. People today are not living in sync with nature, but we should reflect, deeply, on our relationship to the land upon which we live, and aim to live in balance with it, says Morris, explaining his use of mirroring and symmetry.

“Culture and knowledge has been, in areas, really fragmented and displaced,” he says, and his work aims to “piece it back together into something that is a whole.”

In another image there’s a blue-faced honeyeater on the roof of his sister’s house in Hervey Bay, in Queensland, on the land of the Butchulla people. The 10th image is of a corella on a roof in Broken Hill, the town where Morris’ father grew up. As Morris travels to maintain his ties to family, to country, he creates visible evidence to keep his culture strong.

Morris understands this duty as an artist, and as a Barkindji man. “You are part of something, he says. “You have responsibilities. Your ancestors are watching, your elders are watching.”

To people who have not been removed from their land or forced to give up their culture, the story Morris’ photography tells might seem remarkable. It is absolutely compelling, and Morris wants people to know it is not unique. It is imperative to acknowledge that this has been done not just to him and his family, he says, but to millions of people all over the world, including here in the Charlottesville area, where it happened to the people of the Monacan Indian Nation.

It is also imperative to acknowledge that many of these identities, these cultures, have not vanished. They have adapted, and art can be an easy way of getting people to begin to understand this.

“There’s a lot in these birds on roofs,” says Morris, his hearty laughter reverberating through the gallery. “I’m telling ya!”

Kent Morris’ “Unvanished” is at Kluge-Ruhe Aboriginal Art Collection through May 5.

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Ways and means: Inclusive hip-hop makes it to the stage at Nine Pillars festival

Local R&B singer Torele will perform at Rugged Arts x Nine Pillars All-LGBTQ+ Edition on Tuesday. Photo by Eze Amos

Hosting an all-LGBTQ+ hip-hop showcase has been on Remy St. Clair’s mind for a while now.

Over the past few years, while performing at various regional Pride events as rap duo Sons of Ichibei, St. Clair and Cullen “Fellowman” Wade kept hearing similar refrains from artists on these Pride bills:

“We’d love to…but we don’t have the means.”

“I’d love to…but there aren’t enough open artists in my city.”

And, perhaps most devastating, “it’d be great, but this kind of event wouldn’t be welcome in my city.”

It didn’t take long for St. Clair and Wade, who, along with a few other folks in town, book and run the Rugged Arts hip-hop showcase and the annual Nine Pillars Hiphop Cultural Fest (now in its third year), to realize that they have the means, enough open artists, and community support to put on this kind of showcase. On Tuesday night at Twisted Branch Tea Bazaar, Charlottesville’s first-ever all-LGBTQ+ hip-hop showcase will feature performances by Noah Page, Shamika Shardé, Torele, dogfuck, Sadeé, and DJ Angel Flowers.

This is the second year in a row that Nine Pillars and Rugged Arts have combined forces to break new ground in Charlottesville hip-hop: Last year, they hosted the city’s first-ever all-female hip-hop bill at the Music Resource Center. Artists everywhere are denied access to the stage or the recording booth because of their gender identity and sexuality, says St. Clair, “and that’s not fair.” In his opinion, it’s talent, the quality of the music, and the messages contained therein that matters. “We really want to be innovative and give those performers and those artists who are overshadowed,” or flat-out denied, the chance to perform, says St. Clair. “We want every artist to be empowered. And we want the community to take note.”

Rugged Arts has hosted regular hip-hop showcases in Charlottesville for nearly a decade now, and in that time, plenty of openly LGBTQ+ artists—including St. Clair, who hosts the showcase—have performed on the Rugged Arts stage. Torele, a local R&B singer on Tuesday night’s bill, is one of those artists. St. Clair saw Torele (who formerly performed as Not3s) at a Verbs & Vibes open mic a few years back and immediately invited him to the Rugged Arts stage. “It became like an addiction for me,” says Torele of the showcases. “I wanted to do it more and more. As an openly gay R&B artist, it was so nice to feel welcome, to have that space,” he says.

Not everyone is so welcoming. Torele says a few artists won’t work with him because of his sexuality, artists who “hold the stigma that it’s going to harsh their image if they work with someone in the LGBTQ+ community.” He wishes that weren’t the case, but his response is to “wish them the best and continue to do my own thing.” Prejudice against LGBTQ+ folks exist in our society, and so, by default, it exists in hip-hop. Artists like the ones on this bill, along with allies, are working to break it down and do away with it altogether.

Phil Green, a rapper who grew up in Charlottesville, now resides in Richmond, and performs under the moniker dogfuck, cites Richmond’s Ice Cream Social queer dance party as just one example. Ice Cream Social’s been going for about two years now (DJ Angel Flowers is a co-founder), and Green takes it as a sign that local music scenes are becoming more inclusive, even if that growth is incremental. The LGBTQ+ showcase indicates “that the [Charlottesville hip-hop] scene has finally sanctioned queer spaces,” says Green. What’s more, Green adds, it declares to artists and to the entire city, “hey, we want queer artists here. We want them to be seen and heard.” It’s an imperative message to put out there, says Green, who has a little something to add to it: “Respect queer artists, because it turns out, your heroes just might be them.”

Shamika Shardé will make her Rugged Arts debut in this particular showcase. Rapping has been a hobby of hers since she saw the legendary Lauryn Hill perform in Sister Act 2, but she’d never spit rhymes anywhere but her bedroom.

“I knew what I had to say was different from the rest,” says Shardé, and her music reflects that. Because of this, DJ SG and DJ Double U encouraged her to put her music out there, to share her talent and perspective with others. “I was told I have a talent, don’t waste it,” she says. And now that she knows she has a platform, she plans to make the most of it.

Make the most of Nine Pillars

Here’s what not to miss during the Nine Pillars Hiphop Cultural Fest:

Monday, April 22

CVille Freshman Class Youth Rap & Dance Competition

5pm, Jefferson School African American Heritage Center, 233 Fourth St. NW

Tuesday, April 23

Rugged Arts x Nine Pillars
All-LGBTQ+ Edition

8pm, Twisted Branch Tea Bazaar, 414 E. Main St.
Downtown Mall

Wednesday, April 24

Sally’s Kids Vol. 2:
An Oral History of
Charlottesville Hip-hop

Time TBD, WTJU 91.1 FM Studios, 2244 Ivy Rd.

Friday, April 26

Make the Cut DJ Battle

8pm, Music Resource Center, 105 Ridge St.

Saturday, April 27

Wargames Rap Battle

7pm, Champion Brewing Co., 324 Sixth St. SE

Sunday, April 28

Nine Pillars Annual Block Party

3pm, Champion Brewing Co., 324 Sixth St. SE

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Arts

It’s not personal: Federico Cuatlacuatl uses his story to open others

Indigenous artist Federico Cuatlacuatl, Tom Tom Festival Artist in Residence at The Bridge, paints a mural (design pictured) and opens an exhibition this week. Image courtesy the artist

Federico Cuatlacuatl began making art when he was 7 years old. It was a “survival instinct” that kicked in when his family moved from Cholula, Mexico, to Indiana.

“I knew like, two words of English, and I needed a way to communicate that I felt sad and depressed, and that I missed home, and that I didn’t feel good,” says Cuatlacuatl. Because he couldn’t express those feelings verbally to most of the people around him, he developed a visual language for it.

By high school, Cuatlacuatl was an active, prolific artist. Making work was a continuation of that survival instinct that kicked in when he was little, he says. Growing up undocumented, he knew that he had to work “toward something that would one day be fruitful,” he says.

“And that was my chance: to be an artist.”

Now, Cuatlacuatl is living and working in Charlottesville and teaching art classes at the University of Virginia. He works in a variety of mediums—illustration, animation, painting, installation—and throughout the month of April, as the Tom Tom Festival artist-in-residence at The Bridge Progressive Arts Initiative, he’ll exhibit some of his own work and lead a number of community art projects.

Federico Cuatlacuatl

“I can’t sit still,” Cuatlacuatl says, half-jokingly, as the reason for why he works in so many different mediums. But there’s much more to it than that.

An artist’s flexibility and fluidity is crucial to how he functions within his community, says Cuatlacuatl, and for his own artistic practice, community is paramount. “An artist can function, and must function, in a community, and must respond alongside a community,” he says. “I always like to emphasize that my work is not personal. My work is not talking about my narrative, or me personally. But it uses my narrative to amplify that there [are] thousands of cases like these.”

Broadly, his work focuses on a number of issues, including immigration, recognition, and celebration of indigenous communities, and cultural sustainability. We talk a lot about environmental, social, and economic sustainability, and not enough about cultural sustainability, says Cuatlacuatl. “Culturally, we’re so diverse and so dynamic within our own communities, that we have to understand that, and we have to bring that into the conversation of how we are collaborating and becoming a collective community.” In order to sustain a culture, its traditions must be acknowledged and practiced.

Cuatlacuatl was in the car, on his way to town to begin his professorship at UVA, the weekend of August 11 and 12, 2017. When he arrived, one of the first things he did was respond to the tiki torch march on Grounds —a major trauma for his new community. He deconstructed a tiki torch and made it into a kite, which he flew as a form of peaceful protest against the ideas the torch-wielding neo-Nazis and white supremacists marched for. It was his way of demonstrating that, “with tradition and culture, you can really shift conversations around, literally and also culturally,” he says.

Kites as a form of peaceful protest are the basis of Cuatlacuatl’s “Desencabronamiento” exhibition, which opens Sunday, April 14, at The Bridge PAI. It will feature a variety of kites, all of them traditional Mexican forms, which Cuatlacuatl learned from Mexican master kite maker Pedro Cuacuas. The kites are white, rather than rainbow-hued, to express peace.

Cuatlacuatl expects the sight might conjure up the image of waving a white flag, an action that holds different meanings in different cultures. In the United States, the action of waving a white flag indicates surrender. In other cultures—including Mexico—waving a white flag, or in this case, flying a white kite, means peace. “Let’s talk, let’s enter into dialogue.” Cuatlacuatl’s inviting the latter.

The exhibition title, “Desencabronamiento,” translates literally to “the process of getting un-pissed off.” Cuatlacuatl chose that title because making these kites has been cathartic for him, and he hopes it will be to everyone who gets involved, including the local Latinx high schoolers who are building some of the kites along with him.

Cuatlacuatl’s exhibition of kites, “Desencabronamiento,” opens at The Bridge PAI on Sunday, April 14. Image courtesy the artist

The flight patterns of the kites will be 3-D mapped and made into an animation that will live online. And, along with those Latinx students, Cuatlacuatl has begun work on a mural in the Hogwaller neighborhood, one that will celebrate indigenous communities of many kinds in Virginia. “I think we often forget that we are occupying native land,” says Cuatlacuatl, who wishes there was more acknowledgment of the Monacan Indian Nation—the traditional custodians of the land we now call Charlottesville—and other indigenous peoples throughout the area. And not just their past, but their present and future, too.

The social practice of art is an important agent for social change, says Cuatlacuatl. “I really see social practice as a more powerful way of approaching concerns and issues. You can directly work with communities, confront the issue, and possibly propose advances…shift things around,” he says. “Rather than making things, I’m more interested in making things happen.”

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Ticket to write: Rock critic Rob Sheffield tells us what he sees in the Beatles

Rob Sheffield returns to his old stomping grounds this week for a variety of events, including co- hosting a show for WTJU’s rock marathon, and a reading from Dreaming the Beatles at CitySpace in tandem with Rich Tarbell’s “It’s A Music Town,” an interactive exhibit about Charlottesville music.publicity photo

After being wooed by four mop-haired musicians in matching black turtlenecks harmonizing “Help!” on a television screen, 5-year-old Rob Sheffield became a Beatles mega fan.

“Don’t you know that band broke up?” his parents would ask. “They don’t exist anymore,” his teacher would say. It was the early 1970s, and while they weren’t wrong—The Beatles called it quits in the final months of 1970—they weren’t right, either.

Sheffield had seen them, right there on TV. He heard them with his own ears, on the radio and the vinyl records he played.

Almost five decades later, Sheffield, who has written about music and pop culture for Rolling Stone since 1997 and is a New York Times best-selling author of five books, is still listening to The Beatles.

In advance of a reading from his latest book, Dreaming the Beatles: The Love Story of One Band and the Whole World, at CitySpace on Thursday, Sheffield, who lived in Charlottesville and hosted a rock show on WTJU for many years before moving to Brooklyn, told us that in addition to checking out Paul McCartney’s set list from the previous night, he’d been listening to The Beatles just a few hours earlier.

The song was “Tell Me What You See,” a track on the B-side of Help!, the album that hooked him.

It’s “one of those Beatles songs that nobody seems to care an awful lot about,” the band included, says Sheffield.

Sheffield can’t stop thinking about this. It’s a “perfect example” of the band’s brilliance, that in 10 minutes, just to fill space on an album, “they could come up with just an absolutely, unbelievably beautiful and tender song like ‘Tell Me What You See,’” he says.

That re-listening, remembering, and discovering, which occurs often for Sheffield and for billions of other Beatles fans, is what prompted him to write Dreaming the Beatles.

It’s not another Beatles story set in the 1960s. “The Beatles are right now,” says Sheffield. They are “more famous and popular and beloved now than they were in their lifetime” as a band. “They tried breaking up and it didn’t work,” he says. The music “escaped from The Beatles and the world took over.”

Sheffield  says he didn’t try to interview the two surviving Beatles, Paul and Ringo—this isn’t their story. (Plus, he says they’re the only two people on the planet who could leave him starstruck. He’s never talked to Paul, but a phone interview with Ringo years ago left him “quivering in the knees.”)

It’s the music’s story, and as Sheffield wrote Dreaming the Beatles, the story grew—he knew it would. “That’s the way it goes with The Beatles,” he says. “The story never ends.”

The book has been out for two years, and Sheffield’s still having revelations about the songs, many of them tied to the six-CD White Album box set that came out in 2018, a year after Dreaming the Beatles.

There’s a version of “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” in which George Harrison misses a high note, stops singing and quips, “Sorry, that was my fault. I tried to do a Smokey, and I just aren’t Smokey.” Sheffield is moved by the fact that, 50 years after George made a Smokey Robinson joke that he likely forgot about and didn’t think anyone outside the studio would hear, millions of people have heard that line and “felt it in their souls.”

Before that box set came out, Sheffield visited with its producer, Giles Martin, son of Beatles producer George Martin, who played him a version of “Good Night”—the last track on the White Album, with Ringo singing lead

This particular version features all four Beatles singing together—a rarity—and revealed to Sheffield beauty he hadn’t before heard in this song.

People assume it’s a Paul song, but it’s actually a John song, one that Giles told Sheffield was “too tender and melodic and emotional” for John to sing himself, so he made Ringo sing it. John himself only sang it twice—once when he showed Ringo how it went, and once with the full band—and he never told his bandmates why he couldn’t sing it himself.

Hearing this version of the song made Sheffield re-think his entire perception of John, who, at that point in his life (1968) had met Yoko Ono and was divorcing his first wife, Cynthia. Sheffield always thought of it as a “joke at the end of the album. Turns out, there’s all these emotional layers to it,” he says.

“My God!” he exclaims, basking in the warm glow of yet another revelation about the magic of the world’s most beloved band, knowing full well there’s more to come. “It’s going to take us the rest of our lives to even start listening to The Beatles.”

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Wandering heart: Remembering Gabe Allan

“The Messenger” was cast into bronze fairly recently, at a Santa Fe foundry, and Gabe Allan exhibited the work at Burning Man before bringing it home to IX Art Park last year. A celebration of Allan’s life will be held on Saturday, April 27, at 2pm at The Haven. Photo by Brian Wimer

Over the past few weeks, Charlottesville artists have been mourning the loss and celebrating the life and work of one of their own. Local sculptor Gabriel Allan, whose larger-than-life bronze sculpture of a fire-winged man, “The Messenger,” is at IX Art Park, died March 15.

Gabe, who grew up mostly in Crozet and Charlottesville, lived a lot of life in his 37 years, say his family and friends.

From the time he was young, he was creative, caring, and comfortable taking risks. As a kid, he skateboarded, snowboarded, and ziplined with friends. He hiked all over the region, and, when his home country could no longer satisfy his curiosity, he hiked through Europe and visited Paris, where he “spent three weeks haunting the Rodin museum” says his father, Freeman Allan.

He visited China many times and became fluent in Mandarin; he took a motorcycle trip to a remote part of the Tibetan plateau; and he once found himself huddled around a fire with yak herders, eating sheep broth, and singing songs in two languages. Most recently, Gabe visited Ulan Bator, Mongolia, where he made plans to visit shamans near the Siberian border.

Gabe Allan, age 17, in front of “The Thinker” at the Rodin Museum. Photo courtesy of Freeman Allan

He was always seeking something. “Gabe was a sincere and devout Buddhist,” says Freeman, who notes that Gabe spent many months on Buddhist retreats all over the world. And he had a sense of humor about the whole thing, says Freeman.

With a smile on his face, Gabe once told his father that his deep meditations often resolved into the “profound koan” (a koan is a riddle demonstrating the inadequacy of logic, leading to enlightenment) of, “I wonder what’s for dinner.”

Gabe was always sharing something, says artist Bolanle Adeboye. The two were housemates and friends, and occasionally she would model for a sculpture or a drawing—Gabe was always asking friends to “strike! And hold!” a pose for his latest work.

Adeboye’s favorite of those works is “The Still Point,” a bronze and stained-glass piece of a woman in motion. Adeboye loves, among other things, the fluidity of the woman’s implied movement, the expression of her face, her hands, her feet—all rather emotional physical details that are difficult to capture, especially in such a hard material.

“The Still Point,” by Gabe Allan. Photo courtesy of Bolanle Adeboye

He was “a self-generating cycle of creative awesomeness,” says Adeboye. She’s not sure how he did it, but he could “channel light and love for other people even when he was in darkness. He was generous and kind. He loved chocolate. He was a really good dancer. He was beautiful.”

It’s part of what made Gabe such a good artist. “What has always amazed me about our son was the breadth of his sympathy and vision, artistically, emotionally, and spiritually,” says Freeman, who continues to find more evidence of this as he leafs through his son’s sketchbooks.

“I will love the man all the days of my life,” says local sculptor Robert Bricker. “Gabe is huge in my heart.” Bricker met Gabe when Gabe was finishing his art degree at UVA and wanting to work on a large-scale sculpture, “a grand expression” that Bricker, who has a studio at McGuffey and runs Bronze Craft Foundry out in Waynesboro, was happy to encourage.

That grand expression is “The Messenger.” The sculpture “threw down the gauntlet” for what a student sculptor could do, says Bricker. “It’s larger than life. It’s highly expressive,” and Gabe created it when he was in his early 20s. “It’s an extraordinary work by any sculptor, and it just shows his brilliance, that he did it at a young age,” says Bricker, who adds that world-renowned artist and sculptor Cy Twombly (for whom Bricker cast bronze) was quite taken with the sculpture when he saw it, in its wax form, at Bricker’s foundry.

A celebration of Allan’s life will be held on Saturday, April 27, at 2pm at The Haven.

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April Galleries

Born and raised in Philadelphia, Andy Faith’s favorite thing to do as a kid was visit the Philadelphia Museum of Art to look at Marcel Duchamp’s found art pieces. She’s been making her own work from found materials since 1994, the latest of which are on view at McGuffey Art Center throughout the month of April. Photo by Martyn Kyle

Soft morning light filters in through the window of Andy Faith’s studio in the basement of McGuffey Art Center, and try as it might, the light can’t possibly illuminate every object on every shelf in the place.

There’s an old Monticello Dairy ice cream carton, yellowed and full of rusty nails; tea bags; rough slabs of wood; metal cages; doll eyes she found in Paris; plastic dice of many colors; scraps of cheesecloth; jars of doll pieces labeled “breasts + other body parts,” or “penises”; aging clockworks; various animal skulls; and a small box of tiny bones that tinkle when Faith runs her hands gently through them.

She laughs as she looks around at her beloved materials—she can hardly find anything when she wants it, but still manages to create. It helps to have a deadline, says Faith, like the one for “untitled,” her show on view in McGuffey’s Upstairs South Hall Gallery throughout the month of April.

“Protector” is one of the pieces featured in Faith’s show at McGuffey this month. Photo courtesy of the artist

“It’s sort of political,” she says about the show, with pieces like “Even If You Don’t Believe, Please Pray for Them,” dedicated to the children who have been, and continue to be, separated from their parents at the U.S. border. There are pieces on racism, on incarceration, on sexism, and a few totems. “But that’s what it is. That’s what’s happening,” she says, and these things are on her mind constantly.

For Faith, making this work is healing, and she hopes it will be for the viewer, too. Some folks may think it’s scary, and she understands that, but it’s protective and beautiful in its raw vulnerability.

Sometimes, art has to break a viewer’s heart in order to heal it. —Erin O’Hare

Openings

Chroma Projects Gallery Inside Vault Virginia, Third St. SE. “Luminous Structures,” a show of works by glass artist Emily Williams and painter Elaine Rogers. 5-7pm.

CitySpace 100 Fifth St. NE. “It’s A Music Town,” a multimedia exhibition curated by Rich Tarbell and Coy Barefoot that explores the sights, sounds, and stories of Charlottesville in the modern rock era. 5-8:30pm.

C’ville Arts Cooperative Gallery 118 E. Main St., Downtown Mall. “Once Upon a Time: Clocks with a Story,” featuring clocks made by tinkering guru Allan Young. 6-8pm.

Dovetail Design & Cabinetry 309 E. Water St. “New Home: Same Mountainside,” watercolor and mixed media works by Leah Claire Larsen. 5-7pm.

Home Sweet Home Realty 1050 Druid Ave. Ste. A. “Reflections, Illusions and Dreams,” a show of work by Casey Woodzell. 5pm.

Les Yeux du Monde 841 Wolf Trap Rd. “Picasso, Lydia and Friends, Vol. IV,” featuring 12 Picasso prints as well as works from seven friends of the late modernist art professor and painter Lydia Gasman. 1-5pm.

Live Arts 123 E. Water St. A show of light box works by Bolanle Adeboye.

McGuffey Art Center 201 Second St. NW. In the Sarah B. Smith Gallery, “Albemarle in Winter,” a show of watercolor images of Albemarle County; in the Downstairs North and South Hall Galleries, “Pink,” a group show of 11 artists examining how pink is relevant to their work; in the Upstairs North Hall Gallery, “Under Pressure,” an exhibition of experimental monotype prints by Polly Breckenridge; and in the Upstairs South Hall Gallery, “untitled,” featuring works that are an offering of witness, compassion, and protection for all those who suffer in the world, by A. Faith. 5:30-7:30pm.

Milli Coffee Roasters 400 Preston Ave. An exhibition of original works in oil on canvas by Kris Bowmaster. 7-10pm.

Music Resource Center 105 Ridge St. “Meditative Reflections,” a show of work by Sara Gondwe, who uses crayons, an iron, and fabric paint to create her pieces. 5-7pm.

New Dominion Bookshop 404 E. Main St., Downtown Mall. “The Art of Marion Roberts,” featuring photo manipulations. 5-7pm.

Roy Wheeler Realty Co. 404 Eighth St. NE. An exhibition of work by Laura Heyward, who creates in oil, acrylic, pen and ink, printmaking, and collage. 5-7:30pm.

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. 5:30-7:30pm.

Spring Street Boutique 107 W. Main St., Downtown Mall. “NewArt,” featuring paintings by Ell Tresse. 6-8pm.

Studio IX 969 Second St. SE. “Recalibration: New Paintings by Mike Ryan,” in which the artist explores pattern and shape, creating without restraints. 5:30-7:30pm.

VMDO Architects 200 E. Market St. “Myths, Monsters, and General Mayhem,” an exhibition of acrylic works on masonite board by Sara Knipp. 5:30-7:30pm.

Welcome Gallery 114 Third St. NE. “Sculpture and Color,” featuring works by sculptor Robert Strini and painter Ken Horne. 5-7:30pm.

WriterHouse 508 Dale Ave. “A Place To Call,” a show of photography and mixed- media pieces by Alden Myers and Liza Wimbish. 5-7pm.

WVTF RadioIQ 216 W. Water St. “Love Breathes in Two Countries,” featuring work by local landscape artists Christen Yates and Brittany Fan. 5-7pm.

Other April shows

Annie Gould Gallery 109 S. Main St., Gordonsville. A show of paintings by Jane Skafte and Sue DuFour. Through May 26.

The Bridge PAI 209 Monticello Rd. “Desencabronamiento,” an exhibition of Federico Cuatlacuatl’s sculptural kites and video that explore tradition and culture as political weapons. Kite workshops, exhibition, talk, and mural paintings throughout the week of April 8, in conjunction with the Tom Tom Founders Festival. Exhibition officially opens April 14, 7-10pm.

Buck Mountain Episcopal Church 4133 Earlysville Rd., Earlysville. “The Ten,” featuring multi-media abstract paintings by Philip J. Marlin.

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. “Jake’s Clay Art: Animation and Energy,” a show of Jake Johnson’s colorful pottery.

Fellini’s 200 Market St. “Owned,” an exhibition of pastels by Cat Denby.

The Fralin Museum of Art at UVA 155 Rugby Rd. “Pompeii Archive: Recent Photographs by William Wylie,” through April 21; 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. A multimedia show by the members of the BozART Fine Art Collective, including Carol Barber, Randy Baskerville, Betty Brubach, Matalie Deane, Joan Dreicer, Frank Feigert, Sara Gondwe, Anne de Latour Hopper, Julia Kindred, Julia Lesnichy, Amy Shawley Paquette, and Juliette Swenson.

Jefferson School African American Heritage Center 233 Fourth St. NW “Deborah Willis: In Pursuit of Beauty” examines how beauty is posed, imagined, critiqued, and contested. Through April 27.

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; “Beyond Dreamings: The Rise of Indigenous Australian Art in the United States.”

Random Row Brewery 608 Preston Ave. A show of mixed media works in crayon and fabric paint by Sara Gondwe.

Shenandoah Valley Art Center 122 S. Wayne Ave., Waynesboro. “Awakening,” Sandra Luckett’s multimedia exhibition that is a monument to spiritual rebirth. Opens April 6, 5-7pm.

Tandem Friends School 279 Tandem Ln. The Charlottesville Area Quilters Guild Biennial Quilt Show, featuring work from more than 135 members from four area chapters. April 6 and 7.

Vitae Spirits Distillery 715 Henry Ave. A show of watercolors, some incorporating calligraphy, by Terry M. Coffey.

Woodberry Forest School Baker Gallery, Walker Fine Arts Center 898 Woodberry Forest Rd., Woodberry Forest. “Seasons Of and In Mind,” featuring paintings by Linda Verdery.

Categories
Arts

Downtown warehouse has a colorful history

Since the 1980s, the Pink Warehouse on South Street has been home to local artists of many kinds. Staff photo

Sandwiched between South Street and some train tracks, the Pink Warehouse has stored various things throughout its 105 years: wholesale food for the Albemarle Grocery Co.; tools for the Chesapeake and Ohio Railway; imagination.

In 1983, Roulhac and Ben Toledano—an author of architectural history books and a Southern literature-loving lawyer—bought the abandoned building. They renovated it, raised four children in it, and eventually, accidentally, transformed it into a storied creative mecca.

Today, the building holds a few different apartments and offices, and Roulhac says that while she has no rule about renting to artists, “they just come.” And if they’re not creative when they move in, they are before they leave.

The building is perhaps most famous as the site where, in 1991, the newly-formed Dave Matthews Band played its first official gig on the warehouse roof to a couple dozen people.

Matthews’ manager, Ross Hoffman, rented the bedroom next to Roulhac’s, and Matthews used to sit on the floor with his guitar and play his songs. Roulhac heard him through the wall.

Artist John Owen lived there, too, and, reportedly threw memorable parties after Live Arts productions.

C-VILLE Weekly rented space in the Pink Warehouse in the 1990s. Roulhac has written a number of books there, and she’s exhibited Edward Thomas’ paintings in her living room. In the late 2000s, John Noble and Dee Dee Bellson opened BON Café, a music venue/art gallery/coffee shop in the building. Bellson is the daughter of actress and singer Pearl Bailey and Louie Bellson (Duke Ellington’s drummer), and a well-known jazz singer in her own right. The Tom Tom Founders Festival offices are in there now, and a few apartments remain upstairs.

Until recently, Lauren and Daniel Goans of folk duo Lowland Hum lived in a studio that was once Roulhac’s library, and still contains floor-to-ceiling shelves filled with hundreds of books on every topic imaginable. Lauren says that living among these books fueled creativity, including the writing and recording of a new record, Glyphonic. “It was one of our favorite creative seasons to date,” she says. Due to the nearby parking lot and morning commute traffic, “we had to wake up at 4am to get in enough quiet hours for recording each day. I will never forget Daniel playing guitar in the pitch dark before anyone around us was up.”

“People thought we were crazy to buy the warehouse,” says Roulhac. But perhaps, in a stroke of inspiration that’s come to define the place since, the Toledanos saw something that others did not.

Categories
Arts

Window to the soul: Richelle Claiborne looks at her own history through black music

Richelle Claiborne honors her ancestors and fellow musicians at The Front Porch on March 29 at 8pm. Photo by Tristan Williams

Like many ideas, singer Richelle Claiborne’s latest musical endeavor came into focus after a couple of bourbons.

She had a story she wanted to tell—one about her creative influences, her ancestors, herself—and she wasn’t sure how to express it. An artist of many talents, Claiborne could work it out through poetry, a spoken word performance, or a play, but the more she thought about it, music seemed to be the only option.

After some sipping and talking with her friend, guitarist Jamal Millner, she had it—she’d perform her personal history through black music: blues, jazz, funk, and soul, reggae, R&B, and maybe a little rock ‘n’ roll.

The resulting show, “Richelle Claiborne: Black Music Excellence Through the Ages,” is at The Front Porch on Friday night, where Claiborne will be backed up by a live band of musicians she’s known for many years: Ti Ames (vocals), Bud Bryant (bass), Rob Hubbard (drums), Ivan Orr (keyboards), and Tucker Rogers (guitar).

Claiborne’s been singing on Charlottesville stages since she joined the First Baptist Church cherub choir at age 4 (how many years ago, she won’t say). She sang as part of her church’s youth ministry, in gospel choirs, in her bedroom, and just about everywhere else. Claiborne remembers the women at church clapping their hands and saying, “Oh, yes, baby! Oh, you sound so good!”—and while you can trust your mama’s and grandmas’ and aunties’ opinions on just about anything, you do so knowing how much they love you, Claiborne says, raising one quizzical eyebrow and pursing her lips before bursting into a fit of laughter.

In college, Claiborne walked out of her Rutgers University choir audition—the idea of having to audition for a non-competitive gospel choir, and one without some sort of record deal, was absurd to her—and onto open mic stages.

That’s when she started “rippin’ it up,” she says, singing not only gospel but jazz, soul, and funk—covers at first, then originals. When she returned to Charlottesville, she sang with a few groups, including Soul Sledge, and in various local theater performances. Claiborne knows this is her outlet, her release, and her higher calling.

“There are many different ways to get to God, here on the planet,” says Claiborne. “When I am pouring myself into whatever artistic outlet I’m choosing to pour myself into, that’s another way that I connect with my ancestors, with the divine…” It’s a lot to bring into a performance, to translate for and convey to an audience, and Claiborne jokes that she might have to start selling waterproof mascara at the door of all her shows (you know, for all the criers).

On Friday, there will be space to cry, says Claiborne, but there will also be space to dance, to laugh, and to get down with it when the groove hits. She’ll perform songs from a variety of genres, all written and recorded by black artists, that explore life’s highs and lows (you can’t appreciate one without the other, she says). A script ties the individual songs together, and focuses on formative moments, such as the birth of her daughter. “Once you reach a certain age,” she says, “the passing of time is not nearly as important as the moments that happen.”

Claiborne only hints at which songs she’ll sing: she and Ames will do an a cappella duet of a Sweet Honey in the Rock song; there will be at least one gospel song, some medleys, some contemporary songs, and a few choices that she expects will surprise her audience. “It’s not the history of black music,” says Claiborne. “It’s my history through black music—how all these different genres have impacted and affected me, or represented me, is the thread that ties it all together.”

She weaves her bandmates in, too: many of them have been present for the moments Claiborne explores in the show. Ames is Claiborne’s cousin; Claiborne, Orr, and Rogers have been friends since high school; and Claiborne and Bryant go way back, to when they were hanging out, listening to the Chickenhead Blues Band and the Hogwaller Ramblers at Durty Nelly’s. These connections are “feel-able,” says Claiborne, because she loves these musicians and they love her in return, and that’s a solid foundation for music-making.

In singing this collection of songs, Claiborne wants to convey the breadth and the depth of what music means to people of color. “It is used for healing. It is used for sending messages. It is used to celebrate. It is used to mourn. It embraces and embodies every emotion that you can possibly have, and every purpose that you could possibly use it for,” she says.

In a single day, you might sing to mourn the dead, celebrate good news, or rock a baby to sleep.

“It’s everything,” says Claiborne. “It’s the most powerful medium we have. Music is it for me.”

Richelle Claiborne honors her ancestors and fellow musicians at The Front Porch on March 29 at 8pm.

Tristan Williams

Categories
Arts Living

Of two minds: Housemates cohabitate and collaborate

For cellist and songwriter Wes Swing and visual artist Bolanle Adeboye, living in the same Woolen Mills house has resulted in plenty of creative collaboration. Photo: John Robinson

Sitting on a bench full of pillows at a large, round wooden table she made with her own hands, Bolanle Adeboye smears veggie cream cheese on both halves of a cinnamon raisin bagel. The visual artist is fighting a cold, and her housemate, cellist and songwriter Wes Swing, asks if she’d prefer a cup of coffee or a mug of tea to soothe her throat.

Coffee, Adeboye answers. Definitely coffee.

As Swing brews coffee, they try to figure out (upon this reporter’s prompting) when they met. Adeboye can’t quite remember when, but Swing’s pretty sure he knows. It was 2009, maybe 2010, and Swing was playing a show at The Bridge Progressive Arts Initiative. Swing noticed that Adeboye was drawing.

Adeboye told Swing that she liked drawing to music, and Swing asked to see what she’d made.  He was intrigued by her work, and they talked art for a while.

Holding a hot mug of coffee in both hands, Adeboye is touched by the fact that Swing remembers that interaction so clearly. “I do remember being blown away by your music the first time I heard it,” she tells Swing. “It was like magic.”

That drawing was perhaps their first collaboration, though an unofficial one. At the time, neither artist had any idea that they’d end up housemates, a living situation that has led to a fruitful creative partnership.

At that point, Adeboye was living in the downstairs apartment of a house in Woolen Mills, a space she’d shared since 2002 with a variety of roommates, all artists of some kind. Not long after making album art for Swing’s 2011 album Through A Fogged Glass, and an animated video for the song “Lullaby,” Adeboye was looking for a new roommate, and Swing, who was looking for a place to live, seemed cool enough to her.

After all, Adeboye says, laughing, she’d heard “Lullaby” a thousand times or more at that point, and she knew she could live with his music.

Adeboye has owned the Woolen Mills house since 2003, and has been slowly renovating it. In 2017, she moved up to the second floor and Swing, who’d briefly left to live in San Francisco, moved back in and took over the first floor apartment. Now the two hang out together, on both levels, often.

On this particular morning, late winter sun shines through the first floor windows, soaking the entire place in beams of light; it’s a veritable showroom for Adeboye’s craftsmanship and vision. She designed the open but cozy floor plan, made much of the furniture and accent pieces (including light fixtures), and covered the walls with her paintings and mixed-media pieces. It’s all “driven by available repurposed and salvaged building materials, determined by ever-shifting function,” says Adeboye of the abode.

“It’s like waking up in an art gallery,” says Swing, who feels constantly comforted and inspired by the house…so much so, that he likes to stay home, and as a result, he makes a lot of music. “It’s the perfect space for making stuff,” he adds.

What’s more, says Adeboye, the home and its décor constantly evolves, so “you have to be comfortable with chaos and uncertainty and change.”

“’Live with it.’ That’s the motto here,” says Swing.

And they do. The sonorous sound of Swing’s cello drifts upstairs to Adeboye’s ears, where she’s usually working on her own apartment (it’s still a work-in-progress), or on one of her fine-art pieces. Adeboye has put a lot of time and thought into creating her living environment, making real her longtime vision for how her life would look, feel, and sound. Strangely enough, she says, when she thought of the sound aspect, she imagined cello. Adeboye didn’t grow up playing an instrument, but she always loved music, and cello in particular.

Adeboye puts down her bagel and puts her hand over her heart. “This is just making me so grateful for my life,” she says to Swing. “I thought I was going to marry a cellist, but instead I just live with one. I don’t actually have to marry one, which is awesome,” she says, laughing.

Swing knows Adeboye’s home when he hears her walking around upstairs or playing electric guitar; Adeboye knows Swing’s home when she hears him playing cello or singing. There’s no setting a time to meet and discuss ideas. All it takes is walking up or down the stairs when inspiration (which can be a vulnerable state of being) strikes. Living in close proximity has cultivated trust in many forms.

They often tackle maintenance projects together (most recently a broken dryer), and there’s no hassle over collecting the rent.

Over time, the nature of their collaboration has evolved from Adeboye creating visuals to and for Swing’s recorded music and live performances into something more intertwined.

Their most recent collaboration, “Now/Now,” is an interactive project in which Adeboye and Swing, along with their audience, produce real-time musical and visual representations of the audience’s reported emotional states. So far, they’ve brought iterations of it into local schools and jails, to various community art performances, and to a school for the deaf and blind in Florida. Each time, it’s a little different, depending on the participants, but the core—the idea of being and creating in the moment, with the people around you—remains the same.

“It took a lot for me to be willing to go there,” says Swing about the intensely collaborative nature of “Now/Now.” He says that before working with Adeboye—who brings chalkboards and sticks of chalk to her visual art shows so that people can react creatively to what she’s doing—he hesitated to work with other artists of any kind, lest they misunderstand or misinterpret his vision. Swing now sees that relinquishing some of that control can yield some pretty spectacular results.

Adeboye says that Swing’s transformed her work, too—she consciously incorporates more interactivity, she’s branching out into other media (such as light boxes), and she’s taught herself to play electric guitar.

Collaboration is such a natural thing for them that they begin a new one as they polish off their breakfast. Swing tells Adeboye that while lying in bed the previous night, he imagined the inside of the Woolen Mills Chapel filled floor to ceiling with her projections.

Adeboye chews her last bite of bagel, thinks it over. “Alright, we’ll talk,” she says, giggling as she realizes: They already are.