Author: Mary Shea Watson

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Arts Culture

In and out: Feminist Union of Charlottesville Creatives explore new selves

“Inside” features work by 18 local female-identifying, gender-queer, and non-binary artists in an online exhibition in collaboration with The Gallery at Studio IX. Viewers can attend the show’s online reception on July 23 from 5 to 6:30pm via Zoom. Go to heyfucc.com for more information. Courtesy of the Artists

The acronym for the Feminist Union of Charlottesville Creatives—FUCC—is pronounced exactly like the four-letter word it brings to mind.

“FUCC facilitates opportunities for our members to have an outlet for their creative expression,” says mixed-media artist and member Sri Kodakalla, “Especially during times of uncertainty, it can be such an empowering thing to be a part of a community of like-minded individuals.”

Founded in 2017 by sculptor Lily Erb and painter Sam Gray, FUCC began as a means to connect and support female-identifying, gender-queer, and non-binary artists through events like clothing swaps, art shows, and ideas exchanged over social media.

In late 2019 and early 2020, they began planning and collecting submissions for their first juried show, “Enough,” to be held in the summer at The Gallery at Studio IX. The show would include a dance party, spoken word performances—a “whole extravaganza,” Kodakalla says. It was part of the FUCC’s effort to hold events that brought artists together to collaborate and share their skills.

But as COVID-19 took hold, arts communities and organizations in Charlottesville and around the world had to cancel in-person events. (Americans for the Arts estimates that due to coronavirus, nonprofit arts organizations have lost nearly $5 billion, with 62 percent of creative workers and artists now unemployed.)

With the help of fellow FUCC member and printmaker Ramona Martinez (a C-VILLE Weekly contributor), Kodakalla did what artmaking asks of its participants every day: Come up with a new idea.

The “Enough” show became “Inside,” an online exhibition in collaboration with Studio IX that showcases the work of 18 local womxn artists, including Erb, Gray, Kodakalla, Martinez, Laura Lee Gulledge, Barbara Shenefield, Hannah ThomasClarke, Abigail Wilson, and others. In each of the works displayed in the virtual show, the artists present unique and deeply personal responses to the internal, external, local, and global chasmic shifts of today’s reality.

“A lot of people have decided that they aren’t going back to work the way they used to,” says Kodakalla. “Or that they won’t take on every opportunity as they come—that they’ll save money, volunteer, and do more social justice outreach. They’re realizing that they’re an introvert, or need more time to themselves. …While the theme of the show is reflection, it encompasses so much more than that.”

As viewers scroll through the works of “Inside,” they can click each image to read an artist statement and bio. Though medium and palette vary widely, perhaps what unites the show is an exploration of the body and its complex relationship with interior and exterior forces—the mind, the natural world, and other beings who inhabit that world. In some pieces, figures reach and fall through empty, dark voids; in others, plants, animals and the man-made anxiously encroach upon human forms as they envelop faces or entire bodies. 

Martinez points to Shannon Smith’s digital print, “Shift,” which juxtaposes the body’s organic shapes against the sharp, repeated edges of geometric shapes—all portrayed in a palette of saturated jewel tones and pastels. It’s a response to the deep grief and mourning she felt over the abrupt end to her college career, Smith says in her artist’s statement. She uses the female form as a means to explore her body in quarantine.

Painter Meghan Smith also investigates quarantine through the lens of the female body. In “Pink Light,” she presents a tense, uncomfortable self-portrait with three hands grasping to apply makeup to her face. One draws a dark line into her eyebrow and another applies concealer under her eye as a black bra pokes out above her tank top.

“Even in isolation, where in theory I could finally indulge a ‘self’ that has nothing to do with how others see me, I’m still stuck in that cycle,” Smith writes in her artist statement. “To feel productive, I need a bra and combed hair and plucked eyebrows. To speak confidently on Zoom, I need my heavy-duty concealer and a fake plastered smile. My outside still dictates my inside and I’m not sure how to escape.”

For Martinez, it’s not surprising that the outside world shapes one’s internal world. She believes the internal is a microcosm for the external.

“It’s no accident that all of these massive societal changes are taking place a few months after everyone is forced to be inside with their demons,” she says. “It’s a huge transition energetically.”

It’s a transition that Martinez, Kodakalla, and many others are still getting used to. They miss the energy of FUCC’s in-person events and the opportunities they presented to connect. Yet, the co-curators feel hopeful about what experiencing art virtually could inspire for artists and art-appreciators alike. They are planning more shows like “Inside” and more opportunities for artists through media like zines, snail mail, and public street art.

“As artists, how can we communicate about this moment that we’re in and the old world dying?” Martinez asks. “How can we as a collective take those ideas and have a conversation with others who find our work? …We want it to exist beyond the gallery scene.”

Kodakalla, too, speaks to the possibility that the idea of normal no longer exists. She seems to stand resiliently against a world where daily conversations among co-workers, friends, or family members invoke phrases like “when this is over,” or “when things go back to normal.” And maybe, that’s a beautiful thing.

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Arts Culture

Musical meditation: Local poetry contest winner explores experience of music

Fred Everett Maus teaches music at the University of Virginia, and is a contributing author to several books on music, sexuality, trauma, and the LGBTQ+ experience. He is co-editor of the upcoming Oxford Handbook of Music and Queerness.

For UVA music professor Fred Everrett Maus, there is much more to music than meets the ear. It presents listeners with the opportunity to understand gender, sexuality, memory, and more.

“Music teaching sometimes makes music into an object, studied by examining external properties,” Maus says. “In all my research and teaching, I have wanted to direct attention to experiences that people have in the presence of music.”   

“I invite my students to give careful attention to their own experiences, and then to try to imagine the experiences of others,” says Maus, who is also the co-editor of the forthcoming Oxford Handbook of Music and Queerness, which has essays on musical genres ranging from Irish traditional music to hip-hop, as they relate to the LGBTQ+ community.

Reading Maus’ poem “Play a Note” is an experience, too. The poem recently won the Jefferson-Madison Regional Library/WriterHouse fifth annual Poetry Contest for Adults, with entries judged by Virginia poet laureate Henry Hart. While COVID-19 might invite works of art that explore quietude, isolation, and fear, Maus’ poem is loud, lively, and inquisitive. Hart calls the piece “rhythmical” in its progression from the “creation of sound to the creation of silence to thoughts of a divine creation.”

The poem incorporates tenets of meditation, a practice Maus teaches through the Insight Meditation Community of Charlottesville. In 2015, he began teaching meditation through the Fluvanna Correctional Center for Women’s Blue Ridge Prison Program, which is now on hold due to the coronavirus pandemic. He says he finds the mindfulness practice valuable, as it teaches him new ways to process tension and change.

“Play a Note” investigates “sustained attention to minimal stimulus,” says Maus, with verbal instructions reminiscent of those from a music teacher or guided meditation. The poem takes the imperative voice as it commands readers through pronouns like “you.” It’s a form reflected in the works of composer and performer Pauline Oliveros’ “Deep Listening Pieces,” and Fluxus group artists like John Cage, whose “4’33″” instructs performers to sit at a piano without playing for four minutes and thirty-three seconds, as audience members hear only the sounds of their surroundings.

Yet Maus’ poem ends with images and sounds very different from the meditative practice of acknowledging external stimuli without commentary. He brings the reader from an internal reverie into “hundreds” of “squandered” and “thrown” noises and faces of the streets outside—perhaps reminiscent of today’s world, after all.

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Culture

Healthy growth: Amid coronavirus challenges, NoBull Burger expands its reach

Elizabeth Raymond, co-founder of the plant-based NoBull Burger, has seen her share of ups and downs amid the COVID-19 crisis. Jontell Vanessa Photography

If you don’t have hope, what do you have?

That’s the mindset Elizabeth Raymond recently adopted for NoBull, the vegetarian burger and brand she launched almost a decade ago with her mother, Crissanne, and her sister, Heather.

Crissanne, a “wickedly talented” chef and caterer, raised her children to be cautious about what they were consuming, and created homemade veggie burgers based on her own mother’s lentil soup recipe. “It was a big treat when mom made a batch [of veggie burgers] for us,” says Raymond, who was one of six children.  “People wouldn’t remember her name, but they did remember her as the veggie burger lady.”

Fast forward to 2011: Raymond was finishing graduate school at UVA and bartending at the now-defunct Blue Light Grill downtown, her sister owned a massage therapy practice, and Raymond’s mother was enjoying her new role as grandmother. But Raymond and her family had always wondered about marketing their mother’s veggie burger, and the timing seemed right, so they pitched NoBull to Raymond’s food industry connections.

“Veggie burgers were just starting to come to the market and just did not compare to mom’s recipe,” Raymond says.

Her chef friends began putting the burgers on their menus, and Raymond landed a spot at City Market, which introduced her to key connections at Bodo’s Bagels and Charlottesville’s Whole Foods Market. Little by little, the brand grew—the burger was picked up by dozens of Whole Foods stores in the mid-Atlantic, 60 Krogers in Virginia, and half of Wegmans 100-plus stores on the East Coast.

Raymond thought 2020 was going to be her year. The nationwide brand was about to enter into its seed-funding stage to raise capital from investors. Her team—a “family unit,” she calls them—was expanding, working on semi-automated production processes, and seeking to scale the company.

“We had great projections for the year,” says Raymond. But as the COVID-19 pandemic took hold, Raymond watched her business “totally halt.” The company lost 90 percent of its food service revenue, as restaurants, breweries, and universities shuttered.

“I felt a sheer panic toward what was going to happen. …Mom and I were looking at each other and saying, ‘What are we going to do?’”

So Raymond did what many entrepreneurs are forced to do at some point, global pandemic or not: She pivoted. Her employees began following strict social-distancing guidelines, wearing personal protective equipment, and performing increased cleaning procedures. The company started providing meals to the Boys & Girls Club, The Haven, and Feed the Frontline.

“For us, food is love,” says Raymond. “We have to take care of our community because they’re taking care of us.”

For nearly two years, Raymond has worked with Tara Eavey of 4P Foods and the Local Food Hub to increase NoBull’s distribution and customer base.

“I have seen local small businesses and farms go from thriving and fruitful, to an entity that is struggling to make it from week to week with non-existent sales,” Eavey says of the pandemic’s impact. When the COVID-19 crisis first began, 4P Foods realized it could serve farmers and small business owners like Raymond by continuing to order as much product as possible. Because of that shift, Eavey recently coordinated one of the organization’s largest orders of NoBull Burgers for its CSA members.

For now, Raymond can breathe a little easier. Her production team has better access to PPE, for example. And NoBull just expanded into two new markets—a natural foods store in Michigan, and Whole Foods in New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut. It’s a region Raymond had been trying to break into for years.

“Our retail sales are spiking, especially in the frozen foods category, since everyone is staying home and packing their freezer. Through all of this, we’re still producing,” Raymond says.

And it’s Raymond’s method of safe, organic food production that the COVID-19 crisis has brought to the forefront of many shoppers’ minds. In April, over 100 poultry and meat processing plants owned by corporations like Smithfield Foods, Tyson Foods, and Perdue Farms reported nearly 5,000 coronavirus cases. By the end of April, prices for meat and other animal-based food products had jumped by at least 8 percent.

Those numbers didn’t surprise Raymond; she hopes the crisis will remind consumers that what they put in their bodies matters. “I hope these events will guide people’s shopping behaviors towards ingredients they can pronounce, farmers or owners they know, and putting a face to a name and how all those things matter,” she says.

Raymond believes nourishment is about finding a balance and eating intuitively. That’s always been her story, and it isn’t over yet. She feels confident that NoBull will be back on menus when restaurants are ready to reopen, and she takes pride in NoBull’s growth and grit in spite of the fragility and fear affecting consumer’s decisions. Pandemic or not, she still has big plans.

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Culture

Playing apart: UVA student Merritt Gibson sings to unite

UVA student Merritt Gibson’s new single “Breaking Down” ruminates on loss, isolation, and fear amidst the COVID-19 pandemic. Publicity image

When rising fourth-year and singer-songwriter Merritt Gibson heard the news that the University of Virginia would be moving classes online for the rest of the academic year, she was devastated. She missed her friends—an integral part of her UVA experience, Gibson says. Then she began to mourn the abrupt disappearance of her daily routine, the activities that grounded her whenever she felt overwhelmed. Gibson craved a smoothie from the Corner and a visit to Clemons Library.

During this sudden life change, she turned to her guitar for comfort. Out of sadness and isolation, the history and public policy student wrote her latest single, “Breaking Down.” Gibson gained accolades for a facility with “contagious pop” on her 2018 debut album Eyes On Us, and the new single is a continuation of that songwriting dexterity. It’s a pop-inspired, vocals-heavy ballad in which she meditates on unexpected loss—the kind that takes your breath away, fills you with regret, and keeps you up at night.

“This song was my anchor during [the onset of] quarantine,” Gibson says. The writing and recording process gave her the “gift” of something to look forward to, as each day blended into the next. “In writing the song, I was able to pinpoint exactly how I was feeling and why I was feeling that way. It allowed me to understand myself in a time of confusion and uncertainty.”

She recorded the single remotely with the help of New Orleans-based, Grammy-winning producer Bob Brockmann, who’s worked with artists and groups such as Mary J. Blige, Biggie Smalls, and TLC. As Gibson sang into her home microphone, Zoom and Pro-Tools plugins allowed a high-quality copy of her recording to stream instantly into Brockmann’s computer.

Joining Gibson (from her home outside of Boston) on the single is a group of musicians that recorded accompaniments from across the country—keyboardist Andrew Yanovski from New Orleans, guitar by Naren Rauch in Los Angeles, cellist Dave Eggar in New York, and background vocals by Maya Solovey from Massachusetts.

Though she still hasn’t met the musicians or her producer in person, Gibson says the process allowed her to connect with new people and develop real relationships despite being in quarantine.

Recording the song, however, wasn’t always easy. Gibson and Brockmann had to spend hours troubleshooting with technical support. And recording sessions were often cut short because two members of their team (including Brockmann) contracted the coronavirus.

Seeing fellow artists struggle and watching health care employees’ tireless work inspired another collaboration: Gibson is working with Massachusetts General Hospital to donate money from each listener’s stream of “Breaking Down.” (Massachusetts ranks fourth in the nation in COVID-19 cases, behind New York, New Jersey, and Illinois.)

“This song is for everyone living in this moment,” Gibson says—the college students who lost a sense of independence and time alone, or the high schoolers who lost rites of passage like graduation. “It’s for medical workers who go into the hospitals day after day to face more heartbreak and devastation, shouldering the burden that they are the last person to see a family’s loved one alive.”

Though UVA hasn’t announced its plans for fall semester, Gibson knows she’ll return to Charlottesville. And that’s given her peace of mind amidst the uncertainty and fear. Even if she still has to quarantine in her apartment here, at least she’ll be virtually closer to her best friends.

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Culture

Blurring the senses: Artist-in-residence Nick Cave brings signature soundsuit to Ruffin Gallery

Renowned sculptor, professor, and community-builder Nick Cave is this spring’s Ruffin Distinguished Artist-in-Residence at UVA. His show, “Spot On,” is on view at Ruffin Gallery through March 31.

On a Saturday morning, artist Nick Cave and his partner Bob Faust sit with a group of 25 University of Virginia students.

“Who came straight from a club?” Cave jokingly asks as he surveys the group. Many are puffy-eyed and swigging coffee in an effort to wake up.

“This is Charlottesville. There aren’t any clubs here,” one student responds.

It’s day two of the first leg of Cave’s workshops, part of his residency at UVA. During these workshops, students across art disciplines collaborate in groups of five to respond to a prompt Cave and Faust designed, the centerpiece of which is a “2020” icon, with the second 20 flipped upside down. In April, the workshops will culminate in art exercises, installations, and presentations in locations of the students’ choosing across UVA’s Grounds.

“It’s important for students to invite their friends,” Cave says. “Who is this for? How do you get the people there, and what is your message? I’m interested in seeing what this student body wants to talk about, and how do we find common ground?” His voice moves in and out of being audible above the unpredictable din of “Spot On,” his current show at Ruffin Gallery.

On view through March 31, the show features three of the award-winning sculptor’s videos, “Blot,” “Bunny Boy,” and “Gestalt.” Each piece includes one or more of Cave’s signature soundsuits—ornate, full-body costumes that produce noises that are meditative yet jarring, rooted in nature though mechanical, and hauntingly beautiful.

“I chose video because I wanted to show choreography and collaboration, and how those set the stage,” says Cave. “How do we identify a space? What does that look like? How do we place ourselves within that context? That’s what the students are doing in our workshops.”

Cave created the first soundsuit in response to the 1991 beating of Rodney King by Los Angeles police. Though colorful, whimsical, and mythical, the suits originated from Cave’s feelings of fear and isolation in response to the globally televised incident of violence, racism, and police brutality.

“I felt like my identity and who I was as a human being was up for question,” he told The New York Times Magazine last October. “I felt like that could have been me. Once that incident occurred, I was existing very differently in the world. So many things were going through my head: How do I exist in a place that sees me as a threat?”

“Bunny Boy” speaks perhaps most poignantly to Cave’s exploration of identity, loneliness, and vulnerability. Viewers must enter a wooden structure that nearly covers the length of Ruffin Gallery and step into a dark interior to watch the film projected inside.

“You don’t know if you can enter this space,” Cave says. “It’s not saying that you can’t, but it’s not clear from this perspective. It asks us to think about expanses and how an audience enters and engages with the work.”

Inside, participants see a nearly 45-minute video of Cave wearing a furry fuchsia soundsuit with rabbit-like ears, floppy paws, and an exposed torso. He occupies an underworld dark space with just one harsh spotlight, while pawing at sounds (a dog barking or a lawnmower) of the “above world,” as Cave calls it. One can’t help but think of the ostracized protagonists of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, or the psychological thriller Donnie Darko.

“We can all identify with this,” says Cave. “We have all been in these spaces within our own internal dark selves. There’s a blurred sense of fantasy and seduction.”

Equally seductive is Cave’s “Blot,” a film that features a shape-shifting black soundsuit comprised of long strands of synthetic raffia. In movement, the raffia strands create a sound reminiscent of the ocean, as the Rorschach-like inkblot pushes and pulls against a reflected image of itself. Behind the scenes, the actor lurches and lunges into a wall; in post-production, Cave removed the wall and created a mirror image of the soundsuit. Cave shot “Blot” and “Gestalt” in one largely improvised take. Though he gives actors a loose statement of his intent for the video, the movements remain predominately unscripted.

“It’s about putting on the object and understanding how it’s moving,” Cave says of the performers who wear his soundsuits. “Are there any limitations and boundaries? What is in motion? How much does it weigh, what is the volume? What will it illustrate as I expand my body?”

While “Blot” lures viewers into a slow, meditative trance, “Gestalt” grabs participants by the shoulders and shakes them awake. Multiple soundsuits—one with buttons and an abacus face, another with a washboard face, and a third adorned with doilies—enter and exit the scene. They interact violently with one another, butt heads, throw one another to the ground, and drag themselves across the floor as the video speed jarringly toggles between fast and even faster. It comes from a place of being bullied, Cave explains, or feelings of being jailed by space and time.

“How do you create work that you have to stay and experience?” Cave asks. “I’ve been in a lot of museums and shows where I could be in there for 10 seconds and say, ‘Okay, I gotta go.’ How do you capture and secure one’s ability to take the time to commit to that experience?”

For Cave, the answer has been wearing his emotions literally on his sleeves (and head, heart, and the rest of his body).

Renowned sculptor, professor, and community-builder Nick Cave is this spring’s Ruffin Distinguished Artist-in-Residence at UVA. His show, “Spot On,” is on view at Ruffin Gallery through March 31.

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Culture

Flourishing feminism: “Bloom” unites artists around the women’s suffrage movement

“Bloom: In Honor of the Centennial Anniversary of Women’s Suffrage” features photography, paintings, sculpture, and mixed-media work from several artists and is on view at PVCC’s North Gallery through April 8. Courtesy of the artist

Mixed-media artist Diana Hale remembers the first time she entered a voting booth. She had just learned how to drive, but wasn’t yet old enough to vote, and transported an elderly relative who’d voted in every election for the past 75 years to the polls.

“There was a lot of effort involved in the trip,” says Hale. “It was a physically difficult thing to do, but it was so important for my family member. It’s easy for us to say, ‘Oh, I have a lot of work to do,’ or ‘I don’t have time to vote,’ but this experience gave me an appreciation for how important voting is.”

A note from Beryl Solla in PVCC’s North Gallery speaks to that familial responsibility to vote. Solla curated “Bloom: In Honor of the Centennial Anniversary of Women’s Suffrage,” which explores the notion that people bloom when they have a voice. The show features paintings, sculpture, photographs, and mixed-media work from Bolanle Adeboye, Stacey Evans, Aaron Eichorst, Lara Call Gastinger, John Grant, Sam Gray, Diana Hale, Lou Haney, Barbara Shenefield, and Annie Temmink, as well as a collaborative crayon drawing from Johnson Elementary School first grade students.

“Women were arrested, beaten, and tortured in an effort to stop this movement,” Solla’s welcome note reads. “In their honor, in our mothers’ and grandmothers’ and great-grandmothers’ honor, let’s all remember to vote.”

Of the past three presidential elections, 2016 marked the lowest voter turnout in the City of Charlottesville, with about two-thirds of total registered voters casting ballots. In the City’s 2017 non-November special elections and primaries, 27 percent of registered Democratic voters and 2 percent of registered Republican voters cast ballots.

“We forget that people died for these rights,” Hale says. “It’s embarrassing to think that this is how we respond, given that people sacrificed their lives for this.”

Temmink, whose “Temper” sculpture explores materiality and process, says she finds it easy to lose track of her place within the complex history of women’s suffrage and modern feminism. Two prints by Barbara Shenefield speak to that history and highlight well- and lesser-known female activists and cross-party politicians. “Bloom 1” boldly illustrates names of women fighting for equality prior to the ratification of the 19th Amendment in August 1920. “Bloom 2,” is a transparent version of her sister, with the names of contemporary feminists fading into bright florals reminiscent of Marimekko textiles and Pop Art silkscreens.

“We’re still working on equal rights,” says Shenefield. “It helps to know that good things take a lot of hard work and a lot of hands. It’s easy to get discouraged, especially when you’re young and can conceptualize a better future, but that’s a long, hard-fought fight.”

Evans’ “Fading Poppies” reflects on that passage of time and loss. Her print documents dying poppies in cold white light that casts dark shadows across the crinkled plant-life. The decaying petals become shapes, textures, and colors, vestiges of the once-living thing they adorned. In “Remembrance,” Eichorst meditates on what might have been, and commemorates the struggle, tears, and loss of the suffrage movement.

“Progress is not only in the fresh beginning of a new idea,” Evans says. “It’s about taking notice at every phase of life, whether it be growth or decay.”

Grant’s “Chalis” similarly removes the living aspect of its photographed flower petals, silhouetted against a black background. Although viewers see luscious oranges, pinks, and yellows, the roots and the green are gone.

Bolanle Adeboye’s illuminated diptych “Sink and Swim” offers a different exploration of struggle and suffrage, progress and choice. The image mimics the experience of peering into an aquarium, as neon, anemone-like shapes mingle with bubbles, scratch patterns, and creeping florals. Adeboye created the piece in opposition to the idea that one’s success depends entirely on a solitary effort.

“It’s a comfort during overwhelming times to remind myself that movement and progress can occur in many directions and along different planes,” Adeboye says. “And perhaps most important, [to remember] none of us are really ever alone in our efforts. There is life and beauty and diversity blooming all around, all the time, even at the very bottom of the ocean.”

Blooming along the gallery’s windows are vibrant painted florals by Lou Haney, whose gouache panels “Floral A” and “Floral B” are also featured in the show. Haney’s window installation blurs the outside environment, and bounces lively reflections across the glass frames of artworks on the opposite wall. Haney calls her painting “psychedelic,” and influenced by the Pattern and Decoration feminist art movement.

Like Haney, Gray and Hale seek to reclaim practices stereotyped as trivial or unartistic. Gray’s “Women’s Work” honors the domestic work that ultimately nourishes society. And Hale’s postcards incorporate collaged embroidered elements that nearly escape the viewer’s eye. As with the minute, controlled, and elaborate details of Gastinger’s botanical watercolors, both artists carefully consider each element of their artworks. Every brushstroke or stitch has a purpose.

“With my embroidery, I think of my grandmother, who will be 101 in November,” says Hale. “She is very progressive and was a big force in the workplace.” Hale says her grandmother “harasses” her about embroidery as art. “My grandmother asks me, ‘What are you doing? I tried to get away from the domestic realm!’ Now, I get to create art of that realm on my own terms.”

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Arts

Journalist Sonia Nazario exposes the plight of illegal immigration

Award-winning journalist Sonia Nazario will speak on illegal immigration on September 18 at Northside Library at 1pm and at The Haven at 6:30pm, as part of Welcoming Week programming. Publicity image

Sonia Nazario knew she wanted to be a journalist when she was a teenager. Growing up in Argentina in the 1970s, she witnessed the country’s “dirty war,” during which a terrorist military tortured and murdered 30,000 citizens. Nazario remembers asking her mother why the dead included reporters.

“My mom said these reporters were trying to tell the truth of what was happening,” says Nazario. “I saw then the importance of journalists. The military was getting away with what they were doing because people didn’t understand the magnitude of the war. In a democracy, journalists hold people accountable.”

That desire to hold people accountable has driven Nazario’s career in investigative journalism. It led her to spend months in one of the world’s most violent, gang-controlled territories and retrace the treacherous journey from Honduras to the United States taken by a 16-year-old boy searching for his mother. In her Pulitzer Prize-winning work, Enrique’s Journey, Nazario recounts the young man’s struggle following his mother’s own immigration 12 years prior—a story perhaps similar to those of the 20,000-plus unaccompanied children detained by border patrol officials in the first three months of 2019.

“It’s a story anyone can understand no matter your feelings about immigration. It’s what many Salvadorans in Virginia have lived through: mothers and fathers separated, and children wanting to be with their mothers,” says Nazario. “There are more kids traveling alone to the U.S. than ever before. I’ve been writing about this for 20 years and it’s more relevant now than ever.”

El Paso, for example, has experienced a 221 percent increase year-over-year in unaccompanied children apprehended at the U.S.-Mex-
ico border so far in fiscal year 2019, and the number of Honduran children detained while trying to cross the border has nearly tripled in the past year, U.S. Customs reports. In a July opinion piece for The New York Times, “Pay or Die,” Nazario wrote a firsthand account of covering the MS-13 and 18th Street gangs in Honduras. She delved into the four systems infiltrated and corrupted by gangs, which, together, have largely contributed to the increase in Honduran immigration—President Juan Orlando Hernández, the country’s schools, health system, and police.

“In the last 10 years, there has been a huge growth in violence in Honduran neighborhoods. Narco-cartels have brought in an amount of money greater than the country’s GDP,” Nazario says. “It’s increasingly controlled by a level of a gangs we don’t understand in the U.S. There are things I’ve seen that would astound people in the U.S.”

Nazario will discuss her decades of immersive reporting during a September 18 event at Northside Library, and again at The Haven, as part of Welcoming Week, an annual events series that unites refugees, immigrants, and residents to highlight the importance and benefits of creating welcoming communities.

“The solutions I’m going to discuss are solutions most people aren’t talking about,” says Nazario. She proposes some that are bipartisan, too. “A good discussion is an open discussion…the only way you advance is through a frank, open discussion.”

She recently spent a month reporting on the murders of hundreds of women in Honduras in an April 2019 opinion piece for the Times, “Someone is Always Trying to Kill You.”

“Unlike in much of the world, where most murdered women are killed by their husbands, partners, or family members, half in Honduras are killed by drug cartels and gangs,” Nazario writes. “And the ways they are being killed—shot in the vagina, cut to bits with their parts distributed among various public places, strangled in front of their children, skinned alive—have women running for the border.”

While in Honduras, Nazario witnessed someone being shot in the head a block from where she stood. Experiences like these re-triggered the post-traumatic stress Nazario developed while compiling Enrique’s Journey. She has horrific nightmares.

The right to voice one’s opinions and experiences without fear of retribution isn’t afforded to many in Honduras. In 2016, Nazario examined Rivera Hernández, the most dangerous neighborhood in the world’s most dangerous city, San Pedro Sula, the Honduran capital and home to the highest murder rates until 2016. In recent years, 96 percent of homicides in the neighborhood failed to end in convictions.

“Everyone in Rivera Hernández knew what happened to witnesses who stepped forward: Their bodies were dumped with a dead frog next to them,” she writes. “The message: Frogs talk too much.”

Enter the Association for a More Just Society, one of Nazario’s favorite U.S. nonprofits striving for justice in Honduras. Nazario speaks to the nonprofit’s witness protection program, where teams of lawyers, psychologists, and investigators spend months building the trust of murder witnesses. If they convince witnesses to testify, they are brought to court dressed in a burqa-like garment and hidden in a wheeled box with a two-way mirror.

Initiatives like this have made a difference: in the program’s pilot neighborhoods, more than half of completed homicide cases now end in a guilty verdict. By January, though, due to the Trump Administration’s cuts to El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras foreign aid, AJS will likely have to cut its staff from 140 to 40.

“People don’t understand how difficult things are in Central America,” says Nazario. “These programs are a fraction of the cost to build a wall and more detention centers. We have to be more human.”

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Arts

Women’s works

Karen Blair (“Blue Iris”) is one of five area artists exhibiting beside two works by abstract expressionist Joan Mitchell in Second Street Gallery’s “Lady Painters: Inspired by Joan Mitchell,” on view until July 19. [Second Street]

Three years after starting her tenure as Second Street Gallery’s executive director and chief curator, Kristen Chiacchia says she feels at home. For the next month, when she enters the gallery, among the works greeting her are a watercolor and oil painting by celebrated mid-century abstract expressionist Joan Mitchell. The untitled works from 1957 form the pièce de résistance in Second Street’s “Lady Painters: Inspired by Joan Mitchell” exhibition. Joining Mitchell in the show are five female artists from Virginia—Isabelle Abbot, Karen Blair, Janet Bruce, Molly Herman, and Priscilla Long Whitlock.

“I wanted to show that I’m taking a step forward and am doing things in Charlottesville and curatorially that I didn’t have the opportunity to do in New York—and that I’m still able to bring a Joan Mitchell into [Second Street],” Chiacchia says.

During her 14 years as director at Edward Tyler Nahem Fine Art in New York, Chiacchia estimates that over 50 of Mitchell’s top-tier works came through the gallery. With this proximity to one of the 20th century’s premier abstract artists, Chiacchia developed a respect for Mitchell and her groundbreaking work. After an introduction to Abbot, Blair, Bruce, and Whitlock through Les Yeux du Monde, and meeting Herman while in New York, Chiacchia noticed a connection between Mitchell’s work and that of the five women in “Lady Painters.”

“These women have been inspired by Joan Mitchell throughout their career, but none have exhibited alongside her work,” says Chiacchia. “You can see the similarities in brushstroke and color.”

And there are even similarities in framing. Herman’s diptych “Montserrat Field” features the same frame that New York’s Robert Miller Gallery would often choose for one of the many Mitchell works that entered its doors. Herman refers to her work as an exploration of figurative measurement, rather than of figures themselves. She says she feels “flattered” to be associated with Mitchell.

“My work is about a connection to flesh and the body,” Herman says. “Even standing in front of a painting is a relationship. It’s a reflection, or you dive into it.”

Dive into the gallery after a Saturday morning at the farmers’ market, as Chiacchia suggests, and the connection between the exhibition’s vibrant palate and that of early summer’s bounty becomes undeniable. Chiacchia speaks of the importance of the color blue to Mitchell, and indeed, the pieces flanking Mitchell’s two “Untitled” works celebrate the cool color.

On the gallery’s back wall is Whitlock’s “High Water, Marks.” It’s an abstracted landscape that portrays a gestural, expansive scene that is a symphony of exacted mark- making.

Upon encountering her first Mitchell in Norfolk’s Chrysler Museum of Art, Whitlock says “it was love at first sight—the big slashes of paint, the energy behind her marks.” In preparation for the exhibition, Whitlock incorporated more mixed-media and looser mark-making in her work. “I love the expressive marks and energy that can be distilled into line; it’s jazzy, hopping, it’s music,” she says.

Karen Blair’s “Blue Iris” energetically conveys joy and excitement. Displaying her painting next to Mitchell’s watercolor made her realize how much of Mitchell’s aesthetic became part of her own.

“Abstract marks can convey an entire world,” Blair says. “As an artist, if you walk into a gallery, the thing that you’re looking for is whether or not the show is more than the sum of its parts,” says Blair. “The energy in [Second Street] knocks you off your feet. Kristen did that. Having a painting next to Joan Mitchell does that.”

Flanking a few of Blair’s works are those belonging to Abbot, who shares a studio with Blair. Abbot’s “The Beach in Summer” subtly nods to the color field aesthetic of Mark Rothko or Barnett Newman, whose work was concurrent to Mitchell’s abstractions. Abbot’s “Summer” is freer, though. It revels in repetitive brushstroke and explores variations in texture and line—perhaps akin to navigating beach towels on a crowded seashore.

On the gallery’s right wall, viewers encounter Bruce’s seven-by-four-and-a-half-foot “Charlottesville, August 12, 2017.” Awash in iron and gold hues, the painting overflows with collage-like figures finished with jagged, puzzle piecemealed edges that don’t quite fit together.

Bruce quotes Robert Motherwell—another of Mitchell’s contemporaries—in his “Elegies to the Spanish Republic”: “‘A terrible death happened that should not be forgot.’ It’s important to find expression for horror. Red is the color of blood, rage, organs, lipstick.”

Just behind “Charlottesville,” in the exhibition’s entrance, there is a phrase uttered by Mitchell during her 1988 retrospective at the San Francisco Museum of Art: “Not bad for a lady painter.”

“Mitchell called herself that sarcastically to show that she wasn’t just a lady painter,” says Chiacchia. “She was one of the most important American painters of the 20th century—not just female painters, but one of the most important painters. The opportunity we have to show her at Second Street and alongside women we know in our community…that’s something really special.”

Second Street Gallery’s “Lady Painters: Inspired by Joan Mitchell,” on view until July 19.

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Arts

Buzz worthy: McGuffey group exhibition reimagines ancient beeswax-based medium

L. Michelle Geiger's encaustic mixed media is one of seven artists’ encaustic paintings, sculptures, and mixed-media works are on view in “Melting Point: Contemporary Encaustic Works” at McGuffey Art Center through June 2. Courtesy of the artist

Sometimes, when the windows are open and the weather is warm, Giselle Gautreau has special guests at her McGuffey studio.

“Bees will come in and visit, so I have to escort the ladies out,” Gautreau says. “I used to be a beekeeper, so I’m obsessed with bees.”

The winged visitors are drawn to the smell of beeswax and honey created by Gautreau’s encaustic artworks. Encaustic painting is a wax-based form of mixed-media art that has its roots in Greece, as early as the fifth century B.C. By combining molten wax, damar resin, and extremely high heat, artists could create and preserve paintings ranging from warships’ adornment to architecture and pottery embellishments and Egyptian funeral portraits. Over time, the costly, labor intensive artform fell out of favor—but it has experienced a modern-day resurgence.

“Artists now have more access to tools to heat the wax,” she explains. “More studios are teaching encaustic workshops, too.”

Gautreau uses instruments such as a pancake griddle, créme brûlée torch, dental tools, and razor blades to create her artworks, several of which are on view until June 2 in a McGuffey group show that she curated, “Melting Point: Contemporary Encaustic Works.” Gautreau selected six other encaustic artists from around the region to join the exhibition—Michelle Geiger, Gina Louthian-Stanley, Bridgette Mills, Lynda Ray, Jeannine Regan, and Kristie Wood.

The show is a veritable feast for the senses. Sculptural works like Mills’ “Guardians II”—comprised of chicken wire, mirror, wax, and textiles—still smell of beeswax. It’s a rich, tactile piece that pays homage to a site-specific sculpture Mills installed in an arboretum in Maryland that was stolen and never recovered.

Geiger, another McGuffey artist, infuses her interest in marine biology and bookmaking in her three-dimensional assemblage paintings. In her whimsical “Stories of the Sea” mixed-media piece, an octopus figurine leafs through an array of papers Geiger ripped from a textbook. She positions the figures against a blue-green background, richly reminiscent of algae, space, or the hue of water 10,000 leagues beneath the surface.

Other pieces in the show, such as Ray’s bright, geometric wave series or Regan’s abstracted landscapes, build up colorful layers of the thick, textural wax—so much so that light bounces across the paintings and creates three-dimensional peaks and valleys. Louthian-Stanley achieves a similarly sculptural effect in her works by using a combination of roofing tar and wax. Her 3-foot-wide painting “Frozen River” calls to mind an empty winter landscape that nonetheless feels warm and inviting, complex, and expansive.

“It can be an excavating or additive process. Everyone approaches encaustic in different ways,” says Gautreau.

Wood, another Charlottesville artist, incorporates the wax and resin medium via photo transfer. She scours antique stores for vintage portraits, manipulates them digitally, and renders the photographs on wax. In “Delicate Little Flowers,” Wood peeled the new wax representation of the original image, and delicately arranged each photo transfer in circular layers—and with added elements like a gold frame and hardware she has captured this cyclical family tree at one specific moment in time.

Gautreau’s works also evoke feelings of nostalgia and memory. Her delicate, graphite-based marking dances across the surfaces of “Grove in Winter” and “Gather”—perhaps imitating a honeybee in flight. She loves the cloudy, diffused quality created by buffing and re-buffing the encaustic surface, and experimenting with the translucency of the wax.

“When I’m oil painting, I know what I’m after and what the piece will look like,” Gautreau says. “Less so with encaustic. There are more happy accidents.”

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Arts

A body of art: UVA marks Merce Cunningham’s centennial with special screenings

To participate in the global celebration of the late choreographer Merce Cunningham’s 100th birthday, see Merce Cunningham: A Lifetime of Dance at Violet Crown on April 17, or catch an episode of “Mondays with Merce” at the Ruth Caplin Theatre through April 25. Photo by Annie Liebovitz

Over the course of her six years teaching dance in UVA’s drama department, lecturer and faculty member Katie Schetlick has noticed a shift in her students. More and more, she’s seeing students connect with the influential work of choreographer Merce Cunningham.

“A large body of his work is from the 1960s, ’70s, and ’80s. But in some way, Merce’s work now relates more to the fragmentation of how we receive information,” Schetlick says. “There are fewer questions about how Merce’s work qualifies as dance. A few years ago, there was much more confusion about his work and what it was supposed to ‘mean’.”

It’s timely too, as 2019 marks the 100th anniversary of the late American artist’s birth. From London to Lyon, and from Charlottesville to Los Angeles, universities, dance companies, and artists around the world are commemorating the occasion. Schetlick and Kim Brooks Mata, director of UVA’s dance program, organized weekly screenings of the documentary mini-series “Mondays with Merce,” airing from 9am to 5:30pm in the lobby of the Ruth Caplin Theatre—on Mondays.

In the 16-part series, Schetlick says “you can see how hungry Merce is for the art form of dance, even after 70 years. You can see his childlike approach.” She points to the final installation of the series, which was the last interview the choreographer gave before he died. The 90-year-old Cunningham’s passion and reverence for dance is tangible. He simultaneously reflects on his legacy while embracing a rapidly changing future of art, and challenges the interviewer’s use of words like “good” and “lifelike” to describe art—as so many did during Cunningham’s lifetime.

“Art is full of life,” Cunningham says, laughing. “All kinds of art.”

Schetlick says, “you can see his endless curiosity about what movement is and what foregrounding movement is in dance. It’s not dance as a means for something. It’s movement in dance in and of itself.”

And Cunningham did start a movement. He shared a lifelong personal and professional relationship with composer John Cage, and collaborated with visual artists such as Andy Warhol, Robert Rauschenberg, and Charles Atlas. Schetlick says she’s been enamored by Cunningham’s “RainForest” since she saw it as a student in her first dance history class 12 years ago. The piece features a set with helium-filled mylar balloons designed by Warhol, and dancers with flesh-colored leotards that Jasper Johns slashed with a razor blade.

“The mylar balloons became another kinetic force in the piece and animated some of the ways that Cunningham was thinking about chance,” Schetlick observes. “You couldn’t predict what those balloons were going to do, so they became a force of change in the piece. …It stuck with me.”

Through Cunningham’s artistic collaborations and explorations, Schetlick says, he challenged what dance could be. He investigated the form of the body—asking questions about it from the early 1950s until his death in 2009. Cunningham’s focus on movement in its purest form is what Schetlick highlights for her students.

“He wasn’t interested in stories or messages through dance,” says Schetlick. “He let the movement guide understanding, rather than play in to concept or feeling—as if the body itself could speak. What we’re trying to impart on our students is the importance of dance. It’s the least supported art form in many different ways, but it carries so much weight.”

UVA’s drama department, The Fralin Museum of Art, and Violet Crown give the public another chance to join in the global commemoration with a screening of Atlas’ documentary Merce Cunningham: A Lifetime of Dance. The film explores the trajectory of Cunningham’s career through the lens of his close collaborator—from early footage of his dances to recent productions using choreography computer software.

“Even when he could no longer move,” says Schetlick, “he was still choreographing.”

To participate in the global celebration of the late choreographer Merce Cunningham’s 100th birthday, see Merce Cunningham: A Lifetime of Dance at Violet Crown on April 17, or catch an episode of “Mondays with Merce” at the Ruth Caplin Theatre through April 25.