Through deep examination of documents, oral histories, and extensive research, “Toward a Lineage of Self” offers a detailed, interactive look at the prosperity, vibrancy, segregation, and discrimination of Charlottesville’s Black community. Image courtesy of Jordy Yager.
“Toward a Lineage of Self” is the latest addition to the “Pride Overcomes Prejudice” permanent exhibition at the Jefferson School African American Heritage Center. Featuring an interactive digital map, the exhibition uses deed records, oral histories, documents, and photographs to show how Charlottesville’s historically Black neighborhoods came to be, the struggles they faced when confronted with racist civic policy, and the community’s response.
With photographs and descriptions, the map breathes life into the past, enlivening the facts it lays bare. The map has three categories: community, civil rights, and discrimination—and what emerges is a picture of a vibrant, well-organized, and prosperous community that supported its members, and when discriminatory practices were introduced, joined the fight for civil rights.
“They structured their lives within this space of legalized apartheid. There’s no other way to describe it,” says JSAAHC Executive Director Dr. Andrea Douglas. “It says in the minutes of the City of Charlottesville … ‘This will accomplish racial segregation in our city.’ You can’t get past those documents and those are the things that are important as we start to think about what is equitable.”
“The minute that African American people leave enslavement, they begin to shape Charlottesville,” says Douglas. “They begin to purchase property, they begin to create their home places, and they begin to build around those places the ancillary needs—the grocery store, churches, and community aid societies … and they’re doing it in the built landscape and they’re doing it at a rapid rate, facilitating this ascendancy for each other—that is what ‘Toward a Lineage of Self’ really articulates.”
One example is John West, a successful barber and the first Black man elected to Charlottesville’s Town Council. He was responsible for more than 600 property transactions between 1870 and 1927. As a landlord, he offered reasonable rates and made home-buying possible for many African Americans.
Similarly, the Piedmont Industrial Land Improvement Company was formed by nine residents, who pooled funds to buy more than 50 properties in its 26-year history, providing both affordable housing and economic returns to its investors. And the fact that Charlottesville’s Black community managed to build seven churches between 1864 and 1919 is a testament not just to its faith, but also to its prosperity.
“The whole of Charlottesville’s center was Black-owned,” says JSAAHC Director of Digital Humanities Jordy Yager. ”This had never been articulated before. We talked about all these different neighborhood pockets like Vinegar Hill, Fifeville, etc., but once you look at it in its entirety, you really start to see how large the center of Charlottesville is as a Black space.” The area totaled some 800 acres.
Yager, a journalist and Charlottesville native who’s written about Vinegar Hill and the gentrification of the 10th and Page neighborhood for this publication, has accumulated hours of taped recollections for C-VILLE Weekly stories, which he offered to JSAAHC for its oral histories archive. Out of this came an initiative, supported by a grant from the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities, to collect interviews about what it was like growing up Black in Charlottesville.
An offshoot of this, Mapping Cville, began around the same time as the Unite the Right rally in August 2017. “After that we had a reckoning in Charlottesville in terms of [the city’s] history,” says Yager. “It was then we realized, we really didn’t know that history. We knew that racist housing policies were enacted, but we didn’t know where and we didn’t know how.”
Armed with a Charlottesville Area Community Foundation grant and with the cooperation of city and county clerks, JSAAHC digitized an astounding 300,000 pages of property records. Then, using optical character recognition software, the racial covenants were extracted.
More than 2,000 community members helped log the information to create what Yager says is “The first complete database of every single racially restricted property in Charlottesville that’s ever existed.”
“Toward a Lineage of Self” spells out the retaliatory discriminatory practices—land seizures, racial covenants on deeds, intentional lack of city services, like water and sewage, that were instituted by local and state governments alarmed or offended by the progress—their affluence and their successful voter campaigns, which, among other things, helped elect James T.S. Taylor to the Constitutional Convention of 1868—made by Black residents.
The uncomfortable truths revealed by the research must be dealt with. These truths are not lodged in the distant remove of ancient history; you only have to look around Charlottesville to see the fallout of this civic-endorsed inequity.
“Toward a Lineage of Self” operates on both a micro and macro level, providing a vivid road map for descendants of the people who formed Charlottesville’s Black community, while at the same time revealing the larger ramifications of systemic racism and inequality.
“We can give people their histories, but we can also engage in a conversation about repairs,” says Douglas. “We can also engage in a conversation about present-day housing practice. In this age when the truth is contestable, the forensics are not, the paper trail is not contested.”
“Beyond Boundaries: The Sculpture of Alice Wesley Ivory” is on view at the Jefferson School African American Heritage Center through December 14. Photo by Eze Amos.
The story of sculptor Alice Ivory is a story of triumph against adversity, and the power of the creative drive. It is also an American tragedy of sorts, highlighting the dearth of opportunities afforded people outside the white, predominantly male, status quo. In “Beyond Boundaries: The Sculpture of Alice Wesley Ivory,” the Jefferson School African American Heritage Center highlights the work and life story of the under-celebrated artist.
Ivory was born in Albemarle County in 1931. From the start, she faced challenges as a poor, Black female in segregated Virginia. But Ivory had a few things going for her. Her parents, Warner Wesley and Gladys Frye Wesley, owned their own farm in White Hall, and though neither one had attended school, they were literate.
As a child, Ivory attended White Hall Colored School, a two-mile walk each day. She completed her secondary education at Albemarle Training School on Hydraulic Road—at the time, it was the only school in the surrounding five-county area to offer Black kids an education beyond the seventh grade. Ivory went on to Virginia State College (now University) in Petersburg, where she earned a degree in art education. She taught at Jackson P. Burley High School for seven years before applying to graduate school at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. (The University of Virginia was out of the question, as it was still segregated.)
Accepted provisionally at first because her undergraduate degree was from a Southern Black institution, Ivory satisfied UWM’s requirements, gained full admission, and received her M.S. in art education in 1962. It was at UWM that she discovered her lifelong passion for welding, a highly unusual choice for a woman at the time. Her interest was not lost on Fred Ivory, who presented his bride with an oxo-acetylene torch when they married. She would use that equipment for the rest of her life. In 1970, she became the first Black teacher hired by the Blue Ridge School, and taught there until retiring in 1990.
Ivory received some artistic acclaim during her lifetime, garnering certificates of distinction from the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts for her sculptures “Crow,” “Wild Boar,” and “Eagle”—the latter created in response to JFK’s assassination. She was also the subject of a one-woman show at the VMFA, which also subsequently commissioned “Kangaroo” for its 1980 “Fantasies,” a touchable exhibition designed for people with visual impairments. Ivory’s work has been exhibited at McGuffey Art Center, and a painted portrait of Ivory by Frances Brand was part of the “Firsts” exhibition. But these acknowledgments are not commensurate with her talent.
The sensitivity, compassion, and humor with which Ivory’s animals and insects are rendered reflect her rural upbringing. Michael R. Taylor, artistic director and chief curator at the VMFA has an interesting take on her work.
“In a way, Alice Ivory’s marvelous welded metal sculptures are all self-portraits,” says Taylor. “She’s in them. She is the fierce junkyard dog, she is the beautiful crow, and she‘s the kangaroo protecting her young. I think that’s all of her rolled into one.”
Ivory used both naturalism and caricature to capture her subjects. Her chickens possess a hand-wrought honesty and humor reminiscent of some of Alexander Calder’s animals. Even though they are abstracted versions, Ivory nails the posture, stance, and movement—in essence, their chickenness.
Generally, she didn’t bother with surface details, placing emphasis on form and gesture. In a very modern way, Ivory acknowledged the materiality of the work, with unadorned metal and exposed welding seams and brazing marks. Other animals in this vein are the attenuated Alberto Giacometti-like “Heron” and the menacing, yet funny, piranha whose teeth are made from nails.
Ivory’s “Bull’ is a study of compressed energy. The bull seems to be gathering itself in preparation for charging. To emphasize the animal’s power, she exaggerates the hooves, attaches the plates of metal so the seams accentuate the animal’s musculature and adds a tail that seems charged with electricity. Her magnificent, oversized “Crow” gets the bird’s attitude exactly right, with a cocked head that conveys curiosity and intelligence.
The majority of Ivory’s sculptures were made (using scrap metal her husband collected for her) between 1960 and 1970, while she was taking a break from teaching to care for her two young children. It wasn’t easy, as Ivory herself wrote: “…other sculptures have been made at home when I had managed to get the baby quiet, the dishes washed, the laundry hung out to dry and another of hundreds of huge meals prepared.”
In spite of these domestic burdens, she produced, by her estimation, 100 sculptures. By way of comparison, American sculptor David Smith, who died 10 years younger than Ivory, produced well over 500 sculptures.
Ivory made the best of it, producing extraordinarily sympathetic work. She unquestionably had the talent to scale the heights of the art world, yet she lived out her days in relative obscurity, raising children, keeping house, and supporting herself as an art teacher. When she died in 1991, Ivory left behind a body of superlative work that speaks not only to what she achieved but also to how she triumphed in a world of exclusion. Looking at it, one can’t help but feel that she, and (to a far lesser degree) we, were cheated out of a more fully realized career.
A celebration of Nym Pederson’s life and work begins on his birthday, August 17, and continues through the rest of the year at different venues. Find more info at nymaroundtown.com. Supplied photo.
In the years leading up to the pandemic, artist Nym Pedersen could often be found on the Downtown Mall, peddling his small paintings, drawings, and collages, which he dubbed “art snacks.” Much like Steve Keene, Nym felt that art should be within everyone’s reach and priced his work accordingly. Nym died on March 9 at the age of 64 after a brief bout with cancer.
Nym came to Charlottesville in 1997 from Portland, Oregon, to join his sister, theater maven Boomie Pedersen. Nym (his nickname a combination of Norman and “him,” thanks to Boomie) grew up in New York City, where he attended the Collegiate School and Columbia University. The Pedersens lived on Central Park West just across the street from the park that became their playground and sanctuary.
It was not an easy childhood. The Pedersens’ father was the director of education at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Heeding the 1960s’ call to “Turn on, tune in, and drop out,” he abandoned his young family for points west, creating years of financial insecurity for those he left behind.
The burden created feelings of low self-worth; in Nym’s case, they helped mold him into someone who was self-effacing and introverted. The trauma showed up in his work, where he expressed the angst of the abandoned child. “I think my brother painted to resolve his relationship with our father,” says Boomie. “That’s where he worked out the torments going on inside him.” This is not to say Nym’s was an unhappy existence. In addition to his family, he had a close circle of friends he valued and who cherished him.
Remarkably prolific, Nym focused on the human form and, in particular, faces. Some of these, generally his pen-and-ink works, are delicate figures in repose, while others, paintings or collage, are grotesques with wild eyes and scar-like grimaces. Nym could also be scathingly funny and much of his art occupies the same absurdist world as Paul Klee’s work.
Nym took studio classes at Columbia and The Art Students League of New York and worked in different media—drawing, painting, collaging, sculpting. Drawn to collage for its ability to suggest layers of meaning, in some works he assembled bits of paper narratively to create startling portraits and in others he employed it as a visual device to provide texture and spatial ambiguity. In several pieces, he even mimicked the effect of collage with paint.
In addition to his artistic practice, which remained a constant throughout his life, Nym worked as a copy editor for McGraw Hill in New York. In Charlottesville, he was employed at Harvest Moon Catering and also as a relief copy editor at C-VILLE Weekly.
Through his marriage to Allegra von Studnitz, whom he adored, Nym became a devoted stepfather and step-grandfather to her biological daughter, two adopted sons, and grandson. The couple would go on to adopt two more boys, and Nym loved being a father and living a pastoral existence in the country surrounded by a large and varied menagerie.
It was this happiness that helped resolve his demons. Allegra describes the sea change: “Some years back Nym reached a breaking point. He felt deep despair about life, his past, the art world,” she says. “He made the decision that his outlook on life would become an introspection on life. He became the kindest, most loving human being, filled with humility. … And with that, he departed.”
Isabelle Abbot’s “Morning Glow” is on view as part of “Influence + Conversation” at Les Yeux du Monde. Image courtesy of LYDM.
Artists Isabelle Abbot and Barbara Campbell Thomas met when Abbot was a student in the MFA program at UNC Greensboro where Thomas was a professor. Thomas became an important mentor to Abbot, helping her achieve a looser, freer painting style and chairing her thesis committee. “Influence + Conversation” at Les Yeux du Monde reunites the two women in an exhibition showcasing their parallel approaches and ongoing artistic dialogue.
The most potent tie linking the two artists is their shared appreciation of the natural world and what this brings to their respective practices. “Barbara has always been very supportive of my time outside in nature,” says Abbot, who became a regular visitor to Thomas’ farm while she was a student. “She talked a lot about note-taking when you’re outside, moving through the world and observing things.”
These plein air notes, a central facet of both artists’ practices, help build a visual language they can draw from. Thomas, whose work is abstract, uses what she gleans from her forays outdoors to develop what she refers to as contemplations of an interior landscape. Her paintings combine sewn fabric, collaged elements, and acrylic paint. “I don’t start with a solid piece of material; I basically build it piece by piece, using small sections of fabric, to form a ground that gets stretched. When I’m done with the sewing, I start adding the paint and collage.
“When I learned the technique of piecing fabric together it was like a lightbulb went off. I felt like it was the knowledge I needed. I don’t want to start with a large expanse of unblemished canvas; I want to make that too. It’s not something that’s a given. Instead, I build the ground myself.”
“Dear Star” by Barbara Campbell Thomas. Image Courtesy of LYDM.
Thomas’ reduced palette of blues and grays is inspired by a rag rug made by her great-grandmother. The rug features a pattern of diamonds, a motif Thomas has incorporated into “Central Medallion.” In this work, the artist plays with space in an abstract way. Surrounding the center diamond, four squares of fabric are attached to each other. Where the seams meet, the strips of material don’t exactly line up, imparting a kind of jangly energy to the piece. Lighter colored painted fabric around the edges frame the dark center, making it pop.
Optically, the thrust of the work appears to be receding down a deep well, while at other times, it feels like it’s extending out toward you. This spatial push/pull animates the work and reveals Thomas’ interest in how movement affects observation. “The visual rhythm and visual cadence of my work is aided by the fact that my body’s in movement,” she says. This attention to rhythm and cadence is also seen in “Night Space,” which features a prominent horizontal direction, and “Dear Star,” which brims with staccato intensity.
Abbot’s connection to the physical landscape is more obvious, although in many works she embraces an abstract direction, using landscape as the jumping-off point. She creates her preliminary sketches outdoors, then takes them back to the studio and tapes them to the wall. “I look at them and see what I would call my go-to marks, my go-to shapes that I put together in different ways.” Moving from one painting to another, you begin to see elements of that vocabulary: descending slopes, triangles, and similar amorphous forms that crop up repeatedly.
In much of the work on view, Abbot, who excels as a colorist, favors a highly keyed palette of turquoise, yellow, and cerulean. Yet in “Ode to Greenwood,” she uses a more naturalistic color scheme. The painting reads true to nature, but in approaching the picture, you see how the color is created with a gutsy amalgamation of gestural hues that work together to describe reflections on water, the choppy contours of soft, muddy land, and shadows.
In “Morning Glow,” blotches of bright pigment, resembling the fiery flecks that shimmer within an opal, denote pinkish sunlight glinting off structures and objects on distant ridges. The furthermost peaks are washed in pale yellow and pink, and Abbot uses vibrant brushstrokes and vivid aquamarine to convey a mountainside bathed in sun, tempering this bold choice with the dark verdant green of the adjoining hill.
For Abbot, like Thomas, it’s not just being in nature, but moving through nature. “For a long time, I painted the landscape like I was looking out a window at it. I framed it and composed it and then painted it.” But now she tries a more immersive approach, capturing the landscape in a holistic way. “It’s something that’s not way over there … you’re in it.” You see how this is implemented to great effect in “Field’s Edge,” a pastoral scene that is not just a stunning image, but is infused with the sensual qualities of its subject—buffeting breeze and warm sun—elements experienced by the artist firsthand and interpreted so effectively for us using her personal artistic language.
On view through July 14, “Madayin: Eight Decades of Aboriginal Australian Bark Painting from Yirrkala” features over 50 works of ochre painting on eucalyptus bark. View the exhibition experience online at madayin.kluge-ruhe.org.
Supplied photo.
“They’re more than art—they’re like the Bible, Google Maps, and ancestry.com all rolled into one,” says Henry Skerritt, curator of the Indigenous Arts of Australia at University of Virginia’s Kluge-Ruhe Aboriginal Art Collection. Skerritt is describing what bark paintings represent to the Yolŋu people of Arnhem Land in the Northern Territory of Australia. It’s an apt description to keep in mind when viewing “Madayin: Eight Decades of Aboriginal Australian Bark Painting from Yirrkala” at The Fralin Museum.
The exhibition, which is the largest showing of bark paintings ever presented in the Western Hemisphere, took seven years to produce—a remarkable endeavor given the scope of the exhibition and the challenges along the way, including a global pandemic and legislative changes governing the export of Australian cultural heritage objects.
“Madayin” is a collaboration with the Hood Museum of Art at Dartmouth College, but it was in Charlottesville, in 2015, that the idea for this exhibition took root. Djambawa Marawili, Chairman of the Buku-Larrŋgay Mulka Centre, was at the Kluge-Ruhe Collection on an Australia Council for the Arts artist residency. Astonished at the number of bark paintings in the collection—many containing stories he recognized—he became intent on producing a show that would tell the history of Yolŋu bark paintings.
Bark painting is a relatively new innovation in an artistic continuum that stretches back at least 50,000 years. But it wasn’t until the 1930s that the Yolŋu began painting their artwork on large expanses of flattened eucalyptus bark. Prior to this, they placed their symbols and figures on the body or ceremonial objects, or they incorporated them into sand-sculptures.
Works on view in “Madayin: Eight Decades of Aboriginal Australian Bark Painting from Yirrkala.” View the exhibition experience online at madayin.kluge-ruhe.org. Supplied photo.
Aboriginal artwork is centered on storytelling passed down through generations, and Aboriginal artists cannot paint stories that do not belong to them through their clan. Songlines are walking routes which traverse the country with important stops like water holes and sacred sites denoted along the way and are essential to the storytelling. Each songline is specific to a certain Aboriginal clan and is memorized and sung.
As an opening and closing practice, a song is sung to include the spirit. “Every one of those paintings has an accompanying song and an accompanying dance,” says Skerritt. “It records these epic ancestral stories and also testifies to the type of ownership of those places. ‘This is my mother’s brother’s land, so I can camp here and I can use the natural resources here,’ and the people living there say, ‘Well, okay, sure. Do you know the song or dance that goes with this place?’ And if they don’t know the right song and dance, they don’t have a right to be there.”
Yirrkala and its bark paintings played a central role in establishing Indigenous land rights. When a section of the Arnhem Land Reserve was opened to bauxite mining in 1963, clan elders responded by producing petitions on bark that presented their claim to the land. The petitions featured text in both Gupapuyŋu and English surrounded by sacred clan designs. The effort to stop the mining failed, but the petitions were significant in establishing indigenous ownership in the Northern Territory Land Rights Act of 1976 and the 2008 Sea Rights case.
“Madayin” is curated by the artists themselves and the late Wukun Wanambi, to whom the exhibition and catalog are dedicated. They know how the work relates, its purpose and its meaning, which paintings go together and which must be kept separate, and which should be removed from public view altogether. Designed to be as accessible as possible to the Yolŋu back home, the extensive 348-page catalog is bilingual and the show is online.
Works on view in “Madayin: Eight Decades of Aboriginal Australian Bark Painting from Yirrkala.” View the exhibition experience online at madayin.kluge-ruhe.org. Supplied photo.
The Yolŋu people divide everything into either Dhuwa or Yirritja moieties, separate groups that operate collaboratively. Ceremonies always include both Yirritja and Dhuwa, and members of one group can only marry someone from the opposite moiety. These principles, central to how the Yolŋu people live, also guided how they chose to arrange the exhibition.
It was important to the curators to hang old paintings alongside contemporary works to show the continued vitality of the Yolŋu artistic and spiritual traditions. “Whether I see an old painting or a new one, it’s no different,” says Wanambi. “The pathway is the same. The songline. The pattern. The story. The place. The wäŋa (homeland)—the place where it came from. It’s all the same.”
The works feature an earthy palette of red—ranging from dark brick to pink—black, tan, white, and mustard, and distinctive Yolŋu marks like cross-hatching, diamonds, and dots. Viewers can spot animals, plants, and people in the older works, but other references to topography, cosmology, and spirituality are beyond our understanding. The newer pieces read like abstract paintings but are composed of patterns, sometimes made up of recognizable objects like fish, and, in some cases, the designs are placed over figurative imagery, obscuring it.
From the Aboriginal perspective, “Madayin” is far more profound than an art exhibition. The word itself means sacred and sublime, and the Yolŋu, in addition to sharing their ancestral knowledge, are showcasing a different way of seeing and understanding.
The Yolŋu spirit of collaboration extends to their artwork, which represents a relationship between the Yolŋu and the land. You see this in a small way with the pigments they use, which are derived from natural ochre and iron clay, but as Marawili explains, it’s far more profound than that: “The land has everything it needs, but it could not speak. It could not express itself, tell its identity, so it grew a tongue. That is the Yolŋu. That is me. We are the tongue. Grown by the land so it can sing who it is. We exist so we can paint the land. That is our job. Paint and sing and dance so that the land can feel good and express its true identity. Without us, it cannot talk, but it is still there. Only silent.”
Uzo Njoku’s show “Virginia is for Artists” is at the Connaughton Gallery through June 14.
More information at commerce.virginia.edu/art. Supplied photo.
The John P. and Stephanie F. Connaughton Gallery at the McIntire School of Commerce might not be on every Charlottesville art lover’s radar, but it should be. The gallery typically presents three shows each year with two artists per show who are invited to apply by McIntire Art Committee members. In most cases, McIntire purchases work from the exhibiting artist to add to the school’s permanent collection, now numbering over 80 pieces and hung in public spaces throughout the Rouss & Robertson Halls complex.
Currently at Connaughton is the work of Uzo Njoku. A 2019 UVA graduate, Njoku was born in Lagos, Nigeria, and moved to the United States when she was 7. At UVA, Njoku started out as a statistics major but switched to studio art after her first year.
She is now a one-woman art-producing and marketing powerhouse based in New York City. “Uzo’s journey from statistics major to a self-styled ‘artpreneur’ holds such appeal and also valuable lessons for students in both the arts and in commerce,” says Dorothy C. Kelly, McIntire’s Robert B. Hardaway, Jr. Lecturer of Personal Finance, who sits on the art committee and is an admirer of Njoku’s oeuvre as well as her entrepreneurial skills.
You only have to look at Njoku’s sleek website to see the breadth of her activities; beyond painting, there are events and a prodigious array of Njoku merch—coloring books, calendars, mugs, T-shirts, and outerwear—plus her own wallpaper designs and a mural commission for Tommy Hilfiger. Not bad for a recent college graduate.
Njoku’s vibrant, large format works feature broad, flat planes of paint. For the most part, she takes a stylized approach and uses a bold palette of bright colors together with black to create a compelling graphic quality.
In many of her pieces, Njoku incorporates patterns, as their detail contrasts nicely with the more simplified passages. Pattern is very important to Njoku, who uses it to incorporate Nigerian culture into her work. She uses it in a similar fashion to Kehinde Wiley, as backdrops to portraits, but she favors traditional wax cloth patterns, such as in “A New Perspective,” or distilled versions inspired by them in “A Very Nice Girl,” as opposed to Wiley’s lush floral expanses.
For Njoku, these designs extend beyond visual flourish or cultural reference to imbue the pieces with movement. “The Weight of Ink” is a self-portrait of the artist, identified by the “U” tab on the end of her turtleneck zipper. She’s positioned against an intense teal background and wears a hot pink sweater under an orange shirt and red jacket. Features like ribbing, stitching, and buttons are rendered in careful detail. Two yellow circles denote earrings. What makes the painting captivating is the face, which is largely nonexistent. Is it that she is laughing so hard that her eyes are squinted shut? All we can see against the black of her skin and hair are her teeth, yet the title suggests a more somber interpretation. Is it a comment about Black invisibility, or the weighty responsibility of presenting the Black experience? One thing is certain: The title suggests that there’s more here than meets the eye.
With the “The Young Man,” Njoku produces a psychologically charged image—a result of the melancholia that seems writ on the subject’s face. Sporting a bright red sweater and jeans, he stands before a structure composed of various geometric shapes that form walls, steps, and a doorway. It feels confined, and one wonders if it’s intended to reflect his situation and, perhaps, the stasis that governs his life. Languor is conveyed by a couple of chickens pecking at the ground. Njoku executes these in a more painterly fashion, using blurred brushstrokes to produce feathers. A full laundry basket is positioned against the back wall, and behind the youth hangs a showy floral cloth. Njoku makes it pop by painting it like a self-contained rectangular pattern, as opposed to laundry drying on a clothesline.
The largest work in the show, “Indefinite Space,” is an eye-popping tour de force of motifs and portraiture. Two female figures recline against a vivid pattern of blue, yellow, red, and white that explodes across the canvas. Njoku ratchets up the effect by introducing another similarly hued pattern that butts up against the dominant one. Behind these, she paints a background that looks like a stylized version of deep space. The women, whose faces are rendered with deft sensitivity, confront the viewer with powerful gazes. Each wears African-style head wraps and large gold earrings; one has on fashionably ripped jeans and sneakers, while the other sports a nose ring. The clothing positions them in contemporary times, yet the figures’ poses recall classical renderings of Greek gods and, together with the celestial background, suggest divinity.
The exhibition, which includes multiple works featuring strong women, opened during March’s Women’s History Month. The fact that the strong women in this show are also Black is especially important, given its location at a school that produces future movers and shakers within the realms of commerce and power.
Dathan Kane’s “The World of Shapes” exhibition at Visible Records is one of two shows by Kane that are on display in Charlottesville and Newport News through the month of March. Publicity photo.
Dathan Kane has just completed a month-long residency at Visible Records, an artist-run gallery and studio space that focuses on contemporary arts and empowering the community, and is located in the Belmont/Carlton neighborhood. Kane’s residency is part of a joint project with the Contemporary Arts Network of Newport News that will see two Visible Records artists headed there to produce a mural.
During his time at VR, Kane painted the walls of the 1,000 square-foot space with one of his distinctive black and white murals, which he collectively refers to as “The World of Shapes.” The result is stunning.
Born and raised in Hampton, Virginia, Kane received his B.A. in art and design from Virginia State University in 2014, with a focus on illustration, charcoal drawing, and graphic design. He didn’t start painting until his senior year, but took to it immediately. After graduation, he embarked on a career painting still lifes and portraits. But this changed dramatically following a 2015 trip to Art Basel Miami. “Seeing the work that was there and the artists I’d been studying—having access to that was inspirational,” says Kane. “It’s not like I’m coming from L.A. or New York, where you’ll see a lot more of that type of art.”
Inspired, Kane took his art in an entirely different direction, going big, going bold, and going monochrome. “I was thinking of ways to create something, to develop a visual language that felt authentic to me,” he says.
Reducing his palette to black and white wasn’t such a stretch for him, given his focus in college. But this palette choice was more profound than mere facility with a genre, “Black and white has always represented the foundation of art,” Kane says. “The absence of color draws attention. When you think of art for the most part, you think of color. When color isn’t present, you tend to be a little curious.” And color may have had a chastening effect on the scale of his forms since the combination may have been too much visually.
Looking at images of Kane’s various installations around the Hampton Roads area, Richmond, and Baltimore, you’re struck by how individual the projects look, while obviously done by the same hand. You also see black and white’s timelessness and how its undeniable chic works so well within the urban landscape.
In 2018, Kane became involved in the public art scene. He loves working outside and he likes the way public art engages with people who might not set foot in a gallery or museum space, or might not feel comfortable in those spaces. “If you’re able to engage someone passing by on their daily commute and take them out of reality for a minute, that impact is really special to me.”
In 2021, Kane was given the opportunity by Contemporary Arts Network to present his work on a grand scale and create an immersive experience. “I was a big fan of theme parks growing up,” he says. “And I had this idea to create a visual theme park.” If this sounds similar to Yayoi Kusama, it is. But Kane, motivated by entirely different forces, is achieving a similar effect using paint only. For that project, he painted six different spaces in the CAN headquarters in Newport News, including walls, floors, ceilings, and objects in the spaces. It took about four weeks to complete, working 12 hours a day.
Kane’s installation at VR includes podiums and a framed painting mounted directly on the mural. Like visual exclamation points, these features draw the eye and set up interesting spatial relationships between the large shapes on the wall and those on the other smaller objects. The arrangement of shapes themselves, what goes next to what, provides opportunities for Kane to toy with space and depth, creating the illusion of three dimensionality, overlapping planes, and forms that seem to flicker back and forth between dimensions.
Kane painted steadily for about 16 days at Visible Records, often working into the early morning hours. He finds inspiration for his rounded shapes in organic forms, and he works without a projector or grid marks. Everything is drawn freehand directly on the wall, giving his shapes a pleasing irregularity. The one exception is the perfect circles, which are made using cut-out stencils.
After priming his surface and mapping out the design in his head, Kane sketches it on the wall, moving from left to right, using a paint pen marker. When he finishes this, he adds the paint. Some projects require a preliminary drawing, but nothing stays exactly the same since the texture of the wall determines what you can do. Kane is really big on clean lines, and uses a flat-tip brush to paint everything. This brush, with which he fills up massive expanses, is just two inches long.
It’s hard not to be charmed by Kane’s chunky jumble of forms that push up against each other and seem ready to burst forth from the constraints of their two-dimensional surfaces. They’re amusing and joyful, and also incredibly stylish. They tick all the public-art boxes because what’s better than inserting a little joy, humor, and beauty into the life of someone passing by?
Karen Elizabeth Milbourne. Photo by Tristan Williams.
January 29 marks the start of Karen Elizabeth Milbourne’s tenure as the J. Sanford Miller Family Director of The Fralin Museum of Art at the University of Virginia. Milbourne comes to UVA from the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African Art in Washington, D.C., where she was senior curator and acting head of knowledge production. A leading scholar in the field, Milbourne received her BA in African studies from Bryn Mawr College, and Ph.D. in art history from the University of Iowa.
Milbourne has won numerous awards and fellowships, including a Fulbright Fellowship, and several awards from the Smithsonian and others for curatorial excellence. Her writing has been published in edited volumes and journals including African Arts, Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art, Art Papers, ARS, and Collections. Milbourne is the former chair of the Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship program and currently serves on the scientific committee for Archives of Women Artists, Research and Exhibitions, and the advisory board for the Lusaka Contemporary Art Center.
She is arriving at an exciting time for the arts at UVA, with the second Charlottesville Indigenous Art Takeover on view now. The event is sponsored by the Kluge-Ruhe Aboriginal Art Collection and The Fralin, in concert with the exhibitions “Maḏayin: Eight Decades of Aboriginal Australian Bark Painting from Yirrkala” and “Voices of Connection: Garamut Slit Drums of New Guinea” at The Fralin. The former, the most significant exhibition of bark paintings to tour the United States, was largely curated by the artists themselves, who formed the concept, selected the works, and wrote all text associated with the exhibition, including catalog essays. A collaboration between Papua New Guinean scholars and UVA faculty, students, and museum staff, “Voices of Connection” showcases the instruments and people of Papua New Guinea and its offshore islands. Correlating exhibitions and events will be happening at the Kluge-Ruhe, Les Yeux du Monde, Second Street Gallery, and the Upper West Oval Room of the Rotunda.
Just as exciting are the plans to expand and elevate the arts at UVA by constructing a new multidisciplinary arts center. C-VILLE sat down with Milbourne to discuss her role.
C-VILLE Weekly: Can you tell me about your personal history with art? What set you on your path?
Karen Milbourne: I did not officially start studying art history until graduate school. I was always interested in the arts and took studio classes throughout college. I actually started out as a psychology major, but wasn’t loving running rats through mazes. I took an African art history class and suddenly everything made sense. It was just the right place for me. And so I created an independent major in African studies with a minor in studio art. For my junior year I applied to a program through Colgate University at the University of Nigeria in Nsukka. I was extremely fortunate because artists who now are incredibly world-famous, like El Anatsui, taught there. He used to just let me hang out in his studio while he was working. His monumental work “Behind the Red Moon” is currently installed at Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall.
I came back knowing this was something I was passionate about. That summer, I had an internship at the Museum for African Art in New York City, which led to my first job. Around the same time, Bryn Mawr was given an African art collection and I was made curator of it as an undergrad. So, I wasn’t technically studying art history because Bryn Mawr didn’t offer a focus on Africa in its program, but I was quite focused on the subject. I wrote my senior thesis on Nigerian modern art and then worked at the museum in New York for a couple of years before going to graduate school.
Lisa Waup’s screen painting “moving tides” is part of “close to the wind” at Kluge-Ruhe Aboriginal Art Collections of the University of Virginia. Photo courtesy of the Kluge-Ruhe Aboriginal Art Collections of UVA.
Looking at the exhibitions you’ve curated at NMAfA, the African art you focus on is contemporary mostly, isn’t it?
Mostly. I work largely in the global contemporary. I’ve worked with Africa’s arts across time and a lot of my effort has been to undermine or unsettle assumptions about what is or isn’t African art. For instance, people don’t understand that there’ve been African photographers since the 19th century and that masquerade is a contemporary art form.
Of all those exhibitions, which are you most proud of?
I’ll give you three examples because each represents something different. The first, “Earth Matters, Land as Material and Metaphor in the Arts of Africa” was a really wonderful collaboration across the Smithsonian campus. It included partnerships with the Environmental Film Festival, Dumbarton Oaks, the National Air and Space Museum, the American History Museum, and the Smithsonian Garden. So bringing all of those different groups together and looking at what the Earth means to all of us was really exciting and rewarding. And intellectually, it was thrilling to have that ability to pull that project together. But it also made me realize how challenging big projects can be in terms of sustainability. So many of the things that I wanted as relationships or because of changing institutional structures weren’t possible.
“I Am: Contemporary Women Artists of Africa” came about after I’d gone through the collection of the National Museum of African Art and realized that only 11 percent of the named artists in the collection self-identified as female. So that led to a women’s initiative where we’ve been able to bring the representation of women artists in the collection up to 25 percent. With that exhibition I was really looking at the history of one institution and what institutions need to do to change, and then modeling a different way of showing women artists. It wasn’t that ambitious a project. I wasn’t traveling all over the world and bringing my own new research to it. It was about implementing a different kind of structural change.
“From the Deep” [on view now at NMAfA] wasn’t about me, the expert, going to an artist and saying, “I like this one, that one and that one,” and taking those artworks back to the museum. It was working collaboratively with the artist, Ayana V. Jackson, to help push her practice forward. So it was a six-year process where I worked with her from seed to harvest, providing her the space to create the artwork and bringing it to an exhibition format. We did two pop-ups, one in Johannesburg, one in Cape Town, because she’s based in South Africa. We brought audiences in, the soundtrack wasn’t yet scored, so it was going on live around us and we asked audience members, if you sit this close, if you sit this far, how do you experience it? And Ayana got the feedback of how people were experiencing the exhibition, which then informed the finalization of the artwork. That sort of collaborative process is really very exciting to me.
As director of The Fralin, you’ll be stepping away from your curatorial activities. Are you going to miss that?
Very much so. But the opportunity to envision what a museum should be is such a tremendous opportunity. I’m excited about partnering with the Kluge-Ruhe and creating a museum system that includes the performing arts and is centered on indigenous perspectives. It just didn’t seem like an opportunity I’d ever get again.
Karen Elizabeth Milbourne. Photo by Tristan Williams.
What is the status of UVA’s Center for the Arts? Is it going forward?
Oh, it’s definitely going forward. The Fralin, the Kluge-Ruhe and the new performing arts center will all share a single space, which is really exciting to think in a multidisciplinary fashion. I’ve worked with a lot of live artists, so it’s wonderful to think about partnering with the performing arts.
You’ve been recognized for your collaborative approach. How do you plan on collaborating with other creative and performing arts entities across UVA and Charlottesville?
It’s exciting thinking about the brilliance that one can find around the UVA campus. I would love to partner with the new [School of] Data Science. One of the main issues facing museums is databases, particularly, how to create databases that are flexible to allow for differing knowledge systems. For example, we might label something Yoruba artist, 19th century. Well, Yoruba might identify that same thing by clan. So where do you put the clan name instead of cultural name? How do you account for gender fluidity? How do you both have a backend where you can input data to allow for greater inclusion, and create it so that it’s outward facing in a way that’s not contradictory to how anybody wishes to identify themselves.
There is also potential for collaboration with the law school looking at ethical stewardship of collections, looking at cultural patrimony laws and understanding those in relationship to our collections and thinking about how we take care of them and interact with and share them. So these are things I’m really excited about, as well as really thinking in a more multidisciplinary fashion.
Another reason I’m so excited is the new building. We have the opportunity to think flexibly from the get-go, and can include things like a sprung floor for dancers and comprehensive electrical cabling that can support something complicated like an immersive video.
I would consider you on the front lines of the culture wars, and we’re a divided country and UVA is kind of a microcosm of that. The Fralin’s diversity efforts in recent years are really admirable, but there are many who are resistant to this. How do you remain positive and effective in the face of these challenges?
I’ve never worked anywhere where there weren’t challenges. I think that’s sort of the nature of being alive in this world. But I think all of these individuals are looking at the world around them and trying to imagine new futures. And that’s what I’m trying to do, I’m imagining a future with the museum. So it’s really trying to work with somebody on that front rather than hashing out what you said or they said, or was it this way or that way. I’m interested in, What is the future that we can build together? I think that’s the space where we can find common ground.
Do you have any hobbies? What do you like to do in your free time?
I’m an avid walker. I walk upwards of five miles a day with my dog. And, as soon as I can find a pool, I will go back to swimming. So those are two passions of mine. I love to hang out with my kids (ages 13, 16, and 19), and I love to read.
What are you most looking forward to about moving to the Charlottesville area?
Well, outside of the brilliant colleagues at UVA, it probably is the mountains. The physical environment was definitely part of the appeal, and I would also say, the vineyards.
Included in “Maḏayin: Eight Decades of Aboriginal Australian Bark Painting From Yirrkala” at The Fralin, Gunybi Ganambarr’s “Garrapara,” uses natural pigments on eucalyptus bark. Photo courtesy of The Fralin Museum at UVA.
Charlottesville Indigenous Art Takeover 2024
The Fralin Museum of Art at the University of Virginia
“Maḏayin: Eight Decades of Aboriginal Australian Bark Painting from Yirrkala,” February 3-July 14.
Painter Frances Brand’s “Firsts” collection put names and faces to innovative doers whose contributions shaped Charlottesville. All images courtesy of the Albemarle Charlottesville Historical Society Collection.
It wasn’t until the 1970s that painter Frances Brand found her creative calling. Inspired by the story of Anna Luisa Puerta, an immigrant from Colombia who took a job as VDOT’s first flag woman in order to support her family, Brand started thinking about other people in our area who were the first to do something noteworthy in their careers, studies, or other endeavors, whether because of race, gender, or nationality. Running with this idea, Brand completed over 157 portraits with the bulk produced between 1974 and 1978.
Painting History: Frances Brand and the “Firsts,” a panel discussion on Brand and an exhibition of her legacy of socially engaged artwork, will be presented at 6pm on Wednesday, January 10, at the Martin Luther King Jr. Performing Arts Center. The panel boasts its share of firsts—Nancy O’Brien (Charlottesville’s first female mayor), Cornelia Johnson (Charlottesville’s first Black female officer), Teresa Walker Price (the first Black female secretary of Charlottesville’s electoral board)—all painted by Brand, as well as Frank Walker (artist and painter of a portrait of Frances Brand). Former Charlottesville mayor Virginia Daugherty will serve as the event’s moderator.
For information about the January 10 panel and exhibition, visit albemarlehistory.org.
The panel, and exhibition of a selection of Brand’s portraits on view in the performing arts center lobby, is part of a larger effort undertaken by Daugherty, O’Brien, and others, to ensure the “Firsts” portraits remain a vital part of the Charlottesville community. Brand’s granddaughter, Cynthia Brand, donated the collection to the Albemarle Charlottesville Historical Society in 2006. Many are in need of costly restoration work. Brand didn’t use the best materials, sometimes painting over affordable artwork from five and dime stores.
Brand, who died in 1990, was wonderfully unconventional. An Army brat, whose father, maternal grandfather, and maternal great-grandfather all graduated from the U.S. Military Academy, Brand was born at West Point. She moved from one Army post to another throughout her childhood, attending boarding schools, including a convent school in Belgium, before entering Goucher College in Baltimore.
Brand lived in Charlottesville twice. The first time while her husband was attending law school in the late 1920s, and then she returned for good in 1959, settling in the JPA neighborhood. In the interim, she had two sons, joined the Women’s Army Corps, divorced, and lived abroad working with the German Youth Association aiding children who’d suffered under the Nazis. Upon her retirement from the Army in 1954, she lived in Mexico City, where she earned a bachelor’s degree in art.
Brand’s deep commitment to portraiture and social justice is similar to her contemporary, the great Alice Neel. So too is the confrontational quality of her portraits, their scale, and the interest in pattern. Brand uses it with panache, as can be seen from the bold herringbone in the jacket of William Harris, UVA’s first dean of African American affairs; the black and gray houndstooth of The New York Times’ first female reporter Nancy Hale Bowers’ cape, which echoes the newsprint in her hand; and the elaborately embellished skirt worn by Grace Tinsley, the first Black woman to serve on Charlottesville’s school board. In Brand’s self-portrait, she employs the conceit of the mirror to give you two Brands: herself and her reflection, thus doubling not just her, but also the expanse of eye-popping floral material that comprises her gown, turning the bottom of the painting into a field of flowers.
Evident in the work of both Neel and Brand is the respect and admiration for their sitters. But that’s where the comparison stops. Neel was a consummate artist in complete control of her medium. She took her time developing a work to completion. For Brand, the narrative elements, and her goal of recording as many firsts as she could, eclipsed technique. She was in a hurry, eager to complete her project and trumpet the achievements of her sitters.
Brand didn’t just paint “the walk,” she walked it, not only by shining a spotlight on ordinary people doing extraordinary things, but in her inclusive attitude. It’s noteworthy that Brand, along with her friend, prominent local civil right activist Sarah Patton Boyle (who Brand depicts with a burning cross that had been ignited by white supremacists on her lawn), are the first white members of Charlottesville’s NAACP.
We don’t often have the opportunity to pause and consider steps made along the way that help enrich a community and move it forward. Brand’s joyful paintings of this extensive cast of lively, interesting, stylish, and socially engaged people offer just this, breathing life into a slice of Charlottesville’s history.
“Come to the Woods” calls for repeat viewing of Susan McAlister’s show “Canopy,” at Les Yeux du Monde through October 29. Supplied photo.
Susan McAlister uses a number of approaches to landscape, from direct physical representations to more nebulous suggestions of place, to riffs on the basic forms and patterns that are the building blocks of the natural world. “My process is essentially the same whether I’m working representationally or abstractly,” says McAlister, whose work is the subject of “Canopy,” now on view at Les Yeux du Monde. “I’m finding form, I’m pushing color, I’m layering materials, I’m thinking about the relation of all of these elements together.”
The plein air tradition of sketching and painting out of doors is central to McAlister’s practice. “When I take my walks in nature,” she says, “I think about the shapes that are happening and the way the light moves through those shapes and how a vine travels up a tree and continues over your head. I’m considering all of this and what it’s like being engulfed by nature and how that makes my heart feel.”
While outside, McAlister also forages for natural found objects, which she uses as inspiration, sometimes incorporating them into her assemblages, thus rooting them in a specific time and place. “Faunus I,” for example, features a feather, petal, and bee. Originally inspired by a visit to the Matisse room at the National Gallery in Washington, D.C., McAlister took the concept of cut-outs and ran with it, adding three-dimensionality into the mix to produce her gorgeous explosions of layered cut paper.
Luminous vistas of the Blue Ridge cloaked in fuzzy haze are conjured up from a combination of McAlister’s observation and memory. “These wooded landscapes are about my childhood. I grew up where my playground was the uncut forest outside my door. That kind of tangled landscape, that’s orderly but also disorderly, is endlessly appealing to me.”
In “Near and Far,” the haze has been replaced with rain-washed crispness. McAlister uses extraordinary brushwork here, with bold expressive slashes, smears, and clumps of paint that describe the varied mountain terrain of woods, meadows, and streams.
“Meeting in the Woods” depicts the sort of tangled woodland that appeals to McAlister. In this rollicking work, the scene has shifted from the gently sloping hills of memory seen in “Wooded Way,” “The Engagement,” and “Evening,” to more rugged Montana. McAlister has amped up her brush work accordingly, with slashing strokes that describe the wind tossing the trees, and add points of visual interest to the work.
“Spring Shadows & the Forest Floor” seems to exist on the knife edge between abstraction and representation. McAlister has visually nailed the sense of wind, using large brushes to produce blurry contrails of paint along with quick daubs of green that suggest fluttering leaves.
The artist’s muted palette perfectly embodies the temporal and atmospheric conditions she wishes to convey. Light greens pinpoint the season as early spring. Dove gray represents the recesses of the forest interior. Elegant inky blotches describe roots, branches, and tree trunks, tiny flecks of cerulean blue and stark white brighten the sky with intense, pure pigment. In the upper left quadrant, the absence of green implies that we are at the edge of a clearing or body of water where the land opens up and the view of the sky is more expansive.
McAlister’s palette of sunny pastels is derived from Bonnard. It’s a challenging color scheme to make serious, particularly for an artist who states, “I don’t want to be cute, I don’t want to be sweet. I’m most pleased when my paintings read as bold and expressive.” So, she tempers her palette’s prettiness with the introduction of duller shades, gesture, and layering. You can see this in the rectilinear zones of “Edge of the Forest.”
“Come to the Woods” has a curious power that seems to build with each repeated viewing. The initial impression is of a work that is delicate and fragile, thanks to its pale colors and softly undulating shapes. But, the complex arrangement of pink, blue, green, and yellow and the interplay between painted surface and line, create interesting visual relationships. With its tessellated forms and passages that cascade down the picture plane, the work is really a deconstructed landscape.
Four paintings—“Vert,” “From the Open Window,” “Lost in the Forest,” and “Lush”—are hung together on the wall. McAlister did this to create a bigger expanse of painted surface. But the quartet’s juxtaposition, with two representational works and two abstract ones, hits at the crux of McAlister’s oeuvre, which is really about painting in and of itself, not one specific style. You see in these works, the ease with which the artist switches gears and her incredible facility, no matter how she’s painting. The “what” she’s painting remains a constant, however.
“Landscape is where my heart is,” she says. “It’s what I want to talk about.” As the works in the show reveal, McAlister uses various inventive means to “talk” about it, but one thing is clear, she is using a decidedly contemporary language to do so.
