Author: Sarah Sargent

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Culture

Reach for the sky

The Fralin Museum’s visual history of skyscrapers includes Joseph Pennell’s etching “The Woolworth through the Arch.” Image courtesy of the Fralin Museum of Art.

Skyscrapers, in our modern imagination, are glitzy glass needles. It wasn’t always that way. The nation’s first towers were ornate and detailed. Intrinsically American, the designs embodied the qualities we like to associate with our national image: We’re can-do, bold, strong, technologically advanced, and audacious.

The Fralin Museum’s new show, “Skyscraper Gothic,” explores the history of these early skyscrapers. The curators, Lisa Reilly from UVA and Kevin Murphy from Vanderbilt, have brought together a wonderfully comprehensive assortment of prints, drawings, photographs, paintings, sculptures, furniture, textiles, toys, models, illustrations and decorative arts to showcase the prevalence of both the Gothic style and the skyscraper motif in contemporaneous culture.

In the early 20th century, Gothic style was seen as enduring, with the authority of time and religion backing it up. The architects most certainly saw a connection between the lofty towers of the office buildings they were designing and the soaring quality of medieval cathedrals. They also must have felt a strong connection to the medieval builders who, like them, were engaged in engineering innovations, building their structures as high as possible, minimizing load on walls with flying buttresses and, in the case of the late Gothic, reducing masonry to the barest minimum to allow for large expanses of stained glass.

At the same time, early skyscrapers were shaped by less idealistic forces, like municipal regulations: One of the signature features of the original skyscrapers is the step-like setback profile. Those setbacks were incorporated to conform to a 1916 New York City zoning ordinance requiring light and air to reach the sidewalks. This distinctive design element was absorbed into skyscraper iconography and widely replicated. 

Several works in the show highlight the vital role of the construction workers who put the buildings together. The structures on which they toiled captured the public’s imagination, and so did the workers themselves. The metalworkers’ feats of strength and derring-do—balanced on girders hundreds of feet up—were the stuff of legend, embodying the distinct male energy and bravado of the skyscrapers themselves. 

Louis Lozowick’s “Above the City” and Harry Sternberg’s “Riveter” both position their subjects on girders at dizzying heights. In the latter, a red girder juts dramatically out toward the viewer, enhancing the tension and force within the composition. You can feel the effort the figure is expending with his machine. It’s a theatrical image, rendered in highly-keyed yellow, scarlet, and blue. The man’s face is obscured by the riveter, and he is positioned in a monumentalized fashion against the city—an everyman worker and symbol of masculine power. 

Charles Turzak’s “The Driller” captures the subject’s strength and determination. Jangled buildings in the background and a cartoonish halo of wobbly lines surrounding the figure convey the teeth-jarring vibration of the drill with droll humor.

The selection of prints, drawings, paintings, and photographs provide just the right backdrop, orienting us in the environment of these early 20th century cities. In several, artists use steam to convey the furious activity of the industry that built and sustained these great metropolises. Examples include Thomas Hart Benton’s “Construction,” Henry Reuterdahl’s “Commerce and Seapower,” Sears Gallagher’s “Manhattan Skyline,” and Samuel L. Margolies’ “Babylon.” 

The first modern art movement in America, Precisionism, which celebrated man-made objects and technologies, is well represented in the exhibition as well. You can see the cool hard-edged detachment characteristic of the Precisionist School in Clare Leighton’s “Breadline, New York,” Louis Lozowick’s “Above the City,” Zama Vanessa Helder’s “34th Street Skyline,” Jon Whitcomb’s “Urban Landscape” Howard Norton Cook’s “Chrysler Building,” and Leo Rabkin’s “Untitled (Spirit of Progress, Skyscrapers and liners).” 

With their velvety blacks and subtle light effects, Samuel Gottscho’s “Radiator Tower (at Night)” and Russ Marshall’s “Penobscot Noir” are gorgeous, lush photographic images that evoke a moody, brooding city. Don Walker’s “Downtown Detroit Enveloped in Fog” uses atmosphere conditions for dramatic effect, too.

Other photographs provide more visual information about the buildings and their settings. Samuel Kravitt’s “Aerial View of the Empire State Building” and Ilse Bing’s “View of Lower Manhattan” give us a sense of what New York looked like and the scale of the skyscrapers in relation to their surroundings.

The everyday objects on display reveal how skyscrapers functioned as icons. The buildings’ influence seeped into nearly every corner of American culture. Among the treasures on display are a flapper’s beaded purse with skyscraper motif, a number of children’s toys, from board games to building blocks, and a dazzling chrome weight and height scale and maple bookshelf that both ape the skyscraper form. 

A great deal of thought has been put into the exhibition design. Handsome banners of the Chrysler Building, the Empire State Building, and the Woolworth Building hang above the stairs in the foyer to greet visitors. The banners work with the steel gray color used on the walls to set the tone for the rooms. The pedestal for “Chrysler Building Souvenir Building” is cut to resemble the building’s shape, and vintage postcards of famous skyscrapers are positioned on an outline of the United States, helping visitors visualize where the buildings are located. Even the elevator doors and interior are sheathed in an intricate Art Deco motif, which also makes an appearance on one gallery wall. All this produces an ambience that replicates, with great élan, the cool elegance of the iconic structures themselves.

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Culture

Fresh eyes

“Eyes on Sen Soley,” featuring work by Mackenley Darius, Anthony Martial, Richard Nesly, and Erivaux Prospere, is on view by appointment at The Bridge through September 30. Supplied photo.

When Haitian American art collector and curator Jeanremi Verella first encountered the Sen Soley art collective during a residency in Port-Au-Prince, he knew he had to bring the artists to America. But he quickly learned that strict visa quotas made this nearly impossible. So he brought their artwork instead.

Sen Soley is a Haitian art collective that includes artists Mackenley Darius, Anthony Martial, Richard Nesly, and Erivaux Prospere. It takes its name from the patois spelling of Saint Soleil, a Haitian art movement founded in 1973, and revives the stylized human and animal forms and Haitian Vodou symbolism that was the focus of the earlier group. Haitian Vodou is a religion that fuses the West African Vodun religion with Roman Catholicism. For Saint Soleil and Sen Soley alike, visual art represents a synthesis of mind, body, and nature. These artists look to their rural roots and the Haitian traditions of storytelling, music, writing, and religion, as well as dreams and visions for their inspiration. 

Verella, who attended UVA, spent time learning about the artists in Haiti, and has now helped organize an exhibition at The Bridge Progressive Arts Initiative. “Eyes on Sen Soley” is open until September 30. 

Haiti is in the midst of a tumultuous period. “There’ve been natural disasters, and political tension, again and again,” says Verella. Earlier this year, the country’s president was assassinated, and this week an earthquake killed more than 1,200 people. 

“With everything that’s happening in Haiti right now, it feels really valuable to offer something beyond the headlines,” says Alan Goffinski, executive director of the BPAI.

Verella still hopes to find a city or organization willing to sponsor the artists. This would enable them to get their visas, interact with other artists, and expose their work to a wider audience. “It’s been such a humbling journey of living with the artwork and getting to unfold it at a different location and look at it with people,” says Verella.

The work is characterized by bold color and design with a surface that is kept flat with no illusion of depth. This jibes with the paintings’ role as symbolic entities depicting spiritual matters, rather than realistic vignettes of the physical world. 

The exception to this is the work by Mackenley Darius, which has three-dimensional volume. “His style kind of branches out of the Sen Soley movement,” says Verella. “He does ethnography of Haiti and I think this gives him additional perspective, enabling him to blend the ideas of Sen Soley into his artwork.” 

The stunning portrait of Haitian American art superstar Jean-Michel Basquiat (“Honor to My King”), who gazes soulfully from the canvas, is his. Basquiat incorporated Vodou images in his work. Here, Darius not only captures Basquiat, but he does so while emulating his subject’s distinctive style.

Richard Nesly’s paintings have the all-over rhythm of a frieze or piece of fabric. He reduces the palette to one or two colors to showcase the pattern that undulates across the work. Human, animal, and plant forms ooze out to form other entities, or flow into one another to suggest the interconnectedness of all things. In some pieces, these take on the appearance of a serpent, an important Vodou symbol.

Smack dab in the middle of Nesly’s “Nids Dé Zwazo,” you can see a Vodou symbol called a vèvè. An important part of Vodou ceremonies, vèvès are “drawn” on the ground using corn meal, flour, or some other powdery material. The vèvès are ritualistically destroyed during the ceremony when congregants dance across them, scattering the powder. Vèvès also appear in other works in the show.

Looking around the room, and perhaps with the exhibition’s title in mind, one is struck by the number of eyes that stare back at you. Prospere’s “Untitled 1” and “Untitled 2” feature densely packed ribbons of richly hued paint, that at first appear to be completely abstract, before you notice the eyes and mouths emerging from the ornate bands of color, and the suggestion of a figure. Are these intended as representations of otherworldly presences observing us from another dimension?

The eyes are also remarkable in Nesly’s “Lé Ancien,” adding a punch of energy to this striking work. Nesly creates enormous visual excitement through the interplay of pattern, figures, and color. Though Nesly’s work is highly stylized, the figures are individualized with characteristics and features that give us the impression of real people.

Anthony Martial’s work seems the most serious, perhaps because it is rendered in black and white. His figures of humans and birds are simple, but his works have a complexity and power, thanks to his compositional arrangements and sophisticated surface patterns.

When dealing with Haiti, it’s natural to focus on the suffering endured by the Haitian people, whether at the hands of Mother Nature or corrupt politicians. But “Eyes on Sen Soley” shows another side of Haiti, and in Goffinski’s words, “presents some humanizing culture so we can appreciate the Haitian people as people, and these artists as individuals.”

The paintings in the exhibition are all for sale as are prints of them. All proceeds directly support the artists.

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Culture

Following curiosity

Students in sculpture and mindfulness courses combine efforts in an inspiring outdoor exhibition at Kluge-Ruhe. Supplied photo.

Feeling stressed? Suffering from pandemic anxiety? Need a staycation?  “Breathe with Me” offers a special respite.

Inspired by dadirri, the Aboriginal practice of deep listening, “Breathe With Me,” an installation at the Kluge-Ruhe Aboriginal Art Collection of the University of Virginia, invites visitors to slow down, attune to nature, and connect with the salubrious qualities well known to Indigenous people and now embraced by Western medicine.

A collaboration between Kluge-Ruhe and the UVA art department and  Contemplative Sciences Center, the show pairs outdoor sculptures by students of William Bennett with reflective prompts composed by students in Jayme Siet’s Mindfulness and Nature course. Conceived during the height of the pandemic as a means to provide safe outdoor programming, the project is the brainchild of Kluge-Ruhe Education and Program Manager Lauren Maupin. 

“We knew that providing the UVA sculpture community with an extensive outdoor space to dream bigger with their sculptures would result in something unique and engaging,” says Maupin. The inclusion of the mindfulness/deep listening aspect dovetails neatly with the museum’s collection.  

The project also aligns with the COVID-19 policies instituted by UVA for 2020-21 that required all in-person sculpture classes to meet outside. Bennett points out that working outside also has particular resonance for this generation of students who “are passionate and concerned about the fate of the earth. This venture gave them the opportunity to work with the earth as material and to have the beautiful landscape of the Kluge-Ruhe museum as the context of their work.” 

The installation includes 13 site-specific sculptures positioned along a mown path in the museum’s backyard. The prompts, accessed by QR codes using Smartphones, are designed to guide viewers through a mindful engagement with nature.

Walking amongst the sculptures one is dazzled by the aspiration and obvious thought, care, and sweat equity that went into the works. “I believe that there is a strength and power that beginning art students bring to the table,” says Bennett. “Experienced commentators mentioned the ambitious plans of the young sculptors, who were unafraid and didn’t know what they could not do, so they did it.” 

Isabella Whitfield’s “Together Forever/Forever Together” features two parallel sets of stairs cut into the earth heading downwards in opposite directions. Even without the title, the piece suggests entrances to two graves. Descending into them is a little creepy and one gets a sense of entering into another subterranean realm. The perfect earthen steps are remarkable feats of craftsmanship. Piled behind the piece, dirt removed to form the holes speaks to the temporary absence of that volume and suggests that at some point it will be poured back into the holes. Surrounding the installation, six wood stanchions support a rope and also small pieces of wood engraved with poems by Maggie Weaver that ponder the shared fate of nature and humans. 

Two works, Addison Keatts’ “Ascension” and Sharon Chong’s “Me, Myself and You,” introduce the sense of smell with a heady perfume that emanates from the cedar used in their work. Keatts binds together scraggly branches to form a teepee shape. The viewer is invited to step inside the shelter and gaze out at the mountains and up at the sky through a perfect oculus. The piece was inspired by Keatts’ quest for a sense of home. Building it also gave her an outlet for the sadness and anger she felt about the death of a friend. 

Consisting of wooden planks sunk into the ground, “Me, Myself and You” forms a double spiral of 8-foot-high planks. Walking on the path between the planks is intended to be a contemplative experience—closed off from the outside world, one becomes more focused on the immediate surroundings. In the spaces between the planks one can see visitors walking on the other path within the shared solitude. 

Calista Rieken’s “Symbiosis” is a meditation on the interconnectedness of nature. Her figures of a deer and wolf mother and her two pups are faced with a veneer of bark, suggesting they are one with and reliant upon not only the trees—a couple of the figures emerge directly out of the tree trunks—but each other. 

Continuing the animal theme, UVA sculpture teaching and studio assistant Ed Miller’s “Earthen Bison” references the history of that great creature whose pre-18th century range extended as far east as Virginia. Constructed of earth, chicken wire, and straw, the animal has a head made of fired red clay. Positioning yourself with the mountains behind the sculpture, you can envision those long-gone animals in the landscape.  

Bennett’s “Omphalos/Oculus Looking in Seeing Out” features three dome-like structures: the dome of earth formed by the dirt removed to create the path; the concrete dome, a nod to Jefferson; and the stainless steel dome, which Bennett describes as “A curious observatory building where a participant looks in to the see the stars within the earth rather than looking out to see the heavens above.” 

Bennett points out that art by students rarely sees the light of day. “This was a chance for my students to make work that would have an audience, completing the gift exchange that is at the core of our art-making tradition.” “Breathe with Me” is indeed a welcome gift to a Charlottesville community emerging from the isolation of a pandemic.

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Arts Culture

The deep end

Sharon Shapiro’s “Stars and Stripes” is on view in “Social Fabric,” her exhibition at Second Street Gallery. Courtesy of SSG.

“You can’t paint swimming pools without thinking about class and thinking about race,” says Sharon Shapiro. Pools figure largely in “Social Fabric,” Shapiro’s show at Second Street Gallery. Originally drawn to swimming pools for aesthetic reasons and because “they’re fun to paint,” Shapiro began to dig deeper into their history. “We didn’t really talk about it in the South when I was growing up. Like, why weren’t there any Black kids at the public pool?” She goes on to point out that, following integration, many municipalities opted to fill in their pools rather than integrate them—one small example of how racism hurts everyone. 

Initially, Shapiro, who is white, was hesitant to paint people of color and their experiences. “But then when 8/12 [the Unite the Right Rally] happened right here in Charlottesville, I thought, ‘I can’t not make work about this.’” 

Her pools run the gamut, from the Villa Artemis’ Grecian-style exemplar in Palm Beach, Florida, immortalized in a 1959 Slim Aarons’ photograph of socialite C.Z. Guest, to an above-ground number in the yard of a foreclosed house, and the abandoned pool at the defunct motel on the top of Afton Mountain.

Collage has always been an important aspect of Shapiro’s work. She produces both actual collages and trompe-l’oeil versions made by layering media and images. In both cases, what occurs is a fracturing of the image akin to how things appear in dreams and memory. Shapiro uses a language of bright colors and quotidian settings to depict exceedingly serious matters. This contrast between messaging and content serves to highlight the latter, and the comfortably familiar trappings enhance the sense of foreboding inherent in the work.

Various iterations of the American flag are repeated throughout this exhibition. The flag has become a loaded symbol, often co-opted by the political right, but in Shapiro’s work the flag seems to express a plaintive entreaty to remind us of who we can be. Other recurring objects include Charlottesville’s Robert E. Lee statue, a Palladian window and lantern from the Albemarle Charlottesville Historical Society, tiki torches, and three teenage girls. The work focuses on what it means to be female in America and, given the themes explored in the work, their patent vulnerability jolts the viewer. Not only are they young and tender, they’re also members of a generation that faces a troubled legacy on many fronts. Shapiro’s girls seem to be watching while functioning as symbolic reminders of what’s at stake.

The triangular arrangement of “Traveller’s Rest” recalls heroic academic-style paintings. In this case, the mounted general and his horse are relegated to the background. The main action is in the contemporary color scene at the bottom.

What are the girls doing here? Why is one of them gesturing with an American flag, and what does the expression on her face mean? We’re not quite sure what’s up except that an overall feeling of discord pervades the work. Shapiro is adept at adding just the right cultural references—flip flops, Birkenstocks and wrist adornments—and then positions the works in their time period. Similarly, the artist appropriates architectural items, the Palladian window and lantern, as vestiges of an antebellum South.

Shapiro’s use of watercolor has an insubstantiality that goes well with the pool theme and also the fragility of the girls. The work has the feeling of collage, with the foreground superimposed on the statue. Photo transfers of newspaper and Playboy magazine articles are scattered across the surface, reinforcing the collaged effect and alluding to the patriarchal forces surrounding the girls. Lee’s horse, Traveller, is beautifully rendered in graphite, and while the statue’s clearly been demoted, it still looms over us. 

In “Stars and Stripes,” the girls appear again, this time in front of an expanse of graffiti. They appear to be on a balcony or a viewing stand of some sort, with an unraveling flag draped over the balustrade. To their left hangs a fancy chandelier. The girl in green (the same model as the girl in red) is partially replicated, like an oddly disturbing Photoshop gone wrong. The girls are watchful, of each other and of things we can’t see.  

A 13-star flag forms the background of “Miss 1976 (Spirit).” Again, Shapiro layers mostly pool-related images—the above-ground pool, assorted vintage lawn furniture, an inflatable tube. She reduces the palette to yellow, orange, and hot pink with a touch of blue, recalling the Day-Glo aesthetic of 1970s posters. Examining the photo transfers, one sees the girls standing in front of the Lee statue plinth, casually holding tiki torches like lacrosse sticks over their shoulders. These once-benign items now trigger traumatic memories of the Unite the Right torchlight parade. 

In “Anthem (Once Upon a Time)” Shapiro replaces the WASP icon at the Villa Artemis with a young Black woman wrapped in the flag. She doesn’t have a shadow, which may mean she’s otherworldly, and perhaps just an apparition. But her being here proclaims she has as much right to a place in this narrative as someone like Guest.  

“For me it’s got to be both,” says Shapiro about balancing aesthetics with the underlying message of her work. “It’s got to be something that I want to investigate. Painting is like a puzzle, you’re setting up problems and then you’re solving them with paint.” With “Social Fabric,” Shapiro remains true to her goals, creating works brimming with drama and visual allure that urge us to ponder the issues she explores.

Second Street Gallery is located at 115 2nd St. SE, and can be found online at secondstreetgallery.org.

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Culture

Seeing Charlottesville

Painter Edward Thomas was an architect, historian, and prolific artist who, with his folding easel, was a familiar site in Charlottesville. His artist statement attributes his style to minimal thought during the process: “Thinking gets in the way and leads to artifice; painting what you think is there rather than what is there.” Photo: Will Kerner

Most days, Charlottesville artist Edward Thomas could be found with his folding easel, set up on a sidewalk, by the river, or at a construction site, engaged in capturing “what the world looks like from where I stand,” he’d say. Thomas died May 8, 2021, at the age of 49.

“Edward had an extremely good eye and extraordinary sense of color,” says his friend and mentor Richard Crozier. “He painted with a kind of bravura.” He produced faithful renditions of his subjects, with formal elements—palette, marks, and gestures—having a stand-alone integrity that transcends their narrative role.

Thomas had a rare ability to convey the quality of air and light, enlivening his paintings with particular vitality. He also experimented with various forms of animation, made filmstrips based on flip book technology, built at least two cycloramas (which allowed the viewer to experience a 360-degree panorama), and a number of praxinoscopes (similar to a zoetrope), nine of which were featured in a 2015 show at Second Street Gallery. He built tabletop versions and a giant one the Dave Matthews Band took on tour.

A graduate of the University of Virginia School of Architecture, Thomas was an inveterate builder and tinkerer, creating and adapting with constant inventiveness. He described his house on 6 1/2 Street as “a perpetually unfinished architectural laboratory” where he could employ his knowledge of brick masonry, constructing, among other things, a wall that showcased the history of masonry techniques, transitioning from neolithic drystack to Jefferson-inspired arches that formed an aqueduct. He also excavated and built a subterranean, groin-vaulted wine cellar with a tunnel connecting it to the house. 

His friends describe Thomas as witty, hardworking, kind, gentle, and endlessly creative. He cared about the world around him, volunteering for Food Not Bombs and The Salvation Army, and using his art as a means to conserve countryside and old farms targeted by developers. He drove one of the first (if not the first) hybrid cars in Charlottesville, a 2000 Honda Insight. Thomas was an avid gardener, and shared the vegetables he grew with friends. He loved animals and had three dogs, Five, Jupiter, and Zero. 

UVA architecture professor Peter Waldman says of Thomas, “He was joyful and poignant. His is a great loss as he mirrored for us all Charlottesville, making the ordinary splendid.”

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Arts Culture

Looking up: Laura Wooten’s ‘View from the Ridge’ offers 99 visions of hope

“Ochre Stillness” is one of 99 different paintings of the same “View from the Ridge” by Laura Wooten. Courtesy of the artist

She paints the same view day after day, recording the subtle and great changes of hour, season, and weather. Her subject is both profoundly familiar to her and constantly changing. Laura Wooten’s “View from the Ridge” at Second Street Gallery features 90 small paintings (8 inches x 8 inches) and nine larger works (30 inches x 30 inches), all depicting the same stretch of land just outside of town. Painted over the course of 2019, the images are devotionals to nature, inspired by the daily walks Wooten takes with her dog.

Wooten’s mentor, Stanley Lewis, with whom she studied in the 1990s, first at the Chautauqua summer program and then the MFA program at American University, once said something that has resonated with her ever since: “It is possible to find yourself in the painting, a part of yourself that you didn’t know before.”

“This opened me up to the idea of both looking outward and looking inward through the painting process,” says Wooten. “Even within the context of observational plein-air painting, there was the possibility of exploring an inner world. This became a guiding idea in my work for the next 26 years.” To ensure she maintains this quality and prevents the work from becoming too literal, Wooten rarely does preliminary sketches, reconstructing what she’s seen from memory back in the studio.

According to Wooten, the smaller landscapes are “perhaps equal parts looking out and looking inward. The impetus for the series was an enthrallment with the color, light, and atmosphere of the place, but the series continued to develop with an awareness that the landscape is being seen through the emotional lens of the self.”

“View from the Ridge” Nos. 1 and 2 provide a good set-up for what is to come. All the elements of the landscape are distinctly visible. The road bends down through fir trees on the left and a striking birch on the right to where the land opens up to an expanse of meadow. On the far side, wooded hills lead to mountains in the distance. This is the vista that we will see again and again, transforming before our eyes through Wooten’s brush. These two paintings capture the palette of early winter in the Piedmont and also the quality of light—brilliant sunlight in “No. 1” and a more muted version in “No. 2.” They are so evocative that we almost don’t notice the sophisticated brushwork with which they are rendered.

As you proceed around the room, following the seasons of the year, you notice something different about the larger works. In these paintings, created in 2020, the view has “become a stage set,” Wooten says, “an empty tableau upon which to project the imaginings of an inner world.”

In “Tundra,” the meadow, now sheathed in ice, is composed of a series of brittle, horizontal lines with the hills beyond, a rich mélange of paint that’s daubed, smeared, and scraped across the panel. Wooten uses the same horizontal brushstrokes again in the meadow and also the road in “Great Flood, 2020,” a painting that seems to loosen its ties to reality and venture into the expressionistic territory of Emil Nolde. The landscape is still there, but it functions as scaffolding for the remarkable technical effects. As you look at the work, linger on the hills wreathed in vaporous clouds. Here, Wooten applies light blue, yellow, and lavender pigment and then scrapes it off using a spatula-like tool to create topographical features, vegetation, and reflections of light. Infused with golden radiance, another painting, “Meadow Music,” is the summertime counterpart of this work.

In “View from the Ridge No. 34” the horizontal lines of the meadow are replaced by cloud-like blobs of paint that provide a softer effect. We can almost feel the wind that’s ruffling the grasses and producing the blousy, verdant mounds.

“View from the Ridge No. 57” calls to mind the wonderful pre-abstract paintings of Richard Diebenkorn, with their flattened field of view. The mottled, tawny field contrasts with the blurry yellow-green hills beyond. In the foreground, the road has become just a purple suggestion.

“Carnival, 2020” captures the explosion of color that is high fall. Bold splotches of yellow and orange describe the tree foliage. The slick indigo of the road dappled with yellow smears suggests it has just rained. Green again after the summer heat, the meadow now provides a calm foil to the foreground tree and the riot of color forming the hills on the far side.

Wooten clearly revels in the act of painting and in paint itself, finding in it a means to imbue her work with a deep sensuality and expressive resonance. “I think of each color palette as holding a distinct emotional tone,” she says. “While loving those glorious sharp-shadowed sunny days, I learned to embrace the foggy and gray, those mysterious neutral colors without names. This became a metaphor for being willing and open to examine all parts of myself, with nothing to fear and nothing to hide. Each day was a gift, whatever the view presented, and whatever emotions might come up.”

Wooten also uses brushes, knives, and scrapers to mark her painted surface, giving the pieces a texture and offering another opportunity for expression. “Through addition and subtraction, obscuring and revealing a clear cut shape or a blurred edge, I am exploring the emotional possibilities of the outer and the inner landscape,” she says. “It’s not something I could sketch ahead of time, but something I discover through the process of painting.”

Of “View from the Ridge,” Wooten says, “I made 99 paintings of the same landscape, a place I visit every day, and also 99 paintings of places in myself that I didn’t know before.”

Laura Wooten’s “View from the Ridge” is on view by appointment at Second Street Gallery through January 22.

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Arts Culture

The resilience will not be televised: Three artists dig into the psyche for Chroma’s winter solstice show

Leigh Anne Chambers, Aggie Zed, and Michelle Gagliano share a disorientation in their work that pushes the viewer to interpret the artists' narratives

Chroma Projects Director Deborah McLeod has been keeping a unique holiday tradition for the past several years. “Every year at Christmastime, I showcase Aggie Zed’s oddly enchanting work,” says McLeod. “I think of it as a modern version of the sort of folkloric forms and superstitious practices surrounding not just Christmas, but Krampus, Samhain, and other costumed celebrations of the winter solstice—mostly focused on the breaking of barriers between the physical and spirit worlds.”

This year McLeod chose artists Leigh Anne Chambers and Michelle Gagliano to accompany Zed’s work in “What to Wondering Eyes Should Appear” at Chroma Projects though December 19.

“In Leigh Anne Chambers’ paintings, I imagine that mysterious, unfathomable drama that traditionally goes on in our collective heads in the dark,” says McLeod. “There’s a kind of disorientation and lack of personal control that happens. …A similar disorientation occurs in Michelle Gagliano’s work. Her paintings urge us to pass through those familiar gateways to something more enigmatic that lies beyond the material world.”

Chambers has made a practice of incorporating non-traditional art media, such as vinyl floor covering and carpeting, to call into question our ideas about art. In these works, she uses liquid rubber, a sealant for roofs and retaining walls. The material creates impenetrable expanses of pure blackness that obscure anything behind them. These bold planes have pronounced bravado and engender a lively spatial and textural interplay with Chambers’ other passages.

A work of remarkable power, Chambers’ “Combative Acquaintance” hums with charged energy. Girly pinks explode across the upper right of the painting, cascading down in a dramatic diagonal. These almost-too-pretty hues are tempered by brushwork that introduces brown, green, yellow, and purple. Blocks of black, acid green, and maroon near the bottom add flatness, which contrasts to Chambers’ ornate painterliness. These also provide the semblance of background and ground on which a mass of huddled figures seems to crouch. But Chambers is playing with our perceptions; on further inspection, we can’t be sure they are figures at all. She allows us to get only so far in deciphering, before she drops the illusion altogether.

Gagliano takes a poetic approach to rendering the landscape, focusing on the ephemeral and emotional qualities, and producing work that is atmospheric, symbolic, and mysterious. Recently, she has embraced a more abstract approach, based on the palette of Renaissance painter Raphael, with ultramarine blues, vivid reds, and a liberal use of gold.

“Raffaello in Blue” suggests a landscape with an implied horizon line. Above is the lighter cerulean blue of sky, draped with peculiar, almost dripping clouds, and below, the darker blue and dun color of sun-dappled topography. There is something undeniably elemental about the piece, as if Gagliano is drilling down to the very essence of things: the vapors within the air and the lapis lazuli from which ultramarine pigment is derived in the earth.

In 2018, Gagliano eliminated all toxic materials from her work, introducing ground pigments, oils, and solvents. “I went from the old techniques of layer upon layer of glaze applied with brush, sponge, and knife, to working pigments directly into the surface, using the same kinds of mediums as Raphael used, lavender and walnut oil,” she says. “They’re nontoxic and not harmful to the environment. Now, my studio smells like a spa and you could make a salad dressing from my binding medium!”

There’s a scavenged quality about Aggie Zed’s work. Growing up on Sullivan’s Island (outside Charleston, South Carolina), which was then a sleepy community, Zed and her siblings had the run of the place with its abandoned fort and beaches. Her father was an engineer for a TV station and an all-around tinkerer. After his untimely death in a car crash, money was tight. Zed had to rely on her imagination and skill at scavenging and upcycling to entertain herself. These influences inform her aesthetic, which has the same ocean-tossed, sun-bleached, and windswept quality as the detritus you might find on a beach.

Zed produces a variety of small-scale sculptures, including ceramic human figures and human-animal combos—copper wire, ceramic, and metal assemblages she calls “scrap floats.” These threadbare but jaunty little constructions are curious and endearing. They recall the inventiveness and charm of Alexander Calder’s “Circus.” Take for instance, “Tinyman Tale,” which features a ceramic figure on a joyfully jury-rigged contraption shored up by scraps of metal and what looks like a cog standing in for a wheel. A sail, or banner, billows over the rear of the float. It’s a miniature double-sided painting that suggests the ongoing phases of a narrative. Despite its size, the little painting packs a real punch with interesting juxtapositions of shapes and bold colors.

Zed deftly navigates the fine line between charming and cutesy, creating figures that have far more in common with those of Hieronymus Bosch than the ones that populate the “Wonderful World of Disney.”

“I love my figures because they look like they’ve put up with a lot,” she says. “They’re so patient and poignant, despite whatever it is they have to deal with. I actually think most people are like that. It’s just that the television doesn’t show it.”

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Arts Culture

Kites bring attention to locally detained migrant children’s plight

Image courtesy of Gallery

In Latin America, kites are serious business, flown, depending on region, on Easter and the Day of the Dead. They’re also widely used for sport. With his “Papalotes en Resistencia” (Kites in Resistance), Federico Cuatlacuatl, an assistant professor of new media in UVA’s art department, uses the culture, heritage, and traditions of that region as tools of activism. Originally from Puebla, Mexico, Cuatlacuatl immigrated to the U.S. in 1999.

Two of Cuatlacuatl’s large gold foil kites are currently on view in Second Street’s Dové Gallery. Sparkling gaily under the gallery spots, they seem joyful and light in both weight and connotation. But the kites contain a deeper, more urgent message: Asylum- seeking children continue to be detained in centers across the U.S.

Cuatlacuatl makes the kites personal to a Charlottesville audience by repurposing tiki lights, like the ones used by neo-Nazis during their August 11, 2017, assault on UVA, to construct the framework.

Generally, in this country, kites are seen as an innocent child’s toys, so there’s a dark irony that these objects of play are used to draw attention to
an appalling human rights crisis.

Originally scheduled for April, Cuatlacuatl’s show included a field trip to Washington, D.C., where UVA students planned to fly the kites in a peaceful protest on the National Mall to showcase the migrant children’s plight. Because of COVID-19, the exhibition was postponed and the kite-flying protest canceled. The project was not lost, though, because Cuatlacuatl’s kites offer the perfect complement in content and form to the “Bearing Witness” work on view in the main gallery.

Many will be shocked, as was I, that one of the migrant children detention centers, the Shenandoah Valley Juvenile Center (which houses seven of these children), is located just over Afton Mountain in Staunton. Visitors to the Second Street show are invited to write letters to the children. (They will be delivered through a contact of the artist’s.) The gallery is also collecting supplies for the migrant children detained in Staunton. Please contact Second Street (secondstreetgallery.org; 977-7284) if you are interested in donating.

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Arts Culture

Act locally: Area photographers’ exhibit focuses on systemic racism

This spring, just as people were grappling with the new normal of living in a pandemic, George Floyd’s homicide threw a Molotov cocktail of anger, frustration, and heartbreak onto an already stressful situation. After Rodney and Eric, Trayvon and Sandra, Breonna and Elijah, and countless other African American lives were taken by aggressive policing, Floyd’s killing became a galvanizing moment. People took to the streets, here and around the world, to say these lives—taken so casually and so cruelly—mattered.

In Charlottesville and Richmond, protesters turned their ire to Virginia’s Civil War monuments, those unmistakable symbols of white supremacy. The activists’ desire to remove these monuments is not about erasing history, but rectifying it. The statues were installed long after the war ended, deep in the era of Jim Crow, with the express purpose of intimidation. They are indeed heroic monuments. But it is a misplaced heroism, glorifying a history that didn’t exist, and a cause that was contemptible.

“Bearing Witness” at Second Street Gallery is an ambitious show that presents the Black Lives Matter protests from an artist’s perspective. Eze Amos, Ty Hilton, Marley Nichelle, Derrick J. Waller, Sandy Williams, IV, and Jack Doerner were given significant control over the substance and scope of the exhibition by Second Street’s Executive Director Kristen Chiacchia.

“I wanted to do a show that not only reflected on the protests against systemic racism happening in the community and around the country this summer,” says Chiacchia. “I wanted to look at it not as an historical exhibition of events that occurred, but to present it as an ongoing conversation.”

The photographs have a you-are-there immediacy. This is particularly evident in Eze Amos’ tight compositions, where you feel like you’re in that crowd. Amos deftly conveys the raw emotion of the protests by training his lens on the protesters’ faces. There’s a timelessness about his photographs; they could have been taken during the civil rights or anti-war protests of the 1960s, but for the masks. These evocations of the past drive home the fact that we are still dealing with the same issues and fighting the same battles years later. Amos has a great eye for composition, and revels in the black-and-white medium, manipulating contrasts of dark and light to add drama and visual richness.

There’s a special power to Derrick J. Waller’s photographs of the protests that happened just a few blocks from Second Street Gallery. And his “Skating the Revolution,” taken in front of Richmond’s Robert E. Lee monument during the euphoric time following the June 4 announcement of the statue’s removal, is a wonderfully animated image. The mask and the graffiti adorning the pedestal root it in these tumultuous times, adding a sense of unease to the carefree young man captured in midair. The skater seems in control, but we can’t miss the fact that, as a Black male, he’s also vulnerable. Waller’s photograph “Value the Work of Black Women” shows signs held by protesters in Charlottesville, and some of the signs, made by the Black Youth Action Committee, are also on display in the exhibit. Looking at the signs, we are reminded never to forget that these individuals went out into the streets during a deadly pandemic to stand up for social justice.

Ty Hilton doesn’t focus on the protests, but turns his gaze to inanimate objects transformed by the BLM activists. His aerial photograph of the J.E.B. Stuart plinth—sans statue—is startling. Looking down from above, it’s covered in a colorful jumble of graffiti. One sees not only how the protesters altered the monument with their additions, making it their own and creating a dynamic new artwork in the process, but also, in the empty rectangle at the top, what they accomplished through their protests. The power of absence is palpable.

Marley Nichelle’s images of the burning Confederate flag (“F*** Your Confederacy”) and Richmond’s Lee statue, taken from the rear with electric Breonna Taylor graffiti emblazoned at the monument’s base (“Justice for Breonna”), are potent and beautiful. In his image of a young Black man sitting on the sidewalk overcome by tear gas, or emotion, or both, he captures a quiet moment that is subtle and exceedingly moving. Gazing at the image, we are brought into the man’s reality, pondering his life and the physical and psychic pain he is experiencing.

The exhibition shows us instances of passion, beauty, and grace parsed out from the larger turmoil of the protests. Yes, they bear witness to this important period in history, but they also touch something more eternal that speaks to our humanity. It is this quality, together with the photographers’ mastery of their medium, that elevates the images into art.

All the photographs are printed on the same matte paper, which draws the viewer in and adds a cohesive flow to the exhibition. Hung directly on the wall using magnets, the images have particular immediacy. This quality is enhanced by the fact that no glass or frame separates them from the viewer.

Shifting gears, we come to Sandy Williams, IV and Jack Doerner, who work in a variety of media including sculpture, performance, and film, all of which are incorporated into the images on view in the exhibit. Williams and Doerner began by creating monument-shaped candles from 3D scans. The miniature wax replicas trivialize the statues and undermine their import. Then the candles were taken to the monuments, lit, and filmed as they burn down. Watching the colorful surrogates melt away is satisfying, subversive, and mordantly amusing. At the gallery, a selection of the candles is displayed along with images of them smoldering at the bases of their stone counterparts. The images are printed on aluminum, which creates a luscious slickness and gives the pieces a three-dimensional weight.

To introduce an interactive element and promote audience engagement, the gallery tapped artist and activist Destinee Wright to produce a version of her “Solidarity Cards Project,” which she first initiated in response to the 2016 election. Visitors are invited to write their reactions to the show on index cards that are pinned to the wall.

“I had to move some things around in the season to make these two shows possible,” says Chiacchia. “But we’re keeping them up through November 14. I think it’s very important that they’re up through the election to remind people that deep, historic, systemic racism still exists and the fight isn’t over.” [slideshow_deploy id=’148118′]

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Arts Culture

Bright explorations: David Summers’ uplifting tribute to light at Les Yeux du Monde

A close look at David Summers’ “Mondrian’s Recycling” reveals the whimsical way the painting pays homage to the geometric abstract style of Dutch painter Piet Mondrian. Courtesy of the artist

A Renaissance man as well as a Renaissance scholar, David Summers uses his vast knowledge to explore light physically and from a philosophical standpoint. “David Summers: Nothing but Light” at Les Yeux du Monde examines the artist’s continued preoccupation with the visual topic that has been at the center of his artistic output for decades.

“There’s one thing I should tell you about the paintings,” says Summers, pausing for effect. “You’re supposed to like them.” He chuckles. “They’re supposed to be likable.”

Summers is the Emeritus William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of Art Theory and Italian Renaissance Art at UVA. He is also an author whose works include Real Spaces: World Art History and the Rise of Western Modernism, Michelangelo and the Language of Art, and The Judgment of Sense: Renaissance Naturalism and the Rise of Aesthetics.

“David Summers is that rare art historian who can also paint,” says Les Yeux du Monde Director Lyn Warren. “He draws on his broad knowledge to create glorious paintings that hide unexpected treasures.”

Summers is also known to augment his work with historical, mythological, or other erudite references. His “Net of Indra” series takes its name from an ancient Buddhist allegory that deals with the concept of interconnectedness or emptiness (of a separate self/ego). The net stretches out infinitely above the dwelling of the god Indra. Within each mesh rhombus of the net, a single jewel glitters. All the other jewels are reflected in this one jewel and are also reflecting all the other jewels, ultimately resulting in an infinite ricocheting of reflections within the net. Summers may be making a statement about the interconnection of all things, but it’s the behavior of light that’s particularly relevant to his work. Capturing, with his brush, light glinting off reflective surfaces appears to be one of the artist’s greatest challenges and joys.

Indra’s net figures prominently in the show with four paintings referencing it. “Play of Light in the Net of Indra (Two Blue Pitchers)” is a work of hue, light, and texture. “Fragment of the Net of Indra (Night)” is equally arresting, and “Still Life with Sunrise” thrums with shimmering energy. The outer edges of the painting, where pink underpainting is visible peeking out from beneath the background, tells us a bit about Summers’ process, while creating a quietly beautiful effect. 

“Play of Light in the Net of Indra (Two Blue Pitchers)” Image courtesy of the artist

“Mondrian’s Recycling” pays homage to the Dutch modernist with subtlety and humor. Summers creates an alluring image of cool verdancy in his arrangement of glass objects, mostly blue, green and clear, placed on a table top and its lower shelf. This setup is in front of a window through which a hedge of trees is visible. Thanks to the title, we detect how the outlines of the window, wall, and table cleverly produce a version of Mondrian’s iconic grid formation. It’s a light touch that could have gone unnoticed. Another droll art reference—a deadpan jab at Jeff Koons’ vacuous, overly merchandised output—is dropped into “Still Life with Million-Dollar Balloon Dog.”

“Big Still Life with Mirrors, Homage to van Eyck (For D.W.)” has an interesting backstory. A friend of Summers’, D.W. presented him with a convex mirror similar to the one prominently featured in Jan van Eyck’s “The Arnolfini Portrait.”

Van Eyck has special significance to Summers as a prominent member of the early northern Renaissance school of painting whose developments in the use of oil paint were hugely influential. In addition to falling within his purview of study, Summers relies on the medium van Eyck perfected to create his own transparent glazes. These are fundamental to his oeuvre as they enable Summers to render glass and produce reflections.

In Summers’ painting, the convex van Eyck mirror is surrounded by other mirrors, including, amusingly, a rearview mirror that sits insouciantly at the bottom of the pile. There are also clear glass balls (Japanese fishing net floats), tin cans, and a vase. As in the original van Eyck, you can just make out the artist’s reflection in the convex mirror.

“Commodity Ghosts Dancing in the Sun” references our disposable culture with a row of plastic seltzer bottles—the ghosts of commodity—set against a patterned background. Summers reveals the beauty and humor in these throw-away items, and they, in turn, provide a nice edginess that contrasts with the refined polish of Summers’ execution. To balance Summers’ paintings of objects, interior and garden scenes and a series of enchanting vignettes from the Chesapeake Bay that evoke the best days of high summer are also included in the show.

“Do you remember the Shmoo from ‘Li’l Abner’?,” asks Summers. “It was a lovable little creature, that was any flavor you liked when you ate it. These paintings are like that. The subject matter is really light, I want it to be light. But the arbitrariness of the things is supposed to be slightly humorous—slightly humorous in the way somebody you like is.”