Author: Shea Gibbs

Categories
Knife & Fork Magazines

Any way you slice it

Local pizzeria veteran Aaron Hill is pushing the boundaries of pie with mobile kitchen Slice Versa. Photo: Eze Amos

If you want to make Neapolitan-style pizza in Charlottesville and you’re not from Naples, being from Lampo is probably the next best thing.

But let’s back up. Aaron Hill’s pizza-making days started well before he served as the Belmont restaurant’s sous chef from 2016 to 2019. His first serious dough-flinging foray was at another member of the city’s Mount Pizzamore: Dr. Ho’s Humble Pie. Over two separate stints, Hill spent more than five years helping turn out the Doc’s Wonka-like creations, which couldn’t sit further from the strictures of Neapolitan style and its D.O.C. mandates.

“A lot of my style is definitely a blend,” Hill says. “I don’t go out of my way to do anything…by the rules. I think it’s more important to follow your own taste. There is no real point to [D.O.C. certification]. I see it as a racket.”

It’s that perspective that’s led to Slice Versa, Hill’s seven-month-old mobile wood fired pizza kitchen. From his custom trailer-slash-oven, he’s been turning out zingy Neapolitan-ish and Sicilian-style ’zas since spring 2021 and drawing fans around the county at breweries, wineries, farmers’ markets, and beyond.

To top his sourdough-based pies, Hill seeks out local cheeses, cured meats, and vegetables.

“We’re not in Italy, and I’m not going to be importing every ingredient I have,” Hill says. “I can get black walnut oil or hickory oil or olive oil that is just amazing stuff—all from Virginia. I want to represent this climate and our food system and be sustainable.”

Lending Slice Versa another pizza-loving perspective is co-owner Emma Luster. Hill and Luster met and married in 2019, drawn together in no small part by a certain round, mozzarella-topped delicacy. Luster kept a “pizza diary,” both dreamed of running a food truck, and as they probably say in Sicily, the rest was storia.

Hill’s favorite Slice Versa pizza so far has been a black walnut number he hopes to bring back to the menu soon. For those clinging to tradition, he’s also got the Cheesetown—four cheeses, garlic, chili flake, wild oregano, and EVOO over a crushed tomato base—and bestselling margherita.

“Wherever you are, everyone eats different—that’s been one of the coolest parts of this,” Hill says. “Kind of the point is to break the rules and have more options for more people.”

Categories
Knife & Fork Magazines

Bake it till you make it

Photo: John Robinson

How many badass bakers can one modest hamlet support? Seems Charlottesville is determined to find out.

Christina Martin comes to Charlottesville trailing a wake of Michelin-starred experiences by way of the West Coast and Chicago. She most recently wrapped a short stint at The Inn at Little Washington.

Now, Martin’s putting out pastries under her microbakery label, BakerNoBakery, and stalking the local farmers’ markets while plotting her next move.

K&F: So, you’re a baker with no bakery?

CM: Actually that was an Instagram name that originated in high school, when I was making pastries—mostly cakes and cookies—for birthdays. I’ve just kept it up, through culinary school at Johnson & Wales University, through some internships, and up to now.

Your most recent restaurant stop was The Inn at Little Washington. Where were you before that?

I got a great internship at Grace in Chicago. I moved there in the middle of my junior year and was finishing my bachelor’s degree online. The restaurant closed six days later. It was a hard and fast reset for my career. I helped open two restaurants and closed two in a year and a half and worked at a total of four. It was intense. Then I moved back home to the San Francisco Bay area. When the pandemic hit, the restaurant I was going to work for in L.A. ended up having its opening pushed back. My cousins own Guajiros Miami Eatery here in C’ville, and I was doing bakery pop-ups at the time out of my parents’ house; my cousins said I should come and do pop-ups out of their restaurant.

Photo: John Robinson

And then you just happened upon a job at another three-Michelin-starred restaurant.

I booked all my travel and had a sublet set up, but it was a scam. I needed a job and saw an opening as the pastry chef de partie at The Inn at Little Washington. I had been in fine dining of that caliber, so it was a linear move.

How did you get from there to your own business?

Through my pops-ups I started wholesaling cookie dough to my cousin. Then, because I had worked in multiple cities and met a lot of people, I started shipping bread—sending all these flavors and fun things I was working on around the country. And Charlottesville was drawing me in.

But you left the Inn.

I love the environment of fine dining, but I really believe my path in life lies with being an entrepreneur, as scary as it is. So, currently I’m doing production out of a commercial kitchen from 3-7:30am three days a week. I still think of myself as a baker without a bakery. With the way my creativity is, retail doesn’t really work. I enjoy the free form of the farmers’ market. Then I can spend my weekdays foraging or going to source ingredients.

What’s your baking style?

I like to describe it as Americana-diversity. I work with a lot of traditional American and French techniques but modify them, incorporating the diversity that is this country. I’m half Latin and half white but grew up in the Bay Area, where there are a lot of Asian and Hispanic influences, as well as modern gastronomic techniques.

Speed round: favorite pastry to eat, favorite local pastry, favorite pastry to bake.

I love a perfectly executed kouign-amann. It’s a French pastry that is laminated like a croissant, but the last two folds are done with sugar instead of flour, giving it this caramelly crust. The matcha mint chocolate chip cookie from Bowerbird is ridiculously good. And I love baking caramel buns because laminating by hand is a really fun process, and it’s different every time.

Categories
Abode Magazines

Sit, don’t stare

Photo: Eze Amos

Tate Pray doesn’t consider furniture art. But that doesn’t mean his work isn’t artistic.

The classically trained painter, sculptor, and tireless maker began working as a carpenter after earning his art degree. He moved to Charlottesville in 2005, transitioned to concrete formwork and stuck with that for more than a decade. 

In 2019, Pray returned to his carpentry roots and launched Poem Furniture to bring handcrafted, solid wood furniture and cabinetry to homeowners with vision. He recently chatted with Abode about his own vision.

Abode: What makes Poem Furniture unique?

Tate Pray: We are antithetical to the throwaway culture that we all reside in, and we hope to basically make a mark in the community by crafting heirloom-quality furniture.

Are most of your pieces made-to-order?

We have a showroom in town and have a number of spec pieces, but the majority of the work is commissioned by architects and designers. They come to us—they know the work I do. Sometimes they want to tailor to clients’ needs or they come to us with a completely different vision of their own we can help realize.

Photo: Eze Amos

What materials do you use specifically?

We work in all the domestic hardwoods, and a lot of it is local. We work with sawyers and people who dry the lumber locally. We also fabricate our own metalwork, and that’s a component that’s been valuable to our clients. We have the capability to do sand casting and all the resources to fabricate in metal.

How did you move from classical art training to furniture making?

In supporting my art habit, I got into the building trades. I really love making things that are practical. I still make art here and there, but with furniture there is that connection that comes from creating things for people to live with functionally. It’s really gratifying. What art and furniture have in common is a desire to create and work with your hands. I have an atelier-type background and learned all the classical techniques in painting and drawing and sculpture. With sculpture, you have a visual, hands-on way to replicate nature, and the mechanical acumen you develop translates almost directly to furniture design and proportion and form. The only difference is the functional component of it—making something useful.

So furniture is definitely not art?

I think the inherent nature of art is that it doesn’t have a function. So yes, there is a hard line. If you are making things of use, they should be useful. Whether it is comfortable or not is part of the form-function debate.

Do you have any favorite Poem Furniture pieces?

Most everything I make, I love. I think I’ve had success working with designers and riffing off of each other to a positive end—creating something unique and different and exciting for both of us. A lot of the things that excite me have some element of whimsy. That kind of thing scratches a certain part of my DNA. I love making things that have different elements: metal, steel, wood, stone.

So, no. No favorite pieces.

In one instance, over at Oakhurst Inn, a designer and I worked together on a bar. The back bar was there for us to kind of respond to, and one idea was to make a replica in wood. I said, why don’t we make the whole thing in steel? The designer said she was thrilled and we worked out the details together—a glass and steel, mirrored upper bar, steel crown moldings, all welded together. It’s something you don’t see often, kind of harkening to a storefront façade. And there was just a unique moment where the place and piece spoke to a certain material. We just went, “aha.”

Categories
Arts Culture

Sights and sounds

Photographer Rich Tarbell will sign copies of his latest book, Regarding Charlottesville Music II, at Champion Brewing Company the afternoon of November 26, and at Durty Nelly’s that night. New Dominion Bookshop will have it on shelves. Photo: Sanjay Suchak

Charlottesville music scene photographer Rich Tarbell’s new book of portraiture is a no-filters cross section of local singers, songwriters, and industry supporters, and it’s a should-have for any Charlottesville audiophile.

But let’s get to the part you’ve heard before: The project, like so many other artistic endeavors, was inspired by the COVID-19 pandemic.

We all know the pandemic devastated the arts in general and live music specifically. Fortunately, all the downtime and new perspectives among creatives also ignited fresh sounds. It was a silver lining for music lovers who knew where to look. And if anyone knows where to look, it’s Tarbell.

Set for a November 26 release, Regarding Charlottesville Music II was inspired by both Tarbell’s own pandemic experience and conversations he had with musicians about theirs. Coincidentally, he happened upon a 50-year-old Hasselblad 500C camera early last year. He used it to take outdoor pics of Chamomile & Whiskey’s Koda Kerl and Marie Borgman on March 30, 2020. A few days later, he made portraits of Eli Cook. He thought he might be onto something.

“The photographs had an unintentionally morose feel to them that seemed to anticipate the uncertain times we were entering,” Tarbell says.

Inspired, Tarbell bought darkroom equipment and taught himself to develop photos in his basement. By the end of September, he’d captured and developed hundreds of analog images, and 87 of them appear in Regarding Charlottesville Music II.

So to review the timeline: Tarbell bought an unfamiliar camera in early 2020, started taking pics with it that March, learned to develop film in the next few months, and compiled a book of the images in about a year and a half. It was a crash course, and Tarbell is the first to admit every one of the images isn’t technically perfect. But the process was in keeping with the photog’s backstage-access M.O. as a music industry scenester.

“I’m not saying I’m the world’s greatest photographer,” Tarbell says. “It’s about luck, timing, and access—and friendship and trust. Those are the five things. Once you are in, you are in.”

Tarbell moved to Charlottesville in 1987 to attend UVA. He was an aspiring musician but knew he had limitations. He aged, settled down, and essentially gave it up. He was still around musicians, though, and picked up “a crappy old digital camera.” He taught himself to point and shoot, then improved. According to Tarbell, if you can take pictures in concert conditions, you can do it anywhere—“it’s like learning to drive stick in the mountains,” he says.

Still, it was never technical excellence that gave Tarbell’s work weight. It was being backstage and around talent, being to Charlottesville musicians what Jay Blakesberg was to the Grateful Dead, Ricky Powell was to the Beastie Boys, or Danny Clinch was to the Boss.

For Tarbell, befriending local music talent led to access to regional talent and eventually national talent. In the case of the Dave Matthews Band, Tarbell’s access grew from local to national on its own.

That means Tarbell’s new book features exclusive images of Matthews, Tim Reynolds, and Carter Beauford alongside local standouts like Terri Allard, Harli Saxon, and Charlie Pastorfield. Then there are the behind-the-scenes folks: Danny Shea, Terry Martin, Kirby Hutto, and Patrick Jordan, among others.

Interspersed throughout Regarding Charlottesville Music II are concert fliers, some of which Tarbell helped produce, and essays from select musicians. Tarbell says he began talking to people about the pandemic thinking he would approach the new book’s narrative much like he did in Regarding Charlottesville Music. In that work, he interviewed local musicians over eight months and crafted a conversational oral history. This time around, Tarbell found the interviews repetitive.

“This book is four years after the first, so there’s not a whole lot to revisit,” Tarbell says. “And I realized when talking about the pandemic, everybody’s experience was about the same. So I decided not to bother everyone with that. I didn’t want it to be super depressing.”

The resulting essays feature a few stories about the pandemic’s devastation, but also plenty about its inspirations, thoughts from those pushing through like nothing changed, hope for the future, and touching tales from C’ville’s musical past. The Beetnix’s Damani Harrison tells the story of how Johnny Gilmore and Wonderband kept him in Charlottesville. “They played Thursdays and I went every Thursday for like two months by myself,” Harrison writes in Regarding Charlottesville Music II. “I thought, if this is here, I’ll stay. Rest in peace Johnny.”

Tarbell says he never planned to do a follow up to Regarding Charlottesville Music, and he doesn’t plan to do another book in the future. But the pandemic created the right conditions to change his plans.

“The first book was musicians in their comfortable space, their studio, their basement, what have you,” Tarbell says. “For this one, I started with friends, the few people I would see outdoors. I started pursuing it when the seriously fearful part of the pandemic was over and we could at least not be terrified to go out.”

Categories
Culture Food & Drink

Granular on granola

Some families debate over home fries or hash browns. Brian Nosek and his daughters combined a love of breakfast and research into a rating system based on taste, presentation, menu, ambiance, and service. Photo: Eze Amos

Brian Nosek is into numbers. He’s also into breakfast.

Nosek, a psychologist at the University of Virginia, is a well-known champion of “open science,” a movement to make academic research and its findings accessible to everyone. “A lot of the public perception of psychology is about treatment and management of wellbeing,” Nosek says. “But a substantial portion of the field, of academic psychology, is about strong methodology.”

For his latest data project, Nosek commissioned two research assistants: his daughters, 14-year-old Haven and 12-year-old Joni.

“We love breakfast,” Nosek says. “My spouse sleeps in, and we have time in the morning to do stuff on the weekends. So it’s often, ‘Let’s go have breakfast somewhere.’”

But how to decide where to dine? Nosek says he and his daughters used Yelp as their go-to info source. But it didn’t tell them everything they wanted to know. Specifically, Nosek says Yelp doesn’t say much about the quality you can expect for your money.

The Noseks set out on an egg-zamination of their own. The researchers would eat at 50 places “known for their breakfast.” They would rate every restaurant on taste, presentation, menu, ambiance, and service. They would consider each variable in the context of price.

And in the spirit of open science, they would publish their data for all the world to see, explore for themselves, and perform new analyses.

“We wanted to share our ratings to tell other people about our experiences—give recommendations and inspire people to do fun projects like this on their own,” Haven Nosek says.

No word yet on whether anyone has taken the Noseks up on crunching those numbers. But, from the researchers’ perspective, the conclusions are in. The team’s number one overall breakfast spot in the area? Fill up your gas tank—it’s Thunderbird Cafe in McGaheysville, on Route 33 just outside of Massanutten. “It was really my style and yummy,” Joni Nosek says.

Quirk Cafe, Croby’s Urban Vittles, Guajiros Miami Eatery, Fig, and MarieBette Cafe & Bakery round out the top five overall. (Fig and MarieBette tie for fifth.) Quality Pie earns a special honorable mention from the lead researcher; it lands third on taste but suffered overall due to ambiance issues during COVID.

RIP to the breakfast joint that was top-rated on taste, Bluegrass Grill & Bakery. Charlie & Litsa’s South Main Street Cafe in Culpeper comes in second on the taste dimension. That’s the measurement where you find some traditionally heralded local breakfast places: Oakhurst Inn Cafe and Espresso Bar ranks fourth; Ace Biscuit & Barbecue, Blue Moon Diner, Bodo’s Bagels, and Fox’s Cafe (also now closed) all tie for the fifth taste spot with an average rating of 9.3.

Chains tend not to fare well with the self-styled “Breakfast Bunch” (or the three “Munchateers,” if that’s your taste). Not a single restaurant with multiple identical locations makes their overall top-10 list. Not even Bodo’s. IHOP rates reasonably well on taste and menu, and Taco Bell scores a surprise eighth in the service dimension.

For the eldest Nosek, the most surprising takeaway from the project was how little cost seemed to matter to his intrepid research crew. Presentation and ambiance are modestly correlated with what the Noseks spent, but taste, menu, and service are only slightly related. Donuts, for example, did well because of their affordability. “They’re delicious deathtraps and great value,” Nosek says. Duck Donuts drops in at third behind Thunderbird and Croby’s on the top-10 best value list.

Indeed, the research study sample on the whole is relatively low cost, Nosek says. Across all 50 restaurants, the Munchateers spent $9.91 per person on average, and that was for a hungry group trying multiple things. All in the interest of science, of course.

“I have a love of science and methodology, and I wanted to share some of that with [my daughters],” Nosek says. “The big debate is how much do we want to add new places to the list versus looking at test-retest reliability. I think we will definitely replicate our breakfast study.”

Correction: A previous version of this story misspelled Culpeper.

Categories
Arts Culture

Art for heart’s sake

Racial justice-focused murals emerged around Richmond in the summer of 2020. Photo: VAFF

Richmond-based artist Hamilton Glass wasn’t just upset about the George Floyd killing by police in Minneapolis on May 25, 2020. He was upset about the nation’s reaction to it.

“I was getting really frustrated about why so many people were now seeing this…as different,” Glass says in the 2020 documentary Mending Walls. “It’s been carnage after carnage after carnage, and I was upset about it.”

Glass reached out to fellow artist Matt Lively early last summer. Glass is Black. Lively, white. They had a conversation that inspired Glass to launch a project bringing together 32 artists to create 16 outdoor murals in 16 weeks—all in an effort to connect and heal the interracial wounds opened by the tragic events of May 25.

At about the same time that Glass sat down with Lively, Richmond-based filmmaker Pam Hervey was looking for her own way to process and respond to Floyd’s murder. She heard about the mural project and set about producing the documentary Mending Walls in real time.

“They wanted to create something for the city that was a reflection of their conversation,” Hervey says. “We tried to tell the story of how they were able to accomplish that—the deep connections that emerged. In a lot of cases, the artists working together didn’t even know each other.”

Produced and directed by Hervey for 19Red, Mending Walls features the team  on-scene with Glass, Lively, and the others artists as they create each of the racial justice-focused murals that emerged around Richmond in the summer of 2020. The film includes conversations with the artists, as well as striking visuals as each of the works comes to life.

“The documentary is not about art but about getting to know each other,” Hervey says. “It’s about understanding where we come from.”

Mending Walls

Culbreth Theatre

October 28

Categories
Arts Culture

Off the court

Citizen Ashe follows the life of tennis legend and Virginia native Arthur Ashe. Photo: VAFF

Citizen Ashe, by award-winning director Sam Pollard and Rex Miller, chronicles the life of tennis great and Virginia native Arthur Ashe, a trailblazing figure on the court and activist off.

Ashe was the first Black man to win a singles championship at Wimbledon, the U.S. Open, and the Australian Open. He was also the first Black man named to a U.S. Davis Cup team. But it was a heart attack at age 36 and subsequent bypass surgery that in many ways defined Ashe’s career.

Over the nine years following his first cardiac episode, Ashe embarked on a mission to advocate for heart health. But health issues continued to plague him. In 1988, Ashe was hospitalized yet again. Tests revealed he was HIV positive. Doctors said he likely contracted the disease from a blood transfusion received during his 1979 quadruple bypass.

As an activist, Ashe took on not only heart health and AIDS awareness but racial justice. He visited South Africa as part of a delegation promoting racial integration, and later, in 1985, was arrested for protesting during an anti-apartheid rally. Ashe protested mistreatment of Haitian refugees in 1992 and was again arrested for speaking out.

Born and raised in Richmond, Ashe was honored with a statue along the city’s Monument Avenue in 1996. Because of its location among Richmond’s many confederate memorials, the bronze sculpture showing Ashe holding a book and tennis racket and surrounded by children has become a touchpoint in the ongoing conversation about antiquity and historical injustice in modern American life.

Citizen Ashe is narrated by Ashe and features Johnnie Ashe, Stephanie Cookie Carson, and Donald Dell. The film attempts to put Ashe’s life into sociological context, examining the racial issues surrounding the predominantly white sport of tennis.

Citizen Ashe 

Violet Crown Cinema 

October 30

Categories
Arts Culture

Open book

Retired library workers, Nancy Key, Mary Barbour, and Carolyn Allen, tell their stories in Lorenzo Dickerson’s documentary, Free and Open to the Public. The film debuts at The Paramount Theater on October 21. Photo: Courtesy of Maupintown Media

The Jefferson-Madison Regional Library is the subject of Free and Open to the Public, a film documenting its 100-year history, and the Maupintown Media production offers something most organizations would rather avoid: an unvarnished look at a checkered past.

“The library was looking at its 100 years of service and the current state of public libraries in America…and that is something we want to celebrate and commemorate,” JMRL Director David Plunkett says. “But considering those 100 years, especially in Charlottesville and in the South, it was important for the library to tell a story about the institution. So while the organization now is free and open to the public and libraries are for everyone, there was a time when the institution was only for white families.”

Filmmaker Lorenzo Dickerson crafted Free and Open to the Public as a companion piece to JMRL’s “Celebrating 100 Years” exhibit, now on display at its downtown Central Branch. The exhibit traces the library’s history starting in 1916, when Virginia had fewer libraries than any other U.S. state. The local library network was launched in 1919 with a gift of land, one building, and books. The institution opened two years later.

Not a single Black person stepped into a JMRL building until 1934, however, when administrators made the library at the Jefferson School its Fourth Street Branch, which was open to Charlottesville’s African American population.

In 1942, JMRL officially integrated, closing its Fourth Street Branch and ostensibly opening its main location to people of color. Few Blacks actually used the library, though, and it was 10 years before JMRL hired its first African American employee. According to JMRL, the Gordon Avenue Branch’s opening in 1966 “marked a turning point in the integration of the public library system.”

Still, almost 60 years later, JMRL and libraries across the country are reckoning with program, personnel, and content diversity. As a filmmaker focused on social justice issues and African American history in and around Charlottesville, Dickerson is well suited to grapple with the library system’s issues through the years.

“It was a part of the plan from the beginning to tell a truthful and complete story of the library,” Dickerson says. “Over time, the library has become more intentional with the collections they offer the community. It’s certainly grown to be a more inclusive space over its 100 years.”

Dickerson’s film, which was not made available in full prior to its debut this month, promises to bring life and color to its companion exhibit. It will include interviews with former library employees and community members, trace the timeline of the library’s history, display vintage video and photography from multiple library branches, and tell stories to illuminate the past.

Nancy Key, a retired member of the Central Branch’s cataloguing department, talks of meeting longtime JMRL administrator Roland Buford as a child, and later working with him. Ruth Klippstein, former Scottsville Branch children’s librarian, tells the tale of bringing a domesticated wolf into the library for a kids’ program—and fearing that at any moment the animal would tear loose. (Spoiler alert: It didn’t.)

And of course, there are stories of regular folks and their love of books and libraries.

“Where I lived, it was walking distance,” former Gordon Avenue Branch librarian Mary Barbour says in a clip provided by Dickerson. “I think I spent most of my life in the library, especially the children’s area, reading books. Didn’t check ’em out. But then finally—I guess I was showing up so much—the librarian there [said], ‘I think you need a library card.’”

Plunkett says he hopes Dickerson’s film and the Central Branch in-person exhibit will bring more foot traffic to the library, which has flagged since COVID-19 struck—the pandemic being another era of JMRL’s history covered in Free and Open to the Public. 

And the JMRL centennial might also serve to bring more attention to Dickerson’s work, something Plunkett says the library has celebrated for many years.

Dickerson and his Maupintown Media production company have produced six original documentaries detailing Charlottesville and Albemarle County’s race relations, each shining a light on a little-understood historical niche. There’s Color Line of Scrimmage, chronicling the 1956 Burley High School football team and its undefeated and unscored upon championship season, Anywhere But Here, about 13 African American men incarcerated in Charlottesville, and Byrdland, which tracks a formerly enslaved family from the plantation to their own land.

“JMRL has shown many of Lorenzo’s films at the library and hosted discussions,” Plunkett says. “We are longtime admirers. He just has the ability to tell a very personal and local story, but it resonates with what is happening in America.”

Categories
434 Magazines

Patron of the artists

Visible Records' first exhibit, Tiahue Tocha, featured work by artists such as Ateri Miyawatl, Lydia Moyer, and Karina Monroy, whose mixed media installation included a pink pickup truck with a bed of flowers. Photo: Eze Amos

The folks at Visible Records want to lift artists up. To do so, they’ve had to slow things down. 

The newish art studio/gallery concept, backed by The Bridge/Progressive Arts Initiative and located in the former office space at 1740 Broadway St., opened last November. But the artist-run consortium, which highlights minority and low-income producers, still finds itself carefully navigating COVID-19 concerns. Organizers say they aren’t as far along in their mission as they might’ve expected at this point.

Visible Records’ studio portion—23 distinct spaces from 130 to 312 square feet in size—is less than two thirds full. And the gallery side saw its first exhibition open on August 6, nearly nine months after Visible Records’ first tenants took up studio space. “We’ve had no other option than to move really slowly,” says Kendall King, who heads studio operations.

But the slow pace has almost certainly been a blessing, King says. Building a community around the right artists takes time.

One of the firsts to use a Visible Records studio herself, King says the space has been invaluable in her own production of large-scale prints. She thinks other artists will benefit similarly—not only from the dedicated studios but also from the available common area, where they can collaborate and be inspired by others. “We give artists time and space to take stock of where their career is going.”

Getting into the studio is the first step, and Visible Records’ vetting process for new tenants is deliberate. Because the studio’s intention is to lift up marginalized artists, space is available by application only and has no set price. The community selects artists for inclusion based on fit—whether it be in terms of mission, medium, or demographic.

“We go through a process—everyone who applies that we also want to have as part of the community, we ask them what they can afford without impacting them negatively,” King says. “It might look like someone who helps doing work around the space. Or it might look like us raising money to help them.”

Fundraising has gone well, King says, largely because of Visible Records’ association with the established nonprofit Bridge/PAI. King doesn’t believe the consortium will be limited by money as it selects artists for inclusion in the near future.

King operates the studio space alongside another local artist-in-residence, Morgan Aschom, who acts as manager of the larger warehouse housing Visible Records. The multi-use space was converted after its former tenant, data management company Data Visible, closed in 2014. What remains is 55,000 square feet now encompassing Decipher Brewing, Grow Coral Reefs, Patois Cider, Metal Inc., A2D Appliance Sales, Dreadhead, The Freeman Artist Residency, recording studios, and other small businesses, in addition to Visible Records.

A separate team of local and regional arts industry insiders direct Visible Records’ gallery side, King says. The space’s first exhibit, which closed September 14, is Tiahue Tocha, featuring art by the Colectivo Rasquache. The artists have been unable to return to their home in San Francisco Coapan, a community in the volcanic region of the State of Puebla in Mexico, due to the pandemic.

“It’s just been going great—people are coming to see it,” King says. “The Rasquache collective is entirely aligned with our community. Every day when I come to [the gallery], I am moved and provoked thoughtfully by it again. There is such a range of mediums and contributions to it, but you can tell when you are in the space that these artists have the same energy and intent.”

Beyond its first exhibition, Visible Records has a full schedule lined up for the remainder of the year. Next up is the Freeman Artist Residency, running September 25 to October 30. Established by University of Virginia Professor Neal Rock, the residency program intends to lift up Black artists who are first-generation college graduates.

A solo exhibition featuring Fidencio Fifield-Perez will follow, from November 4 to December 11. Fifield-Perez lends his perspective as a native of Oaxaca, Mexico, to the debate over borders, edges, and the people passing them. Closing out the year and moving into 2022 will be a group exhibition of the current Visible Records studio tenants. The exhibit will open December 17.

With gallery operations scheduled for the foreseeable future, Visible Records can now continue the slow process of finding and vetting possible tenant artists. One remaining hurdle, King says, is that outsider artists often don’t know what’s available to them.

“We’ve subsidized, partially or fully, at least five artists here,” King says. “And we’ve always had at least a third of our artists partially or fully subsidized. I would urge people—if this is how you want to make your mark on the community—we are the place.”

Categories
434 Magazines

Accidental actor

Photo: Eze Amos

Darryl Nelson Smith had never been in a play when he uprooted his Richmond life for an office gig supporting the Charlottesville theater community. He figured he’d take the job with Live Arts for a few years. Twenty years later, Smith is a pillar in local theater—on and off stage.

434: So what’s your ROLE at Live Arts? Lol.

Darryl Nelson Smith: I’m the box office manager, but I feel like I’m more like the face of Live Arts. I help with development and marketing and fundraising. I get to throw fun parties and do a lot of the community outreach. I can’t wait to have people back in the building. And, since we’re a 100 percent volunteer organization, I have been onstage in a couple of Live Arts shows.

If you’ve only recently been in productions, what brought you
to Live Arts in the first place?

A co-worker in Richmond was coming to do shows at Live Arts many years ago. I came to see one and fell in love. Then she took a marketing position here. One day, I got a phone call from her—”this might be weird, but we are looking for a box office manager.” Four or five months later, I packed up my suitcase and a moving truck.

What is it about theater you love?

The cool thing about theater is it is always growing and changing. At Live Arts, we do six or seven productions per year, and there’s great excitement around opening night. But then after four weeks of doing the same show, you’re a little tired of it. Then, there’s all of a sudden a new show and group of people to engage with.

How were you convinced to finally perform yourself?

I went to school for communications and advertising, and in Richmond I worked at museums mostly. But with Live Arts being a volunteer organization, someone was eventually like, “hey, by the way, we need a person and think you should audition.” I’d be like, “you’re crazy—I am not an actor.” But then after going out for a couple of beers, I’d be in.

What’s the last year been like for Live Arts?

We reinvented the wheel and did online shows—but you don’t get that immediate feedback you get with live audiences. We’ve also been doing dance parties to reach out and let people know we are here. It’s just kind of been like, “how can we engage the community?”

What’s the year been like for you personally?

After our doors had been closed for a year and a half, I honestly started to wonder if I could do it again. But I recently had a chance to go to New York and work with a former director of mine and run his box office. I got to do what I love, and I thought, “I can do this again.” I love the interaction with the public—that excitement of people coming to a show. It’s so magical.

What’s been one of your favorite moments as Live Arts box office director?

The last show before the pandemic was Men on Boats, which is an all female cast playing men characters. We ran for two weeks before the pandemic and kind of knew this was a big thing. For the last show, the audience just really wanted to be there and came to support us, and I think the actors felt the love. It was their last show, and they gave it their all.

What’s next for you and Live Arts?

I’m going to be here as long as they want me. But you never know. My life goal is to end up in a cabin in Canada somewhere.

Our first show this season is a one-man show, but we have three different actors available each night just in case. If someone gets sick, we have another actor who can go on. You can come three times and it might be different every time. We also have a big ol’ musical coming next summer. And I always say I won’t be onstage, but you never know. I say no, then I’m up there singing and dancing.