It makes up around 60 percent of the human body. It covers more than 70 percent of the Earth’s surface.
And it makes up 100 percent of local Black-owned business Civil Water’s product portfolio.
Good old-fashioned water—in bottles. No bubbles, no flavors, no harmful chemicals, no healthy minerals removed.
So what’s the big deal then? Barely 6-month-old Civil Water sells its liquid to wholesalers or direct-to-consumer only in aluminum bottles. The 12-ounce vessels are available online—and by subscription service—in 24-packs for $43.99.
“We’re in five states on the East Coast,” said Faith Kelley, one of two just-over-20-year-old founders running Civil Water out of a Charlottesville office. “As far as being in large chain stores nationwide, that’s more difficult. Our timeline is about a year or two.”
It’s tough to figure out how well Civil Water is doing relative to its competitors and the overall market, as data on packaged water material are scarce. But anecdotally, boxed and metaled water firms keep pouring out. Liquid Death, JUST Water, Open Water, Proud Source. Along with C’ville’s own, they’re all looking to irrigate a portion of the market.
“What makes Civil Water unique is a lot of people are really connected to the fact that we are local,” Kelley says. “And, only a few of the other aluminum bottled water companies are actually spring water.”
By any measure, aluminum is way more recyclable than plastic. Regulators and the packaged water industry have taken notice. Governor Ralph Northam signed an executive order on March 23 requiring executive branch state agencies to stop trafficking in single-use plastic water bottles, as well as disposable plastic bags, plastic, and polystyrene food containers, and plastic straws and cutlery. The gov gave necessary medical, public health, and public safety plastics some exemptions, but the agencies must phase out all non-medical, single-use plastic and polystyrene by 2025.
“About 9 percent of plastics that get recycled actually get repurposed,” Kelley says. “Aluminum is of course the number one most recycled material.”
Kelley’s right, but it does take some effort to move aluminum down the recycling stream and get it back on shelves. She suggests taking your empty bottles directly to a recycling center, rather than throwing it in your single-stream bin. You have to be “religious about physically taking your items,” she says.
So what’s next for the self-funded, two-employee Civil Water? Kelley and co-founder Neil Wood are confident they can grow with demand—they contract with a third party to bottle their water, which they say is direct from an Appalachian Mountain source, and have plenty of capacity. They’re now looking for funding to expand, Wood says.
“We want to be able to hit the huge retail chain stores to become accessible for everyone around the country,” Wood says. “And then from there, we will offer some smaller options for packaging.”
And what about those bubbles and flavors? “We actually haven’t thought about that,” Wood says. “There is a market for it. But we don’t drink it.”
Tim Reynolds and Michael Sokolowski sync up synths and strings on Soul Pilgrimage, their new record. Publicity image.
Tim Reynolds is busy these days. He’s shredding on tour with Dave Matthews Band while playing Dave & Tim shows in between. He’s dabbling in livestreams, and is only two years removed from his last TR3 album.
But when his old Charlottesville friend, Michael Sokolowski, called during the pandemic last year, Reynolds freed up some time in his schedule. “We’ve been working together for almost 30 years,” Reynolds says. “We go way back.”
Sokolowski’s proposal? A follow-up album to the duo’s 1992 collaboration Common Margins, a direct-to-two-track recording of Sokolowski on acoustic piano and Reynolds on semi-hollowbody jazz guitar.
For fans of the first album waiting on the edge of their seats for 29 years, the new collab might not be what they expected. On Soul Pilgrimage, which dropped as a digital album and streaming on August 25 (CDs and vinyl records are coming in fall), the friends worked together from a distance, and Sokolowski set the tone with a more electronic-minded perspective.
“I don’t know if it was what we were expecting,” Sokolowski says. “I’m not even sure what those expectations were. Over my career, I’ve always played piano. I’ve had synths and electronic keyboards in bands, but I’ve never gotten deep into synth patch creation, the analog synth world. It took the lockdown to get really into it.”
Reynolds has gone the other way on technology. He doesn’t have a home studio—or even a computer, legend has it—so for Soul Pilgrimage, Sokolowski laid down his side of the project and sent it to Reynolds along with a decent-quality digital audio recorder.
Reynolds listened to the piece of music—“just some great Michael shit,” he says—and played a guitar part as an accompaniment. He didn’t love his first pass.
“The first time, I was not locked in,” Reynolds says. “On the second take, I realized I didn’t need to mess with the knobs. I just needed to play guitar…It was like, ‘just smoke a joint and get into it.’”
Reynolds was satisfied the second time around and sent the recording to Sokolowski. Back in Charlottesville, the pianist-cum- producer started putting the pieces together.
The first thing Sokolowski noticed? Instead of plugging directly into the recorder, Reynolds jacked into his own amp and used the recorder’s microphone to pick him up. “Had I known, I would have sent better mics,” Sokolowski laughs. “You could hear where he clicked the pedal. I was sort of nonplussed. But I got past that and just let it wash over me.”
The happy accident limited Sokolowski’s ability to chop the recording up and make distinct songs, so he built a 27-minute title track around the heart of Reynolds’ guitar playing. The only thing he changed about the original recording was to break the jam into three parts to make it vinyl-ready.
Sokolowski used other pieces of Reynolds’ performance to produce five more tracks. For the album’s balance, he reversed the creative process, reacting in his studio to the guitar parts. On penultimate track “Homunculus,” for example, Sokolowski uses a portion of Reynolds’ playing as a rhythm loop and lets another guitar piece trot over it as lead. It’s the most obvious example on the record of sound collaging, which Sokolowski says he did less of than expected, due to Reynolds’ own process.
“At the beginning, I thought I would just put some cool sounds down and he would send back super-clean guitar tracks,” Sokolowski says. “I realized he had the right idea anyway. It has shape and form and flow and melody and all of that stuff. He was hearing form in all of my sounds that I maybe only heard intuitively. I was putting it down—not in a haphazard state—but not in the way it would end up.”
And how does Soul Pilgrimage end up? On the surface, it sounds more in line with an electronic record than a strings-and-keys duo—more Groove Armada than Bill Evans and Jim Hall. But at its base, it’s guitar and piano playing, something Sokolowski wanted to highlight by avoiding emulated sounds throughout.
For Reynolds, the results couldn’t be more different from the type of guitar he plays on a nightly basis with DMB. This time, he’s filling the space between, you might say.
“When I’m playing with Dave, there is a different sense of space because the music has a different purpose,” Reynolds says. “But I love it. I’m a fan of ambient music. It has a lot of surprises, and it’s all wonderful.”
The folks behind the art installation known as the Truth Farm want everyone to know the truth about immigration.
But what is the truth? And could there be more than one?
Unveiled on Refugee Investment Network founder and managing director John Kluge’s family property within the Trump Winery, the Truth Farm installation first centered around a 120-foot sign spelling out “TRUTH” in mylar. Aid workers often give mylar blankets to refugees seeking asylum, and artist Ana Teresa Fernandez used the material to draw attention to wider immigration issues—namely, that worldwide systemic problems beyond people’s control drive them to flee their countries for safety.
The artist’s Truth Table is surrounded by chairs, places where those with different opinions might come to sit, literally break bread, engage, and talk through complex immigration issues.
“When people become entrenched in their ideas, they pull a sound bite or barrage of sound bites that they have been spoonfed, and that becomes their understanding of an issue,” Kluge says. “When people harden their views, they lose their curiosity. You have to be curious to understand issues. Truth requires some inquiry and listening to others.”
Kluge is not an artist, he says, or even a professional curator. But he thought art might kindle at least some people’s curiosity. A U.S.-Mexico Foundation board member, Kluge conceived the Truth Farm project along with the group’s deputy director, Enrique Perret, and Fernandez. Fernandez had previously worked with mylar and thought it fit the Farm perfectly.
The installation grew from there. In addition to the Truth Table, the Truth Farm artwork includes a working adobe oven built by artist Ron Rael and portraits by undocumented dreamer Arleene Correa Valencia. Valencia’s pieces depict migrant parents and their children against black backgrounds. A friend of Fernandez’s and a professional artist herself, Valencia composes the parents using reflective material and fabric repurposed from her own family’s clothing. She etches the children in glow-in-the-dark thread, implying them only by an empty background.
“When you mix the two, you are seeing a full, embodied parent holding the idea of a child,” Valencia says. “The portraits start to create a conversation about separation and the layers that occur through immigration.”
The Truth Farm artwork itself has had a migration. Valencia’s work has been featured at the Instituto Cultural de México in Miami. Federico Cuatlacuatl’s Truth Farm contribution, sculptures in the shape of traditional Mexican kites, departed to a museum in Toledo, and the Truth Table itself traveled to Champion Brewing Company and the IX Art Park.
Kluge, Valencia, and Fernandez hope the art’s impact extends even further. They are planning another physical installation in Napa Valley, California. While they positioned the first piece next to a Trump property to draw the former president’s attention, the work of pushing folks to talk through immigration issues continues, even as a new commander-in-chief has taken office.
“I think that one of the really interesting things that has been occurring is the shift in all the information coming out after what happened on January 6 at the Capitol,” Fernandez says, referring to this year’s armed insurrection at the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C. “There has been a lot of reconciliation with the facts, but all of this rhetoric is still permeating. It is still a tug of war with this word [truth], and with John being Trump’s neighbor, we enacted everything we want to see good neighbors doing—cooking together and bringing people to the table, being inclusive not exclusive.”
Keswick’s three-year renovation finally comes to a close, with an infinity pool and overhauled design. Supplied photo.
Keswick Hall is no stranger to accolades—the luxury hotel and golf course has received the Forbes’ Five-Star Award, Golf Digest Editors’ Choice Award for Best Golf Resorts in the Americas, and the AAA Four Diamond Rating for its Fossett’s restaurant. But three years ago, the property’s ownership group set out to take it to the next level with a soup-to-nuts renovation. And General Manager John Trevenen says when the public sees the fruits of their reno, everyone will know why the painstaking process took so long.
“It is arguably one of the nicest resorts on the eastern coast of the United States,” Trevenen says. “We see ourselves positioned as one of that extremely small group of fine resort hotel experiences. We have put together a very beautiful product.”
Already a beautiful product, the new Keswick boasts an expanded guest wing (bringing the property to 80 total rooms), an infinity pool and cabanas, red clay tennis courts, and fully reimagined resort grounds. Fossett’s is replaced by Marigold, a fine-dining restaurant led by culinary icon Jean-Georges Vongerichten. The entire guest space has been redesigned from the studs, according to Trevenen, as the project was “an undertaking that no one could have imagined.” That means everything—plumbing, electrical, every non-structural item—was stripped from the facility and recreated from scratch.
The hotel now offers four signature suites, including the two-bedroom Hardie Suite. The guest rooms are decorated subtly, featuring white, blue, and cream shades, as well as light wood, elegant furniture, beds with Duxiana mattresses, and Frette sheets and bath linens. Each guest room includes a smart television and Lutron lighting, and local photographs decorate the walls. The Hardie Suite is fitted with a kitchenette built around Viking appliances and a wet bar.
The general design style, according to Trevenen, is to ensure form follows function. Because Keswick intends to be among the best hotels in the world, its service must be at the highest level. Personnel must predict guests’ needs and meet them before they know they have them themselves.
“We have a tagline of ‘redefining the art of American hospitality,’” he says. “We are reestablishing a style of hospitality that we think is a little different from what is on offer in other properties. We are trying to do it in a more gentle and relaxed manner.”
Trevenen offers Marigold as an example. All resort meals, from breakfast, lunch, and dinner during the week to weekend brunches, are served in the restaurant, a departure from Keswick’s previous approach where different meal seatings were at multiple restaurants. According to Trevenen, the change means the restaurant’s servers will quickly become experts at doing a simple set of activities to the absolute best of their abilities.
According to Trevenen, Keswick owners Robert and Molly Hardie have always treated the century-old resort property as a passion project. “Molly and Robert have had a love of Keswick since Robert was studying at the university. I think it’s just a special place to them,” he says. “They have been terribly good about maintaining the building, the culture, and the DNA within a new structure. It was a labor of love. It might have been easier to start again, but they really wanted to make sure it was given back to the community better than it was before.”
Gwenael Berthy opened Melody Supreme more than a decade ago, with a simple goal to sell records he loved. Photo: Tristan Williams
If you know exactly what you want and plan to ask for it by name, don’t go to Melody Supreme. You can’t walk into the small shop on Fourth Street and find whatever you’d like on the shelves. It’s not Amazon.
So what is it? Melody Supreme is the passion project of a man who’s been trying to spread his sonic enthusiasm for more than a decade.
“I am selling records because I love it,” owner Gwenael Berthy says. “I don’t think I could sell socks or shoes. I am going to carry the stuff I like and the used stuff I have found—the random stuff.”
Berthy opened Melody Supreme in 2010. At the time, lots of folks still collected records the old-fashioned way, he says. They’d come in with no set goal in mind, content to browse the collection, hoping to discover something new and interesting.
Times have changed, and records are everywhere—even Target, Berthy laments. But Melody Supreme hasn’t changed.
“It is a question of generation. I am not sure the young generation has the same feeling about records,” Berthy says. “The Apple or iPhone generation, they are not patient. They want everything right now. So, some people enjoy it, some people don’t get it at all.”
The members of the Prolyfyck Run Crew want to model an active lifestyle, so they practice what they preach three mornings a week starting at 6am. Photo: Derrick J. Waller
The Prolyfyck Run Crew is fluid. It was once known as Run These Streets. Members come and go. Leaders pass the baton. William Jones III started the crew. Wes Bellamy helped push it to wider audiences. James Dowell Jr. now organizes the crew’s three weekly morning meet-ups.
The thing that never changes is the Prolyfyck mission: Inspire Black and brown people who might not otherwise be exposed to running as exercise to pound the pavement. How? Run up and down the hills through Charlottesville’s public housing projects and historically Black neighborhoods, modeling an active lifestyle.
“It was started so our people could see us running through our community,” says Dowell, who’s been helping organize the runs since 2019.
A small group of Black men launched Prolyfyck. Then a few Black women joined. Then white folks, other ethnicities. Today, as many as 100 people might run with the crew any given morning.
What does it take to be a part of the movement? Be at the Jefferson School City Center at 6am on a Monday, Wednesday, or Friday, ready to travel four to five miles on foot. Then join one of three groups: walkers, cruisers, or runners. According to Dowell, the cruisers run nine- to 10-minute miles, while the runners can go as low as six to seven minutes per.
“We encourage each other up every hill—we don’t leave anybody behind,” Dowell says. “A lot of the community members come out and cheer. They might be headed to work or putting their kids on the bus.”
Dowell says he believes Prolyfyck has already made an impact, but there is more to be done—and more to come from the group. “It’s bigger than running,” he says.
The city’s skate park, which opened in 2019, has begun to attract skaters from up and down the East Coast. Photo: Tristan Williams
How well does the Charlottesville Skate Park rate nationally? It’s not huge in raw size, so it doesn’t make a splash on the major top-10 lists. But the city was able to attract high-level talent to manage the place—pro skater Matt Moffett, who’s supervised parks all over the country—and the park has begun to bring in riders from up and down the East Coast, attracting action sports enthusiasts to its combination of obstacles, features, and aesthetics.
“It’s been very much a success, and we have people come here regularly from all over,” Moffett says. “I’m in contact with the Tony Hawk Foundation, and they drool over this skate park.”
Aesthetically, the draws are the park’s intermittent maple trees and open spaces, not to mention the lack of a surrounding metal fence that so many parks feature.
But what of the main event, those obstacles and features? The upper portion of the Charlottesville Skate Park boasts an 18,000-square-foot street plaza with banks, ledges, rails, ramps, and funboxes (among other extreme sports lingo most folks will have to look up to understand). The lower portion offers another 15,000 square feet, devoted to a series of three bowls and pools. The park also has a flat asphalt multi-use area.
The street plaza is further divided into two tiers, one geared toward beginners, the other an Olympic-size course. Moffett says he hopes the different areas make the park accessible to a range of skating abilities, and attracting newbies seems to be one of the skate park’s best tricks. According to avid street skater and Cinema Skateshop owner Louis Handler, the facility’s visibility from the road is clutch.
“People love it, and the level of skateboarding in Charlottesville is going to shoot through the roof because of the park,” says Handler, who skates there several times per week. “Without a place like that, it is a lot more effort to get better.”
Handler says folks will have to overcome their fears; street obstacles and bowls can be scary for beginners. And they’re always going to come across intimidating skate park experts who’ve been doing it longer than they have.
But that’s something Moffett and Charlottesville Parks & Recreation know well and are doing their best to curb. The park helps organize lessons and camps to keep people skating. And in practice, Moffett says skaters fall into traffic patterns like those on a freeway and are respectful of others and their space.
“You don’t throw yourself in front of a moving bus, and this is similar,” Moffett says. “This is one of the unique places you will see tattooed men getting along and coexisting with little girls with unicorns on their helmets.”
The Charlottesville Skate Park was conceived as far back as 2012 but only officially opened in March 2019. And it’s still a work in progress. The lights that designers hoped to install before launch fell victim to a budget overrun, so the park is currently raising funds to equip for night riding.
“With the lights, in summertime you can skate another four or five hours,” Handler says. “Then you would really be getting a lot of bang for the buck. I only want to see it get better.”
Keswick Hall’s list of acclamations is long and distinguished—Forbes’s Five-Star Award, Golf Digest Editors’ Choice Award for Best Golf Resorts in the Americas, the AAA Four Diamond Rating for Fossett’s restaurant.
But when owners Robert and Molly Hardie decided to renovate the century-old property three years ago, the project quickly escalated. Despite all its acclaim and history, the hotel and restaurant are reopening later this year in a completely reimagined fashion.
“Molly and Robert have had a love of Keswick since Robert was studying at the university,” General Manager John Trevenen says. “I think it’s just a special place to them.”
Keswick will unveil its updated chic late this summer, with a new guest wing—bringing the property to 80 total rooms—an infinity pool and cabanas, red clay tennis courts, and fully reimagined resort grounds. Fossett’s gives way to Marigold, a fine-dining restaurant led by culinary icon Jean-Georges Vongerichten.
The entire guest space has been redesigned from the studs, according to Trevenen—the project was “an undertaking that no one could have imagined,” he says. That means everything—plumbing, electrical, every non-structural item—was stripped from the facility.
The hotel will now offer four signature suites, including the two-bedroom Hardie Suite. The guest rooms are decorated subtly, featuring white, blue, and cream shades, as well as light wood, elegant furniture, beds with Duxiana mattresses, and Frette sheets and bath linens. Each guest room will include a smart television and Lutron lighting, and local photographs will decorate the walls. The Hardie Suite is fitted with a kitchenette built around Viking appliances and a wet bar.
The general design style, according to Trevenen, is to ensure form follows function. Keswick intends to be among the best hotels in the world, he says, and that means service must be at the highest level. Personnel should predict guests’ needs and meet them before they know they have them themselves.
“We have a tagline of redefining the art of American hospitality,” he says. “We are reestablishing a style of hospitality that we think is a little different from what is on offer in other properties. We are trying to do it in a more gentle and relaxed manner.”
Take Marigold, Trevenen suggests. All resort meals, from breakfast, lunch, and dinner during the week to weekend brunches, will be served in the restaurant, a departure from Keswick’s previous approach, which was offering different meal seatings at multiple restaurants. According to Trevenen, the change means the restaurant’s servers will quickly become experts at doing a simple set of activities at the absolute best of their abilities.
“[Molly and Robert] have been terribly good about maintaining the building, the culture, and the DNA within a new structure,” Trevenen says. “It was a labor of love. It might have been easier to start again, but they really wanted to make sure it was given back to the community better than it was before.”
The COVID-19 pandemic forced so many to change their worklife. For some, it was working from home and Zoom meetings. For others, it was losing a beloved job and seeking employment elsewhere, or even in a new field altogether.
Then there are those among us who have taken on daring career pivots willingly. Those who have thrown caution to the workforce wind and charted a new course in life.
The following is a look at five folks who’ve forsaken longtime careers for new professional paths. Whether motivated by industry pressures, new perspectives, or milestone events, the pivoters all made opportunity out of change.
“The biggest thing I would say is people shouldn’t be afraid to pivot, especially this day and age,” says Justin Ide, who jumped helmet-long into firefighting five years ago after more than two decades working as a full-time photographer. “If you’re unhappy, just do it.”
Photo: Amy Nicole Photography
Sing it on
Lora Kelley now knows what she wants. During the 18 years she spent working as a full-time hair and makeup artist, it was in the back of her mind. And when she and her husband, local photographer Eric Kelley, founded Grit Coffee (formerly Para Coffee) in 2008, it was in the back of her mind then, too.
“I want to write songs for other people and with other people that tell a truer story,” Kelley says.
In 2017, Kelley took a sabbatical from hair and makeup—doing other people’s, that is. Along with focusing on her music career, she needed a source of income to keep her on key. Enter trauma-informed story coaching. According to Kelley, the process involves understanding what your story is and working to become the person you want to be. To write herself into story life coaching, Kelley earned certification from The Allender Center at the Seattle School of Psychology and Theology.
Music, however, remained her passion. In 2015, Kelley released her first EP (a record including more than a single but less than a full album), titled Dusty Wheels, and a second self-titled EP in 2018. Now, she’s eyeing June 10 to release her first full-length record, a pop-county and Americana hybrid titled Domystique.
Kelley, who has three kids, cites Patty Griffin, Lori McKenna, Natalie Merchant, Joni Mitchell, John Prine, and Brandi Carlile as influences. Her style sometimes calls to mind Taylor Swift’s country catalog, but Kelley hopes her songs provide a perspective popular music often misses.
“I am not falling in love and breaking up, and I’m not going out drinking on the weekends—there’s not a lot of heartbreak,” she says. “When I’m cooking food for my kids in the kitchen, I want a song that makes me feel really good about the present moment I am living in instead of pining for something else.”
So, how does one become a sought-after songwriter working for and alongside the best in Nashville? Kelley knows she has dues to pay. She figures she’ll have to keep writing songs—many of them bound to be not-so-great—and getting better.
“I’m still learning how to write them. I think my best songs are still to come,” she says.
Photo: John Robinson
In the Navy no more
Sherrod Fisher saw a lot as a 21-year Navyman. He did six deployments, three in the West Pacific and three in the Mediterranean. He was in the Middle East when Saddam Hussein was deposed as Iraqi dictator in 2003. He sailed the Suez Canal. He supplied munitions for the United States’ “shock and awe” campaign during the Gulf War. He met Tom Cruise.
“I was an armament guy, aircraft armament, F-14s,” Fisher says, referencing the fighter jet featured in Cruise’s 1986 film Top Gun. “They were in [Naval Air Station] Miramar. It was something interesting.”
Fisher had seen enough after he’d served his time, though, and in 2010 he retired from the Navy. While simultaneously going through a tough divorce, he decided to go to college on the advice of a former lieutenant. He enrolled at South University in Richmond and took a few psychology classes. It might be a calling, he thought. In the Navy, he’d always been the guy people came to to talk about stuff, and he was a good listener.
Fisher completed his bachelor’s degree in 2013, about the same time his oldest daughter graduated from the University of Virginia. He visited her in Charlottesville at the end of the semester and sat in on a psych class. It further inspired him, and he decided to pursue a master’s in mental health psychology, also at South University. He completed the degree in 2016. “Those were grueling years,” Fisher says.
He landed an internship in Richmond when he graduated, but found himself jobless for several months in 2018. “I am a praying man, and that was my time to get prepared for the next step,” Fisher says. “I stepped out on faith and said, ‘Lord, if this is where you want me to go, I’ll go.’”
Fisher put in an application with the Region Ten Community Services Board and has been an outpatient clinician working with children and families ever since.
Along his journey from longtime soldier to civilian, Fisher remarried his wife in 2014. It was another significant pivot for a man accustomed to taking them on.
“When I retired and divorced in the same year, that was pretty traumatic,” Fisher says. “But there was a silver lining to all of that. It was like the beginning.”
Photo: Eze Amos
Out of the vault
Crystal Napier had enjoyed a steady, nearly 10-year career in banking when she started work on her master’s in business administration. She completed the degree in 2013 and continued on in her career. The MBA could only improve her prospects as she climbed the banking ladder, and her future was bright.
But in 2014, she lost her steady job, and went straight to work trying to find a new banking gig. A grad school project had stuck with her: While working toward her MBA, she’d created a business plan for a fashion boutique and personal styling agency. Her husband suggested she stop the job search and pursue her passion.
“I just didn’t realize it was a sign for me to start,” Napier says. “Once I did, I just got out there.”
Napier leveraged a severance package from her previous job, personal funds, revenue from a rental property, her husband’s income, and belt-tightening to make ends meet while she struck out on her own way. Her goal? Help women—regardless of body type—dress themselves professionally and confidently without spending a fortune.
Napier launched Renee’s Boutique with a Facebook page in 2014 and a website in 2015. She traveled around Charlottesville and eventually up and down the East Coast, working directly with clients and hosting pop-up retail events. By mid-2015, she had enjoyed enough success to open a brick-and-mortar location on Water Street. The storefront stood for more than a year, but Napier pivoted again in late 2016, going back on the road for pop-ups and traveling sales and consultation.
In 2018, while six-weeks pregnant, Napier and her husband were involved in a bad car accident. “I was not able to do pop-up shops at all in 2018,” Napier says. “That was a tough year.”
She got back on her feet in 2019, and changed her business model again to focus on online sales and fashion consultations out of her home. She launched virtual styling sessions. The business model, along with several successful grant and loan applications, turned out to be one that would help her fight through the economic hardships brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic.
“It was very tight for our last year, and it’s been a lot of sacrifice,” Napier says. “It’s been a learning curve, but when you are an entrepreneur, there’s always going to be something.”
Photo: Tristan Williams
Flexibility is key
Allie Redshaw didn’t wait long to get back in the kitchen after a workplace accident took her hand in March 2017. But things weren’t the same. After an accomplished career as a chef, she was frustrated by not being able to take 100 percent ownership of her plates from start to finish.
Then, a culinary schoolmate and friend nudged Redshaw into what would become her new career. She gifted Redshaw a year of classes at Hot Yoga Charlottesville, where Redshaw says she was welcomed completely.
“I was in a fragile place,” Redshaw says. “But even if I wasn’t in a class, I loved being in the community and with the people. Everyone knew what my arm looked like, and I didn’t have to hide it. That led to learning cool ways my body could adapt.”
Redshaw was pregnant at the time of her accident but leaned hard into her yoga practice after the birth of her second child in 2017. She listened to her body and learned adaptations, she dove into the spiritual side of yoga, and she embarked on yoga instructor training. Redshaw reached out to other amputee instructors and attended a yoga retreat exclusively for amputees. She eventually discovered the limitations her right arm brought could actually be a blessing in a sport that focuses on inclusion and mindfulness.
“I liked that I could be a representation of difference,” Redshaw says. “Mindful practices…aren’t just for able-bodied people or skinny people.”
Redshaw now leads several classes per week at Hot Yoga Charlottesville and expects to teach more as people return to their regular schedules post-pandemic. Still, she retains her passion for cooking. Soon after her accident, she earned a sommelier certification to bolster her hospitality resume on the wine side, and more recently, Redshaw and husband Ian, also a well-regarded local chef, launched a catering business, Sumac Supper Club.
Never one to sit still, Redshaw also works at yoga retailer Lululemon and is nearing certification as an Ayurveda health practitioner. Ayurveda, which originated in India hundreds of years ago, is a wellness therapy combining yoga practice with a mindful approach to what we put in our bodies.
“I am so grateful that two things that have always been loves and passions of mine—food and yoga, being present in our bodies—have met in the middle to create this perfect place for me,” Redshaw says. “I am grateful for my past and where it has gotten me.”
Photo: Eze Amos
Photos to fires
The Boston Herald had 37 staff photographers in 1999. That’s the year Justin Ide made the number 36 by leaving the coveted job.
“When I left, they all said, ‘What? Are you crazy?’” Ide remembers. “I wanted to do something else.”
The craziest thing? It was a minor career change in the scheme of things. After leaving the Herald, Ide took a job taking pictures for Harvard University. He worked at Harvard for 12 years before his wife’s career as a hospital administrator brought the couple to Charlottesville.
Ide wasn’t able to snap up a new staff photo gig in C’ville, so he did some freelance work and ended up hanging around the Crozet Volunteer Fire Department. He liked the vibe at the firehouse, but he was nearing 50 years of age, and firefighting is known as a young man’s game. Still, maybe Ide had stumbled on his new path.
“One day I was talking to a career guy—Crozet didn’t have any career guys in the fire department, but he was there for something,” Ide says. “And he said, ‘Hey, Virginia is a right to work state. If you get all the certifications, they can’t not hire you.’”
Ide earned his emergency medical technician certification and got a job with UVA’s Medic V rescue team. Then, it was on to firefighting training. Ide was 51 by the time he began; some of his fellow trainees were as young as 19. Still, he persisted. And he was eventually hired by the Waynesboro Fire Department.
“The biggest thing about it is not so much in the daily stuff. During a fire, all hell is breaking loose for the first five minutes, and then it’s fine,” Ide says. “But we would go to certain trainings and things, and the 19-year-olds could do physical exercises repeatedly without a pause in between. When you’re 50-something, you need that pause.”
With more than 20 years of professional photography under his firebelt, Ide still misses taking pictures for a living. But firefighting’s on-and-off work schedule gives him time to pursue his passion, and he’s brought some of his skills to the firehouse, as well. He’s only a few classes short of a master’s degree in public information and serves as an informal public information officer for the Waynesboro FD.
“I’ve created a good working relationship with the local media,” Ide says. “It’s been a great addition, bringing my previous job experience to the forefront in this job.”
The Truth Farm
installation, created to draw attention to immigration issues, was initially centered around a 120-foot sign made from mylar blankets, which are often given to refugees. Photo: Eze Amos
The folks behind the art installation known as the Truth Farm want everyone to know the truth about immigration.
But what is the truth? And could there be more than one?
Unveiled on Refugee Investment Network founder and managing director John Kluge’s family property within the Trump Winery, the Truth Farm installation first centered around a 120-foot sign spelling out “TRUTH” in mylar. Aid workers often give mylar blankets to refugees seeking asylum, and artist Ana Teresa Fernandez used the material to draw attention to wider immigration issues—namely, that worldwide systemic problems beyond people’s control drive them to flee their countries for safety.
The artist’s Truth Table is surrounded by chairs, places where those with different opinions might come to sit, literally break bread, engage, and talk through complex immigration issues.
“When people become entrenched in their ideas, they pull a sound bite or barrage of sound bites that they have been spoonfed, and that becomes their understanding of an issue,” Kluge says. “When people harden their views, they lose their curiosity. You have to be curious to understand issues. Truth requires some inquiry and listening to others.”
Kluge is not an artist, he says, or even a professional curator. But he thought art might kindle at least some people’s curiosity. A U.S.-Mexico Foundation board member, Kluge conceived the Truth Farm project along with the group’s deputy director, Enrique Perret, and Fernandez. Fernandez had previously worked with mylar and thought it fit the Farm perfectly.
The installation grew from there. In addition to the Truth Table, the Truth Farm artwork includes a working adobe oven built by artist Ron Rael and portraits by undocumented dreamer Arleene Correa Valencia. Valencia’s pieces depict migrant parents and their children against black backgrounds. A friend of Fernandez’s and a professional artist herself, Valencia composes the parents using reflective material and fabric repurposed from her own family’s clothing. She etches the children in glow-in-the-dark thread, implying them only by an empty background.
“When you mix the two, you are seeing a full, embodied parent holding the idea of a child,” Valencia says. “The portraits start to create a conversation about separation and the layers that occur through immigration.”
The Truth Farm artwork itself has now begun a migration. Some of Valencia’s work is currently featured at the Instituto Cultural de México in Miami and will next travel to Wisconsin. Federico Cuatlacuatl’s Truth Farm contribution, sculptures in the shape of traditional Mexican kites, has moved to a museum in Toledo. The Truth Farm organizers hope to take Rael’s ovens on the road to host dinners over the next several months, while the Truth Table itself has traveled to Champion Brewing Company and the IX Art Park.
Kluge, Valencia, and Fernandez hope the art’s impact extends even further. They are planning another physical installation in Napa Valley, California. While they positioned the first piece next to a Trump property to draw the former president’s attention, the work of pushing folks to talk through immigration issues continues, even as a new commander-in-chief has taken office.
“I think that one of the really interesting things that has been occurring is the shift in all the information coming out after what happened on January 6 at the Capitol,” Fernandez says, referring to this year’s armed insurrection at the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C. “There has been a lot of reconciliation with the facts, but all of this rhetoric is still permeating. It is still a tug of war with this word [truth], and with John being Trump’s neighbor, we enacted everything we want to see good neighbors doing—cooking together and bringing people to the table, being inclusive not exclusive.”
