Tag: Alan Goffinski

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Arts Culture

Rad space: The Bridge PAI finds new ways to connect by dreaming big

The Bridge has kept art opportunities flowing by sharing creative print content, including zines, pamphlets, stickers, and buttons in its Rad Press distribution boxes. Courtesy of the Bridge PAI

How does a community arts organization react to an ongoing pandemic that requires the restriction of in-person gatherings? It gets creative.

“We’re still dreaming big,” says Alan Goffinski, director of The Bridge Progressive Arts Initiative. “One thing that I think we’ve always prided ourselves on as an organization is our ability to shift gears, respond to the creative impulses of our community, and be that resource for artists and culture shapers to plug in and make something happen.”

Programming committee member Federico Cuatlacuatl says, “We’re in the time where community programs have to constantly reinvent ourselves and how we engage, which is challenging and overwhelming, but, at the same time, exciting because we get to pave that path. We get to throw out these ideas and exciting new possibilities.”

One of those exciting new possibilities is Rad Press, a collection of newsstands in front of the Bridge gallery space at 209 Monticello Rd., which offers a way to connect the community and elevates the voices of Charlottesville artists. They’re not traditional newspaper boxes in appearance or content. On the outside, they are vibrant works of art thanks to The Bridge PAI programming committee members Cuatlacuatl, Karina Monroy, and Daisa Granger Pascall, and Feminist Union of Charlottes- ville Creatives members Heather Owens and Miranda Elliott Rader. On the inside, they contain a variety of print content, including zines, pamphlets, stickers, and buttons, exploring themes of “revolution, resistance, decolonization, and witchcraft,” according to Cuatlacuatl.

This effort “was a direct response to the Black Lives Matter movement,” Cuatlacuatl says. “It was also a response to the tension our communities are feeling under a pandemic. It was at the same time a response to keep the Bridge going in terms of programming, being active, and responding in regard to all of these phenomena. We’re always keeping in mind, ‘how do we keep artists and communities engaged?’ It was a perfect way to keep everyone involved and tuned in.”

In this time of prolonged isolation, The Bridge PAI recognized the importance of tangible communication. “You’re literally holding the opinions, ideas, and values of your community in your hand,” says Goffinski. “Having that experience of engaging multiple senses in that process of intaking someone else’s ideas is a really valuable and beautiful thing.”

The Bridge PAI reached out to local artists already making print materials related to subjects like anti-racism and anti- fascism, and asked them to participate. Goffinski says the goal is to amplify those artists’ ideas, imagery, and literature.

Lydia Moyer, an artist and UVA associate professor, is a big believer in independent and artist publications, as well as DIY distribution, and says she contributed posters and prints to support and encourage radical thought in Charlottesville.

The Bridge PAI hopes to make Rad Press a permanent fixture. “Radical literature is timeless,” Goffinski says. “There are so many conversations that need to be had about so many things. Every week, something new is in the foreground…we want Rad Press to…be able to shift and morph to include new things as they pop up.”

While Rad Press keeps the conversation going outside, the Bridge’s gallery space has become active again through the STUDI0.00 initiative, which offers free, short-term studio use to artists displaced by the pandemic virus or reckoning with the pandemic of systemic racism, according to Goffinski.

“This is a very basic effort to say to our creative community that we exist for you,” he says. “In a town where space is increasingly more difficult to come by and more expensive, we just never lose sight of the fact that our space is a valuable resource and we don’t want it to sit dormant just because we can’t do what we normally do in it.”

Programming committee member Katie Schetlick says the benefits reach beyond the individual artists themselves. “That space has those huge windows, so it also provides the opportunity to be reminded that people are still making art, which is a hopeful visual.” The initiative has also uncovered new talent. “Some of the artists who have requested space, I’d never seen their work before,” says Schetlick. “It’s been nice to actually learn about these hidden gems that are right here in Charlottesville.”

Genevieve Story took advantage of the empty gallery, using it for leather pyrography, fulfilling orders and preparing offerings for the holiday season. Hoping to have a larger space of her own but unable to acquire it due to economic impacts of the coronavirus, Story had been doing work at her kitchen table. “The offer from the Bridge could not have come at a better time,” she says.   

The space continues to be available on a first come, first served basis, and Schetlick encourages others to make a request. “Don’t feel shy about it, even if you just want to go inside and wiggle around and make some funny noises,” she says. “The space is there.”

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Culture

Pizza my heart: Alan Goffinski sings his love of C’ville slices

Alan Goffinski’s Pizzas of Charlottesville album—12 lighthearted jingles for a dozen local pizza spots—comes out Friday, June 5. Photo by Eze Amos

At any given time, at least 20 percent of Alan Goffinski’s headspace is occupied by pizza.

“Pizza’s the best,” he says. It’s his favorite food, and he has no qualms about admitting it: “If anyone tells you [their favorite food is] anything else, they’re lying.”

“Pizza’s there for the best times,” Goffinski continues sincerely, not an ounce of cheese in his voice. “That’s what makes it so important. It’s the meal you eat with your buds. It’s a celebration meal.”

His reverence and enthusiasm for the pie inspired Pizzas of Charlottesville, an album of 12 jingles for local pizza places out this Friday on Bandcamp.com.

Goffinski is perhaps best known as the director of The Bridge Progressive Arts Initiative, but he’s a musician, too. In the early 2000s, he toured and made a couple records with indie rock band The 1997, and this past December, in collaboration with a few other local musicians, released Smells Like Music, an album of 20 goofy-sweet children’s songs under the moniker Little Skunks.   

So Goffinski’s been in “a playful songwriting headspace,” and with local pies of all kinds always on his mind, he says the jingles “developed organically.”

“The idea was that this would be my love letter to pizza, and to local business,” says Goffinski, who chose to focus the ditties on area spots (i.e., non-national chains) that serve primarily pizza and that might knead a little boost right now: Vita Nova, Lampo, Christian’s, Belmont Pizza, and the like.

Each jingle reflects a restaurant’s individual style, says Goffinski, and none “could easily be swapped out for the others without some rearranging. If your pizza restaurant has a brick oven pizza, I’m mentioning the brick oven. Or if you make a particularly large pizza, I’m going to maybe mention that.” (He definitely mentions that.)

Goffinski will donate Pizzas of Charlottesville proceeds to the Charlottesville Restaurant Community Fund, and he’s working with local artist and Burnley-Moran Elementary art teacher Ryan Trott on some merch, too, just in case the jingles catch on with fellow pizza-lovin’ locals.

That’s the purpose of a good jingle, he says: they’re short, simple, slightly repetitive. “They’re all deliberately a little obnoxiously catchy, the kind of thing that maybe you wish wasn’t stuck in your head, but because it is, you embrace it, smile, and curse my name when you’re falling asleep at night.”

Goffinski emphasizes that none of these jingles have been officially sanctioned by the restaurants they celebrate, but some seem to be on board with the idea. “I have no expectation that any of these pizza places are going to use these jingles in any way, shape, or form…especially if they’re trying to maintain any sort of air of professionalism,” he says with a half-self-conscious laugh. “But I would invite them to!”

Goffinski might eat some of these pies more than others, but each has its merits, he says, and he loves them all. “There’s no such thing as bad pizza. Even bad pizza is good pizza.”

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Culture

In sharp relief: Supporting artists through COVID-19

Rapper LaQuinn is one of the local artists who has received aid from the Charlottesville Emergency Relief Fund for Artists, set up to help artists who have lost gigs, gallery shows, and more due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Photo by Amy and Jackson Smith

In an effort to help artists facing financial hardship because of venue closures and event cancellations due to COVID-19, The Bridge PAI and New City Arts Initiative launched the Charlottesville Emergency Relief Fund for Artists on March 20. Artists can apply to receive up to $300; all they need to show is “proof of practice,” says Bridge Director Alan Goffinski. “Proof of a canceled gig, book tour, art show, etc.,” he adds. “The quality of the work will not be judged. We just need to see proof that artists are artists.”

Andrew Stronge requested funds to recoup a fraction of the contract work he lost due to the cancellation of various regional comic-cons. A graphic designer and screen printer who creates posters, shirts, hats, and more, he relies on those events for a significant chunk of his income. He used his relief fund allocation to buy groceries for himself and his wife, who is pregnant with their first child.

Rapper LaQuinn Gilmore (you’ve seen his posters) will use his allotment to stay afloat, even if it’s for a short time—his live gigs were canceled and in-studio recording sessions are not social-distancing friendly, so he can’t record new stuff to sell. And his restaurant job’s gone to boot. Even before the pandemic, he says he was struggling to find affordable housing for himself and his daughter.  

As of March 25, 61 artists had applied for $15,700 in funding, says New City Arts Executive Director Maureen Brondyke. The initial $10,000 raised has already been dispersed, and they hope donations will continue to come in to cover new requests.

“Many of these artists carefully plan from month to month, juggling [multiple] jobs on top of their creative practice in order to pay the bills,” says Brondyke about the need for immediate help. “We’re all acutely aware right now of how difficult it is to not connect with others in person, and artists are often the ones either on stage or behind the scenes creating these opportunities—at performances, at markets or fairs, in restaurants, at school, in galleries and theaters—work that often goes undervalued until it’s gone.”

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Culture

State of the art: How COVID-19 is affecting Charlottesville’s arts community

Devon Sproule is one of the Front Porch music teachers offering online lessons for her students. It’s helped her maintain some sense of routine and personal connection in this very uncertain, socially distant time, and she hopes it’s doing this same for her students. Photo by Paul Curreri

 

As we adjust to life amid the COVID-19 pandemic, we’ll likely turn to the arts—a favorite poem, a beloved album, a treasured painting—over and over in search of comfort and relief. Art, in all its forms, is a vital part not just of our personal lives but of our community. Social distancing measures and the resulting venue closures have turned the local creative world upside down, both for individual artists and the organizations that support them. Here’s what some of those folks are saying about the state of the arts in Charlottesville, and what might come next.

St. Patrick’s Day was supposed to be Matthew O’Donnell’s busiest day of the entire year. A multi-instrumentalist who specializes in Irish music, he was booked for 15 hours of serenading audiences, from senior center residents to late-night beer-swigging revelers.

But this year, his St. Paddy’s calendar was wide open. As the COVID-19 pandemic spreads throughout the United States, Virginia governor Ralph Northam has banned all nonessential gatherings of more than 10 people. In response, local venues that support the arts—concert halls, theaters, galleries, bookshops, libraries, restaurant-bars, you name it—have shuttered their doors for an undetermined amount of time.

This leaves O’Donnell and many other artists in Charlottesville without physical places to share their work—not just for art’s sake, but for a living. It’s also worth noting that many local artists participate in the service industry and gig economy—they tend bar, wait tables, work retail, drive ride-shares, and more. And most of those jobs are gone, or paused until, well, who knows when.

O’Donnell makes his entire living from performances, and he looks forward to the month of March—in large part because of St. Patrick’s Day—when he can bring in twice what he makes in an average  month, to make up for the lean ones (namely January and February).

“I began to get concerned in late February,” as the senior communities closed their doors to visitors, says O’Donnell, and that concern grew as gigs canceled one by one during the first couple weeks of March. “I thought the worst-case scenario would be that everything would shut down, but I honestly didn’t think the worst-case scenario would come.”

Matthew O’Donnell, who has seen his gig calendar wiped clean by the threat of COVID-19, hosted a concert via Facebook Live on March 18. “It went astoundingly well,” he says. “A boatload of people tuned in, [made] lots of requests. People sent videos of them and their families dancing to the music. It was really beautiful.” Photo by Katie McCartney

At first, “it was a professional worry of realizing that all of my business is gone,” says O’Donnell, who hopes he can make some money by playing donation-based virtual concerts. But the worry, the sadness, has turned personal: “These people are my friends,” he says of his audiences, particularly those folks at the senior centers. When he sings with them, he says he “feels something profound. And [now] I can’t go see my friends. I do want to be looking forward to the next thing…but all I know is that the next thing I do is going to be very different from what I’ve been doing.”

Graphic novelist Laura Lee Gulledge knows that, too. “I’m friends with change and constant reinvention,” she says.  As a full-time artist Gulledge relies not just on book sales and illustration commissions but art teaching residencies. She says she often feels like she’ll “get by on the skin of my teeth, but [I] make it work.” Artists are always having to come up with new business models, she says. “It’s implode or evolve.”

Her new book, The Dark Matter of Mona Starr, is scheduled to be released on April 7, and she planned to launch it at last week’s Virginia Festival of the Book. But the festival was canceled due to the threat of COVID-19, as was the rest of her North American book tour.

In a way, the book is more relevant than Gulledge could have predicted, or ever wanted to imagine. The protagonist, Mona, is a sensitive and creative teen learning to live with anxiety and depression. In the back of the book, Gulledge includes a guide for creating a self-care plan for particularly dark and stressful times, and she shares her own.

“It’s like my masterpiece,” she says of The Dark Matter of Mona Starr. “I was finally mentally prepared to own it and step into it, and start conversations about mental health and not feel like a fraud.”

Rather than consider the whole thing a wash, Gulledge will do a virtual book tour via Facebook Live, where she’ll be talking about topics such as drawing through depression and cultivating healthy artistic practices.

The Front Porch roots music school is also pivoting to an online lessons model, to keep instructors paid and to keep students in practice. Songwriter Devon Sproule (who had to cancel her upcoming U.K. tour) usually teaches somewhere around 80 students a week between group classes and private lessons, and, so far, a handful of them have made the leap to live virtual lessons. Keeping the routine and personal connection of a lesson could be particularly important right now, says Sproule. She had to teach one young pupil how to tune a ukulele, a task Sproule had taken on in their in-person lessons. “I had no idea this kid could tune their own ukulele, and I don’t think they did either,” says Sproule. “I think it was empowering.”

The Charlottesville Players Guild, the city’s only black theater troupe, has postponed its run of August Wilson’s Radio Golf, originally scheduled to premiere at the Jefferson School African American Heritage Center April 16. The paid cast and crew were in the middle of rehearsals, and while they hope to be able to open the show on April 30, things are still very uncertain, says CPG artistic director Leslie Scott-Jones. “When you hear medical professionals say this might go through July or longer, it’s like, ‘What’ll we do?’”

Leslie Scott-Jones, a singer and theater artist who relies on performance for all of her income, is one of many Charlottesville artists left wondering what’s next, as venues have closed due to the threat of COVID-19. Publicity photo

The JSAAHC has also had to cancel two benefit concerts for Eko Ise, a music conservatory program for local black children, that the center hoped to launch later this year. Now, they’ll be months behind in that fundraising effort, says Scott-Jones.

The Bridge Progressive Arts Initiative, which provides not only a physical gallery space for visual and performance art, but funding for public art and after-school programs, has canceled all in-person events (though it is finding creative ways for people to participate from a distance, such as its virtual Quarantine Haiku video series). The Bridge has also postponed its annual Revel fundraiser, originally scheduled for May 2. Revel brings in between 20 and 30 percent of the organization’s operating budget for the year, says director Alan Goffinski,

Gulledge makes an excellent case for continued support of the arts as we face uncertainty: “This is the sort of moment where people will look to the creative thinkers to generate hope, and to generate positivity and be beacons of light in this moment of darkness. This is part of our purpose.”

The Bridge Progressive Arts Initiative and New City Arts announced Friday, March 20, that it has established the Charlottesville Emergency Relief Fund for Artists. We will have more information on that soon.

The Front Porch and WTJU 91.1 FM are also teaming up to broadcast live concerts Friday and Wednesday evenings. Follow us at @cville_culture on Twitter for regular updates about virtual arts events that will take place over the coming weeks.

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Arts

Strange lot: The Bridge fills with curiosities in new exhibition

Throughout October, the “Gallery of Curiosities” at The Bridge Progressive Arts Initiative is the setting for a variety of events, such as experimental music performances, a horror film screening, a Halloween party, trick or treating, and more. Photo by Martyn Kyle

On a sultry First Fridays evening in early October, The Bridge Progressive Arts Initiative gallery glows gold beneath the dark, overcast sky. People flock to the warmly lit building to see the “Gallery of Curiosities.” Outside, near the door, there’s a small table draped with a white cloth and adorned with candles, where Leslie M. Scott-Jones (a C-VILLE contributor) reads tarot cards for those who opt to sit across from her.

Inside the gallery, Elyse Smith spins fur from a visitor’s beloved pet into yarn, and all around her, floor to ceiling and wall to wall, hang hundreds, perhaps even thousands, of curiosities, oddities, and objects, each item begging more questions than it answers.

In a thick frame sprouting from the wall, the chalky, fragile white skeleton of a two-headed snake. On a table, an apocalyptic diorama; on another table, a pinhole camera. Sprouting from the floor, a mermaid tail. Stored in a cabinet are slender, corked glass vials of animal whiskers and porcupine quills. Human teeth. A loved one’s ashes.

There are planters made from grinning baby doll heads with all manner of cacti, succulents, and leafy greenery poking out the top. One wall holds nine lidded glass jars, each containing a red tomato in a different state of moldy, liquefying decay. Immediately above it are nine more jars containing chocolate Hostess cupcakes, each alarmingly well preserved.

Inspired by the cabinets of curiosities and wunderkammers of Renaissance and Baroque Europe, as well as contemporary museums like the Museum of Psychphonics in Indianapolis and the Museum of Jurassic Technology in Los Angeles, the “Gallery of Curiosities” is at The Bridge through the end of the month.

The show seeks to elicit a number of reactions from visitors, says Alan Goffinski, director of The Bridge. What is all this stuff? Where did this come from? Is it really from Charlottesville? Who are the people who collect these things?

“Curiosity is this force within us, this natural thing that we’re born with, that we take on as children, that points us toward the unknown and pulls us into a head space of authentic opportunity for learning and growth,” says Goffinski, and this exhibition is a place to exercise, or perhaps rediscover, that force.

The Bridge put out a call for submissions on its website, via email, social media accounts, and even Craigslist, urging folks to submit things they might have on display in their living rooms, attics, and cellars. More than 50 people from the Charlottesville area contributed items, ranging from Fraternal Order of Police memorabilia to Richard Nixon swag.

Tobiah Mundt contributed felted fantastical creations that she describes as a “sculptural representation of the creatures [found] in the place between asleep and awake.”

Hattie Eshleman’s pinkish-reddish-brownish bodily organ brooches, shiny and moist- looking, are a rumination on the inside turned out. “I would love for the viewer to imagine if they had extra organs other than the heart, liver, lungs, etc.,” says Eshleman. “What might those be? Fear? Intuition? An organ that stores forgotten memories?”

Visitors can test their telepathic connection with another person using the same experiment that Upton Sinclair (author of Mental Radio, a book on telepathy) and his second wife, Mary Craig Sinclair, used. Renee Reighart set up the experiment on a table with side-by-side stations, complete with instructions and suggestions for how to clear one’s mind and prepare to send or receive an image to the person on the other side of the divider. It’s “freaky” when it works, she says, but even when it doesn’t, it’s about the wondrous discovery of potential synchronicity and connection with another person.

In the gallery bathroom, there’s the Actuator, researched and developed by artist and musician Will Mullany, who describes his creation as a “proto-conscious mechanical being that guests are invited to interact with.” Mullany displays his research as well, hoping visitors will “set aside their base human inclination to filter their perceptions through logic and reason and accept the ultimate divine logic of the Actuator into their hearts.” And since it’s tucked away in the bathroom, he says, “it offers a sort of serenity and seclusion for these private revelations.”

In most cases, “you won’t be able to tell…what’s tongue-in-cheek and how much of it is fiction, or how much the truth dabbles in fiction along the way,” says Goffinski. For instance, did Ian Coyle’s belly button really produce that much lint—on display in an 8-inch by 10-inch oval frame—in two months’ time?

Coyle says yes; “even in a year’s long creative block, my tummy kept producing works of art.” But still, questions remain.

At its core, the “Gallery of Curiosities” is “an exhibit for Charlottesville, for the quirkiness that exists in our community,” says Goffinski. The show’s power lies in those who’ve curated it, he says, and it affords us a look into the character—both hidden and otherwise—of our friends and neighbors.

“It’s so damn interesting to learn about people in a show-and-tell sort of way,” says Goffinski.

Check out The Bridge’s calendar for a full listing of Halloween-y events related to the “Gallery of Curiosities” exhibit.