Locally produced zine Mala Leche offers a forum for underrepresented voices. “Saint Lucy Eyes” by Sam Gray accompanies a handwritten explainer of Lucia of Syracuse’s persecution.
Photo courtesy of the artist
On the cover of Mala Leche’s inaugural issue, the name of the zine is tiny, hardly visible. The focus is much more on the “bad milk” itself—a cut-out image of a baby bottle, emblazoned with a black skull and crossbones and resting in an equally inky puddle.
It’s an eye-catching design, one intended to draw passersby to its distribution boxes at the Bridge Progressive Arts Initiative. But the cover is just the start, as anyone who picks up a copy will discover upon reading the letter from the editors, Sri Kodakalla and Ramona Martinez, Mala Leche’s co-creators. The zine, they write, “reflects the voices and interests of womxn, non-binary, and genderqueer artists & thinkers.” Kodakalla and Martinez also assert that their zine plays a part in the “death and rebirth of society.”
The first issue’s 16 pieces of art, contributed by 13 creatives in the central Virginia area, serve as proof of a community that is as diverse as it is underappreciated. The works vary widely in subject matter, but have similar levels of intensity and urgency: an anonymous essay about a ride-along with a Charlottesville cop, a handwritten consideration of St. Lucy, stark black-and-white depictions of some of C’ville’s still-standing monuments.
Kodakalla considers Mala Leche’s diversity one of the publication’s most important features. “The thing about Mala Leche is that it creates this space for all those different viewpoints to exist in one zine,” she says. The goal, both she and Martinez agree, is to create a product that’s “relevant to every person.”
Along with co-editing Mala Leche, Kodakalla and Martinez are also the acting co-directors of the Feminist Union of Charlottesville Creatives. FUCC got its start as a Facebook group in 2017, Martinez says, and has only been an “official” organization since it recently received fiscal sponsorship from the Bridge PAI.
One tradition that has been around since the start is FUCC’s annual art show. “It’s really powerful to have a show of all women, non-binary, and genderqueer artists,” Martinez says. “You have to wonder how many genderqueer, non-binary artists have work hanging in the museums of New York right now.”
Mala Leche was created largely to give a different platform to those same artists. Martinez says she had been talking about her dream of such a zine for months before Kodakalla suggested they start it through FUCC. “It just made so much sense because it’s tapping into a network of artists and writers who already have a lot to share.”
Martinez says about half the work in Mala Leche’s first issue was submitted by artists already involved with FUCC, while the other 50 percent came from outside contributors, such as Meesha Goldberg, a painter and writer whose poem “Casualties of the Anthropocene” is one of the issue’s most memorable pieces. “The Earth is made of food / We are one another’s harvest,” Goldberg writes, invoking images of a “shroud of vultures” and deer “strewn & supine” on the highway.
Kodakalla and Martinez had interacted with Goldberg in other capacities—Kodakalla oversaw a 96-foot mural recently completed by Goldberg for the McGuffey Art Center, while Martinez enlisted Goldberg’s help to relocate a stray rooster that had wandered onto her property (the rooster now resides on Goldberg’s farm somewhere “in a secluded valley”). Both were so impressed by the variety and power of Goldberg’s work that they invited her to guest edit Mala Leche’s second issue.
Titled “Fever Dreams of Mother Earth,” its themes hew closely to Goldberg’s poetry and visual work. The issue, which is accepting submissions through February 26, will tackle the “delirium of [Mother Earth’s] dark nights…Mala Leche is conjuring the medicine of Art that we may one morning sweat out our fever and wake from this collective nightmare. Let us lucid dream again!”
Goldberg says she was drawn to the zine for its “strong, perverse tension” and the ways it’s positioned to highlight “sickness in society.” And nothing is sicker in society right now, she argues, than Mother Earth. “So many of our social problems come from cultural disconnection with the land.”
An important aspect of Mala Leche that its creators want to emphasize is that the zine is in black-and-white, so those interested in submitting should plan their artwork accordingly. It imposes a limit when printing visual content—Goldberg herself boasts many vivid, hyperrealistic paintings in her body of work, and to reprint them on such a scale wouldn’t do them justice—but Kodakalla and Martinez maintain that the very existence of Mala Leche is cause for celebration: In addition to giving deserving artists a platform, it pays them too, thanks to the Bridge PAI’s fiscal sponsorship.
The editors are excited about the radical and sometimes revolutionary submissions received by Mala Leche. They’re never sure what to expect, and both agree that the unknown is part of the appeal.
“We’re not really looking for any one particular vision,” Kodakalla says.
“Right now is the time to dream the new world up,” Martinez agrees. “There isn’t one answer as to what that world should look like.”
Perfect plans: Ebony Walden describes her skills as a mix between creative catalyst and community builder. The urban planner, consultant, and facilitator, who has been transforming communities for over a decade, will speak on the theme of transit at the next Creative Mornings gathering. Expect Walden to challenge your brain’s muscle memory with her infectious, authentic strategies. “Art, technology, good questions, thought-provoking activities, and focused discussions are just a few ways I will keep you engaged,” she says.
Friday10/9, Free, Registration begins 10am on October 5. creativemornings.com.
Renowned sculptor, professor, and community-builder Nick Cave is this spring’s Ruffin Distinguished Artist-in-Residence at UVA. His show, “Spot On,” is on view at Ruffin Gallery through March 31.
On a Saturday morning, artist Nick Cave and his partner Bob Faust sit with a group of 25 University of Virginia students.
“Who came straight from a club?” Cave jokingly asks as he surveys the group. Many are puffy-eyed and swigging coffee in an effort to wake up.
“This is Charlottesville. There aren’t any clubs here,” one student responds.
It’s day two of the first leg of Cave’s workshops, part of his residency at UVA. During these workshops, students across art disciplines collaborate in groups of five to respond to a prompt Cave and Faust designed, the centerpiece of which is a “2020” icon, with the second 20 flipped upside down. In April, the workshops will culminate in art exercises, installations, and presentations in locations of the students’ choosing across UVA’s Grounds.
“It’s important for students to invite their friends,” Cave says. “Who is this for? How do you get the people there, and what is your message? I’m interested in seeing what this student body wants to talk about, and how do we find common ground?” His voice moves in and out of being audible above the unpredictable din of “Spot On,” his current show at Ruffin Gallery.
On view through March 31, the show features three of the award-winning sculptor’s videos, “Blot,” “Bunny Boy,” and “Gestalt.” Each piece includes one or more of Cave’s signature soundsuits—ornate, full-body costumes that produce noises that are meditative yet jarring, rooted in nature though mechanical, and hauntingly beautiful.
“I chose video because I wanted to show choreography and collaboration, and how those set the stage,” says Cave. “How do we identify a space? What does that look like? How do we place ourselves within that context? That’s what the students are doing in our workshops.”
Cave created the first soundsuit in response to the 1991 beating of Rodney King by Los Angeles police. Though colorful, whimsical, and mythical, the suits originated from Cave’s feelings of fear and isolation in response to the globally televised incident of violence, racism, and police brutality.
“I felt like my identity and who I was as a human being was up for question,” he told The New York Times Magazine last October. “I felt like that could have been me. Once that incident occurred, I was existing very differently in the world. So many things were going through my head: How do I exist in a place that sees me as a threat?”
“Bunny Boy” speaks perhaps most poignantly to Cave’s exploration of identity, loneliness, and vulnerability. Viewers must enter a wooden structure that nearly covers the length of Ruffin Gallery and step into a dark interior to watch the film projected inside.
“You don’t know if you can enter this space,” Cave says. “It’s not saying that you can’t, but it’s not clear from this perspective. It asks us to think about expanses and how an audience enters and engages with the work.”
Inside, participants see a nearly 45-minute video of Cave wearing a furry fuchsia soundsuit with rabbit-like ears, floppy paws, and an exposed torso. He occupies an underworld dark space with just one harsh spotlight, while pawing at sounds (a dog barking or a lawnmower) of the “above world,” as Cave calls it. One can’t help but think of the ostracized protagonists of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, or the psychological thriller Donnie Darko.
“We can all identify with this,” says Cave. “We have all been in these spaces within our own internal dark selves. There’s a blurred sense of fantasy and seduction.”
Equally seductive is Cave’s “Blot,” a film that features a shape-shifting black soundsuit comprised of long strands of synthetic raffia. In movement, the raffia strands create a sound reminiscent of the ocean, as the Rorschach-like inkblot pushes and pulls against a reflected image of itself. Behind the scenes, the actor lurches and lunges into a wall; in post-production, Cave removed the wall and created a mirror image of the soundsuit. Cave shot “Blot” and “Gestalt” in one largely improvised take. Though he gives actors a loose statement of his intent for the video, the movements remain predominately unscripted.
“It’s about putting on the object and understanding how it’s moving,” Cave says of the performers who wear his soundsuits. “Are there any limitations and boundaries? What is in motion? How much does it weigh, what is the volume? What will it illustrate as I expand my body?”
While “Blot” lures viewers into a slow, meditative trance, “Gestalt” grabs participants by the shoulders and shakes them awake. Multiple soundsuits—one with buttons and an abacus face, another with a washboard face, and a third adorned with doilies—enter and exit the scene. They interact violently with one another, butt heads, throw one another to the ground, and drag themselves across the floor as the video speed jarringly toggles between fast and even faster. It comes from a place of being bullied, Cave explains, or feelings of being jailed by space and time.
“How do you create work that you have to stay and experience?” Cave asks. “I’ve been in a lot of museums and shows where I could be in there for 10 seconds and say, ‘Okay, I gotta go.’ How do you capture and secure one’s ability to take the time to commit to that experience?”
For Cave, the answer has been wearing his emotions literally on his sleeves (and head, heart, and the rest of his body).
Renowned sculptor, professor, and community-builder Nick Cave is this spring’s Ruffin Distinguished Artist-in-Residence at UVA. His show, “Spot On,” is on view at Ruffin Gallery through March 31.
Painter Robert Shetterly's portrait series "Americans Who Tell the Truth" is on view all over town—and includes three local residents. Zyahna Bryant (pictured) is the latest addition to this series. Image courtesy Robert Shetterly/Americans Who Tell the Truth
Unless you’ve been living off the grid (or in denial) you know the story: In spring 2016, Zyahna Bryant wrote an open letter to City Council, calling for the removal of the Robert E. Lee statue and the renaming of the downtown public park bearing Lee’s name.
“When I think of Robert E. Lee, I instantly think of someone fighting in favor of slavery,” she began her letter. “Thoughts of physical harm, cruelty, and disenfranchisement flood my mind.”
Bryant wrote that she was disgusted with the “selective display of history” in the city. “There is more to Charlottesville than just the memories of Confederate fighters. There is more to this city that makes it great. …I struggle with the fact that meaningful things that are unique to Charlottesville are constantly overlooked. I believe that we should celebrate the things that have been done in this great city to uplift and bring people together, rather than trying to divide them.”
Bryant was just 15, a student at Charlottesville High School, at the time.
This week, Bryant herself was celebrated for her work: On March 1, at the Jefferson School African American Heritage Center, Bryant’s image became part of the “Americans Who Tell the Truth” portrait series by contemporary American painter Robert Shetterly.
Among other things, Bryant’s letter sparked support throughout the Charlottesville community and precipitated the formation of the Blue Ribbon Commission on Race, Memorials, and Public Spaces. In 2017, after considering the commission’s report and recommendations, Charlottesville City Council voted to remove not just the Robert E. Lee statue, but the Stonewall Jackson statue from another nearby public park.
A lawsuit citing state law protecting war memorials blocked the city’s plans to remove the statues, but the Virginia General Assembly is working on legislation that, if passed, would give localities control over what to do with the statues.
Shetterly, an artist who lives and works in Maine, heard about Bryant’s work via his son and daughter-in-law, who both live in Charlottesville. Struck by Bryant’s clarity andpersistence (now a first-year student at UVA, she’s continued her local activism), he decided to include her portrait in “Americans Who Tell the Truth.”
Painter Robert Shetterly (left) converses with Zyahna Bryant (right), a local activist and UVA student who is the latest addition to Shetterly’s “Americans Who Tell the Truth” portrait series. Bryant’s portrait is now on view at the Jefferson School African American Heritage Center through April 18. Photo by Eze Amos
“So much depends on an individual who refuses to give in,” says Shetterly, a career illustrator who began this portrait series in 2001. He intended to paint 50 such individuals, to bring their truths closer to his own ears and to those of his audience.
In the nearly two decades since, he’s painted nearly 250 portraits, and he has no plans toslow down. “It got so interesting,” says Shetterly, who believes that “we are all made up of stories. And if we only tell the stories that make us feel good, we’re in real danger of not having any idea who we really are.”
“I [am] learning so much from doing it,” he adds. “I [keep] hearing more stories about more people, and thinking, ‘oh, I have to include that person in this story.’”
It’s difficult to exhibit all of the portraits together, and so they travel in different groups to different places around the country (one gets the sense that the same combination of portraits is rarely shown twice). Currently, portraits of about 60 truth-telling Americans are on view in various locations around Charlottesville (see sidebar), and each show has a different theme, among them civil rights leaders, African American women, and youth activism.
Some of Shetterly’s subjects are contemporary figures, people he’s had the opportunity to meet and get to know (as he has with Bryant); others are long deceased, and so he relies on other portraits and photographs, as well as historical documents, for information. Shetterly paints each subject against a plain and usually colorful background and uses a key to etch a quote from the subject into the canvas, words related to the truth they’re telling. Other than the quote, each portrait is free from embellishment, thereby emphasizing the individuals and the ideals for which they stand.
It’s a “wonderful way to honor people,” says David Swanson, a Charlottesville-based author and peace activist who is one of three locals whose portrait appears in the series. Certainly better than “giant equestrian statues,” he adds. The portraits are personal; taking the time to look at a painting and read the quote is more or less like having a one-on-one conversation with the person in the portrait. And so, “when we hear all about apathy and ‘nobody’s doing anything,’ and ‘we have no leaders,’ and ‘we have nobody who’s getting active,’ just point them towards these portraits of people,” says Swanson.
When Shetterly asked to paint Bryant’s portrait, Bryant considered carefully. She wondered how she might be perceived, not just by viewers of the portrait, but by her community. “Will people think I’m essentially doing this for clout?” she asked herself. She consulted close friends, her mother, and her grandmother, and then looked to see who Shetterly had included in the series so far.
Among the portraits, Bryant saw many black women she admired: Alicia Garza, who, along with Patrisse Cullors and Opal Tometi, founded the Black Lives Matter movement; Michelle Alexander, civil rights advocate and author of The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness; Ella Baker, who worked behind the scenes in the American civil rights movement for more than 50 years and often does not get the credit she deserves; Tarana Burke, founder of the #MeToo movement; and politician Shirley Chisholm, the first African American woman elected to the U.S. Congress, who fought for the rights of women, children, minorities, and the poor. “If they don’t give you a seat at the table,” Chisholm once said, “bring a folding chair.”
Bryant was pleased to see that these women, who are often left out of conversations and historical narratives about the very movements they helped spark, and sometimes even ignored by their own communities, were included in the series. She saw people “who do the work as a means of survival…not because they are looking to become someone’s idols, or searching for fame, but literally because if they don’t do the work, people are going to die.”
She thought, too, about how Charlottesville is often cited as a hashtag, an event rather than a place where people live. For those who do not live here (and even for some who do), “there’s no depth in people’s understanding of this place and what happened here,” says Bryant. She hoped that if another Charlottesville resident was added to the series, it would be a person of color.
“So I thought, ‘Who else would be better for this?’ And because I’m so young, and because the work that I did has been erased in certain ways, and it has been miscredited to other people who did not do what I did, I just really think that now it’s important for young black women to take control of our own narratives. That was one of the pushing factors for me to choose to be there [in the series],” she says.
For all of these reasons, Bryant wanted in on “Americans Who Tell the Truth,” and she agreed in part because she gets the sense that Shetterly “puts a lot of care into his work.” She appreciates the artist’s goal of “not just painting portraits, but traveling with these pieces of art and starting conversations in different spaces about who these people are,” she says. “I thought that was really dope.”
With each portrait, Shetterly includes a quote from the subject. Bryant’s brings the viewer to the beginning of the movement she sparked: “In the spring of 2016, I did something that scared me, but something that I knew needed to be done. I wrote the petition, a letter to the editor and City Council, calling for the removal of the Robert E. Lee statue and the renaming of the park, formerly known as Robert E. Lee Park. I was 15.” Image courtesy Robert Shetterly and Americans Who Tell the Truth
Bryant’s portrait—either photographed or illustrated—has appeared in many places, including on the side of the Violet Crown Theater on Charlottesville’s Downtown Mall, in a wheat paste mural with more than 100 other local activists; inside and outside the Virginia Museum of History and Culture in Richmond; in Teen Vogue magazine, where she was named one of “21 Under 21” in 2019; and on poster board projects created by local middle school students (Bryant herself was in middle school when, at age 12, she organized her first protest, a rally for Trayvon Martin). And while she says it’s always an honor (and still a surprise) to have her portrait anywhere, having her image included in a traveling art exhibition is something else entirely.
“Oftentimes the platforms that I have access to are traditional articles, or written pieces, so, to then be able to extend into a different medium, or have my story be told and shared with other people in that way, that’s really cool,” says Bryant, who insists that her daily life (college classes, work, friends, family, community organizing) is “pretty average.” She particularly likes that Shetterly includes a quote from each subject, right there in the painting, to add some context. And context can sometimes be lacking in portraiture that’s aiming to relay a specific message.
When asked about the truth she tells, Bryant says that among other things, it’s one “about how people of color have been silently marginalized, silently killed, by this kind of war on our memories, this war on narrative. [My truth] is a truth about our need to reconsider, and reckon with, our past, thinking about how we haven’t done right by certain people—indigenous people, black people, Latinx people—and how we’ve basically continued to build on top of, and cover up, these narratives of displacement, and violence, instead of actually working to do the groundwork and make structural change.”
Those sorts of changes require showing up, and being present, over and over again. And now that Bryant—a young black woman from Charlottesville who braved public scrutiny to catalyze a change she believes in—is included in the “Americans Who Tell the Truth” series, her truth, as well as that of those who work alongside her, will be present in new ways, present in more spaces both physically and intellectually. Says Bryant, “it’s given me a different outlook on how I see art as a means to convey certain messages, to start certain conversations.”
Charlottesville’s truth tellers
Images courtesy of Robert Shetterly and Americans Who Tell the Truth
Bryant is the third Charlottesville resident to be included in Shetterly’s series. The other two are John Hunter, schoolteacher and founder of the World Peace Game (left); and David Swanson, journalist and peace activist (right).
Hunter, who taught at Venable and Agnor-Hurt elementary schools, says that his work—his truth—is about “teaching children the work of peace so that they can increase compassion in the world and decrease suffering in the world.”
The World Peace Game is now taught in 37 countries, by more than 1,000 specially trained educators, and its mission is really about legacy, says Hunter. “The results of the work that we do…will be decades in coming to fruition.”
In 2011, Swanson, a longtime anti-war activist and author of several books, including War is a Lie, learned that then-vice president Dick Cheney was planning a visit to Charlottesville. He emailed local law enforcement requesting that they arrest Cheney for conspiracy to commit torture, and shortly after that, Cheney canceled his visit. “The encouraging thing about these portraits is that there are so many…and [Shetterly] can’t keep up!” says Swanson, who thinks that there are even more people in Charlottesville who should be included in the series.
Where to see it
More than 60 of Shetterly’s “Americans Who Tell the Truth” portraits are on view at various spots around town. The “Truth to Climate Change” exhibit at CitySpace has already closed, but here’s where you can find the others:
“A Place Fit for Women”
Jefferson School African American Heritage Center
Through April 18
Featuring 14 paintings of African American women and commemorating the 100th anniversary of the 19th amendment to the U.S. Constitution.
“Youth Speaking Truth”
The Bridge Progressive Arts Initiative
Through March 31
Featuring 120 portraits made by Charlottesville High School students, alongside eight of Shetterly’s.
“Portraits of Change”
The UVA McIntire School of
Commerce
Through April 10
Highlighting leadership in business and commerce.
“Americans Who Tell the Truth @ Charlottesville”
Washington Hall, Hotel B, UVA
Through April 10
Featuring portraits of eight civil rights activists.
“Created Equal: Portraits of Civil Rights Heroes”
Monticello
Through March 31
Featuring portraits of three iconic civil rights activists.
Kuwinjku artists Joe Guymala (left) and Gabriel Maralngurra (right) stand amid some of the memorial poles that are part of "The Inside World: Contemporary Aboriginal Australian Memorial Poles" on view at The Fralin Museum of Art through May 24. Photo by Amy and Jackson Smith
This week, something extraordinary will happen in Charlottesville: Four exhibitions of contemporary Aboriginal Australian art will open in four different venues across town, bringing the total number of such exhibitions currently on view to six. And a seventh will open in mid-February.
Having this many concurrent shows of contemporary Indigenous Australian art in one locale is an extremely rare occurrence outside of Australia, if it’s even happened at all, says Henry Skerritt, curator of the Kluge-Ruhe Aboriginal Art Collection of UVA—the only museum outside of Australia dedicated to Indigenous Australian art.
And it’s some of “the best Australian contemporary art” at that, adds Skerritt. Many of these artists have won prestigious awards, and their work is collected by some of Australia’s major museums (as well as some international celebrities, like comedian Steve Martin). We’re talking “major, heavy-hitter artists,” says Skerritt.
Taken together, these exhibitions give a broad view of contemporary Indigenous Australian art. Artists of many distinct language groups (of which there are more than 250 across Australia), cultures, ages, and experience are represented. Some live and work in remote communities, others in major cities. Some work with materials and methods that have been used for thousands of years, others work with digital cameras. Their art is often political, engaging topics of identity, heritage, race, colonization, sovereignty, globalization, climate change, and resilience. At the same time, these works express a reverence for the wonder and beauty of the natural world.
Nonggirrnga Marawili’s work is on view in two shows, “The Inside World” at The Fralin Museum of Art, and “By The Strength of Their Skin” at Second Street Gallery. Photo by Pep Phelan, courtesy of Buku-Larrnggay Mulka Art Centre, Yirrkala
The shows arrive as catastrophic bush fires are still raging across the Australian continent. Bush fires are not uncommon in Australia, but the current out-of-control blazes, caused at least in part by climate change, have singed tens of millions of acres of land; at least 28 people and an estimated half a billion animals have perished.
Skerritt says that the artists exhibiting in these shows don’t live in the areas affected by the fires, but there are plenty of Indigenous Australian artists (including some former Kluge-Ruhe artists-in-residence) who do.
With that in mind, these shows present an opportunity for viewers to ruminate on land, land that is important to the lives, traditions, and art practices of all of the artists here, land that has sustained their peoples for generations, even when it was violently stolen from them—and subsequently abused—by white European colonizers.
Land is spiritually, conceptually, and physically inseparable from these artists and their practices. It is the vital artery running through these bodies of work.
Have a word
In discussing their work, many Indigenous Australian artists talk about “Country,” and “Dreaming,” two terms describing concepts that are vital to understanding all of the art in these exhibitions.
Country: A place or places that have deep significance for them and their ancestors over many thousands of years.
Dreaming: The English word “dreaming” is inadequate to explain this vast, complex concept. As described in the Kluge-Ruhe’s permanent installation, the Dreaming is a belief system, a worldview shared by many Indigenous peoples. It is “powerfully connected to individual and collective identity. Individuals are born with unbreakable ties to ancestral beings and particular places for which they are custodians.” It can “refer to the time when ancestral beings created the earth and everything in it, including people, animals, plants and features of the land.” Those beings established kin relationships, art practices, laws, ceremonies, and more. The Dreaming is not marked by Western concepts of chronological time, and these narratives “continue to be passed down through generations in painted designs, ceremonies, and songs. The continuation of these activities keeps culture strong. The Dreaming was there in the beginning, it underlies the present and shapes the future.”
“Munguyhmunguyh (Forever)”
The Rotunda Upper West Room, January 23 – April 5
“Kurdukadji Djang (Emu Dreaming),” 1991 by Bardayal Nadjamerrek AO. Courtesy the estate of the artist and Injalak Arts
Kunwinjku artist Gabriel Maralngurra was just a boy when his uncle, the artist Thompson Yulidjirri, took him over the hill to see the rock art paintings of their ancestors. For tens of thousands of years, the Kunwinjku people have painted their Dreamings on rock formations in what is now known as Western Arnhem Land, using the images to educate younger generations on their culture and history.
The sites include many, many paintings of Kunwinjku Dreamings, which go back some 40,000 years, and, as artist Joe Guymala points out, some of the paintings also include images of white people with wagons, which go back about 200 years, to the European colonization of Australia. “The old people thought, what’s this white man? They draw the rifles, shotguns, and knives that the white people brought with them,” Guymala explains.
In the early 1990s, Kunwinjku artists at the Injalak Arts and Crafts Association started painting some of these stories on paper, a more portable medium than rock, as part of a project commissioned by John W. Kluge, in partnership with the arts center.
Maralngurra was president of the Injalak center at the time, and in a letter included in the commission’s published catalog, he and Gunbalanya Community Council chairman Moses Mangiru wrote that one of the goals of the commission was to help viewers of these pieces “develop a greater understanding of Aboriginal culture, our relationship to the Dreaming, and the creation of our clan lands…it is our sincerest hope for the future.”
The commission was an important moment for these artists, says Margo Smith, the longtime director of the Kluge-Ruhe, because “with paper, the artists really had to adjust to painting on a flat surface, but it enabled them to increase their detail, and so you see the development of different styles in painting on paper that [also] included some of the standard [techniques] of rock art” painting, such as hand stencils. Artists would fill their mouths with paint, put their hands up against the rock (or in this case, paper), and blow the pigment around their hands, creating the effect of a sort of starry galaxy around the negative space hand outline.
“Ngalyod dja Ngalkunburriyaymi (Rainbow Serpent and Water Spirit),” 2018 by Joe Guymala. Courtesy the artist and Injalak Arts
Once the commission was over, Kunwinjku artists continued sharing their stories on paper, and to commemorate 30 years of the commission and the resulting art historical moment, five of those original 45 pieces will be on display in the West Oval Room of the Rotunda. Two brand new pieces from Maralngurra and Guymala, artists who have incorporated rock painting techniques and intentions into their own works on paper as a direct result of that initial commission, will also be on display.
With this exhibition, “we’re looking forwards and backwards simultaneously,” says Skerritt.
For “Munguyhmunguyh,” Guymala, who usually paints on eucalyptus bark surfaces that he collects and treats himself, has painted on paper Ngalkunburriyaymi (female Water Spirits who guard sacred water holes and Dreaming sites) encircled by Ngalyod (Rainbow Serpent, the most important ancestor spirit in West Arnhem Land, who appears in a variety of animal forms in Kuwinjku mythology). He used ochre pigments, which he collected from the bush and mixed himself.
“I like to paint for myself, so kids can learn the stories. I want to pass down the stories to my sons, daughters, and grandchildren. Our grandfathers learnt from their fathers and gave this knowledge to us, and I want to share this with the younger generations,” says Guymala, who also wants to inspire young people to paint, so that they, too, can share these stories.
“Kunwardde Bim Kakukyime (Rock Art Style),” 2019 by Gabriel Maralngurra. Courtesy the artist and Injalak Arts
Maralngurra describes his work as “similar to the rock art but different; it comes out of my head.” What’s notable about Maralngurra’s piece in this show is that it combines a variety of painting traditions in a single image: He uses an X-ray style to paint overlapping mimih spirits (a 50,000-year-old subject) and animals (a 7,000-year-old subject), in combination with ceremonial cross-hatching (made public only in the last 50 years), and colonial influence (European missionaries introduced the bright blue pigment that Maralngurra uses, but does not allow to take over the piece).
“I’ve got stories to tell the whole world,” says Maralngurra, who will be in Charlottesville, along with Guymala, to open the exhibition. “About how it’s done, the painting and the stories and our culture, bininj way.”
“Shadow Sites”
New City Arts Welcome Gallery January 24 – 30
“Echoes #3: Tjalini,” 2019, by Robert Fielding. Courtesy the artist and Mimili Maku Arts
On view for just one week at Welcome Gallery, the works of Steaphan Paton and Robert Fielding together demonstrate how modern media such as photography and video have become a vital part of some Indigenous artists’ practice.
Through the works in this exhibition, both Paton (a member of the Gunai and Mondero nations) and Fielding (a Western Aranda and Yankunytjatjara artist from Mimili community on APY Lands, who also has Afghan heritage) inspect their cultural identity and history, along with notions of Country, belonging, race, colonialism, and more.
In his artist statement about the three “Echoes” works that will be on view at Welcome Gallery, Fielding writes:
“The objects in these photographs are echoes of the past. With them come the memories of past afflictions upon our land and culture: the memories of rations, missions, mining, and farming.
“Like manta (earth) continually reclaiming the physical remnants of the past through rust and erosion, Anangu culture continually reclaims its place as part of our landscape. By reshaping echoes of the past into songs of our future, we create new memories, new ways of keeping culture strong.
“Where one sees an oil barrel, I see a fire pit, a place to share stories.
Where one sees a flour bucket, I see the many secrets we carry and hide.
Where one sees a water tank, I see shelter and protection.
Where one sees desecrated land, I see a resilient future.
“The words sandblasted into the rusted surfaces expose our radiant and unblemished truth that stands strong against the test of time and change. We have absorbed the past, and made it our future.”
Land of contrasts
There’s quite a bit of diversity among Australia’s Indigenous (Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander) peoples. Today, there are more than 250 distinct language groups across the continent, which is slightly smaller than the continental United States and has a varied geography comprised of deserts, temperate and tropical forests, and snow-capped mountain ranges.
“By the Strength of Their Skin”
Second Street Gallery, January 24 – March 20
“If you had to pick three of the top artists in Australia at the moment, Nonggirrnga, Regina, and Mabel would be pretty high on most people’s lists,” says Kluge-Ruhe curator Henry Skerritt about the three artists exhibiting in “By the Strength of Their Skin” at Second Street Gallery.
Nonggirrnga Marawili, Regina Pilawuk Wilson, and Mabel Juli are three of Australia’s most revered artists (their works are collected in major Australian museums), and each has created new works specifically for this show.
“Each of these women artists approach their art practice through the prism of their Country, their Dreamings, and the everyday expression of living in a place where the spiritual and the quotidian are seamlessly connected,” writes Second Street Gallery curator Kristen Chiacchia in the show’s press release.
“Baratjala,” by Nonggirrnga Marawili. Courtesy the artist and Buku-Larrnggay Mulka Art Centre
“The animating tension of Aboriginal art has always been this tension between innovation and tradition,” says Skerritt, who opines that Marawili’s works are some of the finest examples of that very thing. She learned to paint on bark in the 1980s, when she was in her 40s, assisting her late husband, Djapu statesman and artist Djutadjuta Mununggurr. After her husband’s death, Marawili continued painting the Djapu themes approved by her husband, and, as the Second Street press releases notes, over time came to explore “intuitive subjects and mark making outside the realm of the sacred.” Now a multidisciplinary artist living and working at the Buku-Larrnggay Mulka art center in the Northern Territory, she’s known for her bark paintings, larrakitj (memorial poles, including a few on view in “The Inside World”), and prints. Her works articulate how country comes alive, both physically and spiritually, by the movement of natural elements seen and unseen.
“Syaw (Fish Net),” 2019, by Regina Pilawuk Wilson. Courtesy the artist and Durrmu Arts Aboriginal Corporation
Charlottesville audiences may be familiar with Wilson’s work—she had a solo show at Second Street in summer 2018. A painter and master weaver, Wilson is also known for her role in the Aboriginal land rights movement. As European whites colonized the land, they forced Indigenous peoples to live on reserves and missions, with strict rules that in many cases sought to slowly dissolve or outright eliminate Indigenous traditions, languages, and cultures. (It is not unlike what European whites did to Indigenous American peoples.) In the early 1970s, Wilson and her husband decided to move off the mission and back to their country (traditional land), starting a community for Ngangikurrungurr people in the Daly River region, with not much more than a tent. During her visit to Charlottesville in June 2018, Wilson explained that they had to leave the mission in order to practice their traditions, their art, their language. Many of her paintings are of weavings, preserving stitches in paint so that they can live on, visible and present for future generations.
“Marranyji & Jiyirriny,” by Mabel Juli. Courtesy artist and Warmun Art Centre
Gija artist Juli has been painting since the 1980s, when she settled in Warmun, East Kimberley Western Australia. She was about 50 years old at the time, and two of the community’s celebrated elder artists encouraged her to make artwork. According to the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia’s website, Juli has effectively incorporated pinks, purples, and greens into the Gija color palette, which was previously traditionally comprised of ochres. Her large-scale works often feature a few icons or symbols (say, a crescent moon, a four-pointed star, or a bird) on a solid color surface; they may appear simple, but they tell rich stories. For many years, she painted Ngarranggarni (Dreaming) creation narratives of her country, Darrajayn, but more recently, she’s broadened her practice to include works about language conservation and climate change.
“The Inside World”
The Fralin Museum of Art at UVA, January 24 – May 24
The largest of these shows, “The Inside World: Contemporary Aboriginal Australian Memorial Poles” presents the work of more than 50 artists from the remote Aboriginal communities of Kunbarrllanjnja (or Gunbalanya), Maningrida, Milingimbi Island, and Yirrkala, all located in Arnhem Land, in the Northern Territory. On view in the upstairs gallery at The Fralin Museum of Art, “The Inside World” is more than a large-scale installation. It’s a journey.
“There are some things that unite the peoples of Arnhem Land,” Henry Skerritt writes in the exhibition catalog. “One is their belief that everything in existence has an ‘inside’ and an ‘outside meaning,’” and that together they “[operate] as a continuum that structure the entire universe.”
Some of the memorial poles featured in “The Inside World,” a traveling exhibition now at The Fralin Museum of Art. Photo by Amy and Jackson Smith
“Traditionally, memorial poles like those in ‘The Inside World’ would have been used as ossuaries: the final resting place for the bones of the dead,” Skerritt says. “The poles would be made from the trunk of a carefully selected eucalyptus tetradonta (stringybark tree) that had been naturally hollowed out by termites. The most perfectly cylindrical trunk would be selected and its bark stripped so that it could be painted with powerful clan designs that would identify and protect the spirit of the deceased.”
But in recent years, writes Wukun Wanambi, a Yolngu artist, “the elders have given us authority to use [memorial poles] in our art.”
Aesthetic use of memorial poles really began in 1988, with “The Aboriginal Memorial” exhibition at the Biennale of Sydney, says Margo Smith. Artist Djon Mundine organized the installation of 200 painted poles from 43 artists from the community of Ramingining in Arnhem Land, one pole for each year of European settlement, commemorating all of the Indigenous people who died defending their lands and their cultures from colonizers. (The highly political installation is now a permanent exhibition in the National Gallery of Australia in Canberra.)
Since then, memorial poles—called larrakitj, lorrkkon, or dupun—that have been painted as art and not used as ossuaries, have been regular fixtures in Aboriginal art shows around the globe.
“The reason why the old people have given this authority is so that we—the Yolnu people—can maintain our culture and pass it on to the generations that come after us, to build up their strength and wisdom,” adds Wanambi. “But larrakitj can’t stand by himself: larrakitj’s identity comes from its family, and this attaches it to our culture and Law. Balanda (non-Aboriginal people) need to understand the whole structure—not just the art part—or they will never understand.”
Photo by Amy and Jackson Smith
And so, the 112 poles in “The Inside World” (at other venues, the traveling exhibition has shown 99 poles from the Debra and Dennis Scholl collection; this iteration also includes 13 from the Kluge-Ruhe’s collection) are grouped by artist, and then by location, throughout the gallery space. With the walls painted black, the objects spotlit and anchored in glittering black coal slag, eco-acoustics recorded in the bush floating through the air, viewers (the vast majority of us Balanda) will symbolically traverse time and the Australian landscape in a motion to begin to understand the stories contained within, and projected by, these groups of poles.
“Llarakitj need their family because it gives them strength and power,” says Wanambi. “One larrakitj on its own is like nothing—it doesn’t mean anything—but if you put three or four together in one group it is like a family: they have the strength of the family ties from that area.”
“Tithuyil: Moving With the Rhythm of the Stars”
The Kluge-Ruhe Aboriginal Art Collection, February 11 – May 31
Brian Robinson often says that he was born with a pencil in his hand. “No surface was sacred for me…I drew on pretty much everything from the kitchen table to household walls, to windows to the back fence…pretty much everywhere, and so that creativity continued to grow and flourish.”
Robinson is of the Maluyligal and Wuthani tribal groups of the Torres Strait and Cape York Peninsula, and a descendant of the Dayak people of Malaysia.
“By virtue of this act I hereby take possession of this land,” 2017, by Brian Robinson. Courtesy the artist and Mossenson Galleries
“The artworks presented in ‘Tithuyil’ look at life in the Torres Strait with a bit of a twist,” Robinson says. He writes in his artist statement that these etchings and linocut prints “present an intoxicating worldview, one where iconic works of classical art and popular sources from global culture are co-opted into the spirit world of the Islander imagination. Wise-eyed sea creatures, muscular warriors, stars in the heavens, broad-petaled flowering plants, and hollow-eyed skulls sweep through his works. Interwoven amongst this realm of references to his island home and the surrounding sea waters and islands of the Torres Strait, are the tokens and talismans of a parallel life within a global culture of superheroes, comic characters, and ancient Classical mythologies.”
In juxtaposing these seemingly disparate visual icons with a delicately struck balance of humor and seriousness, Robinson captures the viewer’s curiosity, requiring a close look to parse out the relationships among these icons.
About a dozen of Robinson’s works will be on view in this show. One of them, “By virtue of this act I hereby take possession of this land,” is rendered in white line on a black surface that stylistically recalls ancient Greek vase painting. At its center is James Cook, the British Royal Navy captain whose ship brought the first Europeans to the coast of the continent now known as Australia in 1770. Cook’s arrival precipitated extraordinary violence, and eventual colonization, committed by European Whites against the land’s native peoples.
Scrolling Torres Strait aquatic flora designs surround Cook as he charts a course on the map, navigating by the stars in the sky above him—pixelated alien creatures from the 1978 arcade game “Space Invaders”—as he plans to invade the space of Indigenous Australian peoples.
“Ngayulu Nguraku Ninti (The Country I Know)”
The Kluge-Ruhe Aboriginal Art Collection, Through February 2
Country is the subject of this series of paintings by Barbara Moore and Sharon Adamson, two artists who live in the Amata community in the APY Landsin northwestern South Australia, a geographically vast but sparsely populated area made up of numerous unique Aboriginal communities. Both women paint very personal expressions of the natural world that has nourished them and sustained their peoples for tens of thousands of years.
Barbara Moore paints a mural in the Kluge-Ruhe breezeway in November 2019. Photo by Tom Cogill
Moore, an Anmatyerre artist who started painting later in her life, in 2003, maintains a devoted art practice while also working full-time as a senior health worker at an Amata clinic. She paints large-scale, colorful works that convey the great variety and vivacity of the landscape and her relationship to it. The circles in her works represent water holes in the desert rock formations—vital sources of drinking water for the people who live among and travel desert lands.
Two of her paintings in the show are rendered in grayscale. During an artist talk at the Kluge-Ruhe in November 2019, Moore, who was in town for a residency along with Adamson, explained why she departed from her usual palette for these particular works: They’re of the nighttime.
Sharon Adamson. Photo by Tom Cogill
Like Moore, Adamson paints at Tjala Arts center in Amata, where she’s also employed. And though the two artists’ works share a certain fluid dynamism, they are distinct.
Adamson, a young, emerging artist, grew up watching her great-grandfather paint Rainbow Serpent stories, and she’s chosen to carry on not just his methods of mixing pigments, but his preferred subject. In many Aboriginal cultures, the Rainbow Serpent is a creating deity regarded as protector of the land, its people, and sources of life (such as rivers and water holes); if enraged, the Rainbow Serpent can also be a destructive force. Adamson usually paints these momentous stories on rather large canvases, but here she shows three smaller—but still considerable—works that better fit the Kluge-Ruhe’s limited wall space.
“With Her Hands: Women’s Fiber Art from Gapuwiyak”
Kluge-Ruhe Aboriginal Art Collection, Through April 5
Fiber works made by women have “historically been regarded as craft and devalued in the art world,” says the Kluge-Ruhe’s Smith, who’s also an anthropologist, and “With Her Hands” pushes back against that idea, with pieces that demonstrate the artistry that goes into such work. Twenty-five women from the community of Gapuwiyak, in Australia’s Northern Territory, created these 100 diverse pieces, which include necklaces made from shells, seeds, and nuts; mats; a variety of baskets made from natural and dyed pandanus palm; ceremonial headbands and armbands; and a selection of sculpture. All of the works are part of the Kluge-Ruhe’s collection, and the show was curated by six women of color working through the Mellon Indigenous Arts Initiative.
Kangaroo by Lucy Malirrimurruwuy Wanapuyngu. Courtesy the artist and Gapuwiyak Culture and Arts
Together, the pieces in “With Her Hands” speak to the rich history of fiber work in Aboriginal cultures but also “to women’s lives today in Aboriginal communities,” says Smith. The works demonstrate each individual artist’s reverence for tradition and inclination toward innovation. For example, artist Anna Ramata Malibirr discovered that she could boil emerald green crepe paper (not something her pre-colonial ancestors would have had access to) to dye her fibers.
But…how?
How did Charlottesville end up with the only museum outside of Australia dedicated to Indigenous Australian art? A billionaire was moved by an art show.
John W. Kluge—at the time one of the richest men in America, and also an Albemarle County resident—saw the landmark “Dreamings: The Art of Aboriginal Australia” exhibition at the Asia Society Galleries in New York City in 1988. Inspired by the show, Kluge made his first of several trips to Australia in 1989, and he began collecting and commissioning works from Aboriginal artists.
In 1993, Kluge purchased the collection of the late Ed Ruhe, a University of Kansas English professor who began collecting Aboriginal art during a professorship in Australia in 1965. Ruhe purchased work directly from artists, community art centers, and Aboriginal art dealers (a few of these pieces are currently on view in a small exhibition in the Brown Science and Engineering Library at UVA), and amassed a library of related books and articles.
In 1997, Kluge donated the bulk of these collections to UVA, and the museum opened in its current location—in an old mansion on Pantops—in 1999, where it serves as a global hub for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander art.
“Plastic Projections” is one of the works on view in the climate change-focused “A Quick and Tragic Thaw” at UVA’s Ruffin Gallery through October 18. Courtesy of the artist
Escapism or activism? Should a workprovide respite from pertinent problems, or is it art’s duty to provide commentary on these political and social issues? More and more, this seems to be the debate among artists and patrons.
While it’s limiting to think that the two approaches are mutually exclusive, the conversation surrounding them seems to have grown louder in recent years. The problems of the world have grown louder, too, not least the ever-approaching specter of climate change. How is escapist art possible when its subject concerns something that none of us can escape?
“A Quick and Tragic Thaw,” the latest exhibit at UVA’s Ruffin Gallery, seeks to find some middle ground. Co-creator Gabrielle Russomagno says the climate- themed collection of artwork is intended to be a “meditation on something that might feel like loss…regardless of pedagogy and political paradigms.”
Russomagno and her artistic partner Yvonne Love, have been concerned with climate change since their first collaboration over a decade ago, when the two created an exhibition on global warming. “A Quick and Tragic Thaw” certainly feels like the culmination of many years of work and thinking—their art was informed by the research of Howard Epstein, a UVA environmental science professor who studies the effects of climate change.
This added scholarly element compounds the sense of collaboration. Liza Pittard, visiting artist coordinator for the UVA Arts department, calls it “bridging the arts and sciences in an almost poetic way.” “UVA is a research institution,” she says. “How can we get other people involved?”
If the crowd present on the exhibit’s opening night is any indication, then “A Quick and Tragic Thaw” has already left a considerable impression. The single, cubelike room it occupies was overflowing with spectators.
The largest portion of the exhibition is a re-creation of Greenland’s shifting, shrinking glaciers done in black sand and porcelain—a stark dark and light that comprises much of the room’s color scheme. Love and Russomagno have given it the fitting label “Patterned Ground.” The porcelain analogues for ice contain intricate valleys and divots, and the black sand holds a network of delicate grooves. It’s eerily soothing to look at, hypnotic almost to the point that the viewer forgets the dire subject matter.
On the far wall, “Plastic Projections” provides a burst of color to the muted room. Present and future predicted maps of the Arctic are arrayed in an oblong shape, each of them on plastic that has been warped by heat into new forms. Close inspection is required to realize that they are maps at all—from a distance, they resemble flowers in the process of opening and closing.
This uneasy balance of extremes—finding beautiful ways to represent terrible things, almost to the point of obfuscation—is present in all of the exhibition’s artwork, and it brings to mind the ongoing debate of escapism versus engagement. Which is being practiced here? After all, Love and Russomagno’s work is not explicitly giving a call to action.
The abstract explaining “A Quick and Tragic Thaw,” says that the artworks are meant to “emphasize connections…between indisputable data and the conceit of how we choose to live.” The result is plainly gorgeous but only quietly upsetting, what Pittard calls a “passive political statement.”
Another juxtaposition here is the artists’ differing reasons for creating a series of works about climate change. Love, whose father was a naturalist, approaches it from a scientific view. “Observation was a huge part of my upbringing…I was hearing about the negative human impact on the environment from a very early age.”
Love’s observational skills have given her an intimate understanding of how humans can affect their surroundings. “I’m seeing the effects in my own backyard, and it’s been really scary.”
Russomagno, by her own admission, is “totally urban.” She contrasts her upbringing to Love’s, saying that although she wasn’t surrounded by the natural world, she could still “notice if people were in despair, because I was surrounded by a bajillion of them.”
The result of these distinct points of view is a representation of climate change that not only connects the personal and political but also the universal. On the wall labeled “Transfer and Pierce,” a collection of drawings on carbon paper, the sketch of a single Arctic individual feels perfectly in place next to large-scale renderings of his home.
Love and Russomagno recognize that this is a problem that affects all of us. They wanted to avoid the “screaming, politicized voices,” as Russomagno puts it, and reach something more transcendent. “There’s something about loss and beauty combined that I think stirs everyone’s soul,” she says. “Maybe if the conversation through art activates that in someone, then we’ve done our work.”
“Plastic Projections” is one of the works on view in the climate change-focused “A Quick and Tragic Thaw” at UVA’s Ruffin Gallery through October 18.
Portland, Oregon, artist Thea Gahr’s Risograph print is part of “Wellspring: A Portfolio of Prints Celebrating Water,” on display at The Gallery at Studio IX through September 1. Image courtesy artist
A little boy stares into a river while ghostly shadows move through the current. The long, lithe bodies could be lost souls or river spirits, past lives or unspoken dreams, but whatever life force they represent, they’re rushing onward away from the boy—and away from you, the passive observer. The headline reads, “What we do to water, we do to ourselves.”
The image is one of 13 Risograph prints that comprise “Wellspring: A Portfolio of Prints Celebrating Water,” at The Gallery at Studio IX. Created by artists from the Justseeds Artists’ Cooperative and curated by Sarah Lawson, the show features work that asks viewers to do more than sit idly by. Rather, it asks us to reflect on our own relationships to water, consider the critical role it plays in our lives, and hold the baton of preservation, prevention, or management in a rapidly changing world.
“For me, engaging with others’ art is a way to grapple with issues that are sometimes too complex to try to address head-on,” Lawson says in an email interview with C-VILLE. That same spirit moves Justseeds, the collective of 29 artists across the U.S., Canada, and Mexico, who work together to produce collective portfolios and other creative responses to contemporary struggles for justice, from environmental and racial equity to migrant issues and the prison-industrial complex.
Molly Fair
“For this exhibit specifically, I hope that people find the art interesting to look at and engaging to think about, but that it’s also a chance to get your feet wet and hopefully become motivated to take some sort of environmental action,” Lawson says. Though she recommends simple shifts like reducing water waste through more efficient appliances, donating to non-profits, or calling representatives about water-related issues like pipelines, the exhibit itself stops short of prescriptions.
According to the artists’ statement for Wellspring, “These graphic tools are for you, as a human that recognizes that you need clean water to continue to be. The messages can be used for uniting, inspiring, warning, inciting, animating, empowering, invigorating.” Rather than focus on specific struggles over water—such as contamination in Flint, droughts in California, or the Pacific Garbage Patch, among other issues mentioned in the statement—each print leaves room for personal interpretation.
The final exhibition offers a broad swath of creative concepts to generate viewer inquiry and impact. In response to the water theme, each artist created a unique visual they rendered via Risograph, a printing process akin to automated screen printing. By pressing single shades of vibrant ink onto paper, then layering new colors and images on top, the artists developed multi-dimensional work with a vintage feel.
Each piece takes a different approach to the topic of water. In one, two frigate birds swan dive alongside a polar bear poised atop a towering iceberg; the root of the ice feeds choppy blue waves through which jellyfish glide. In another, neon pink and blue raindrops scatter across the word “commonwealth,” simultaneously conjuring visions of Virginia and the universal wealth water provides.
Roger Peet
Calls for change range from literal, like Colin Mathes’ doodles and handwritten list of improvised water filters; to pointed, like Erik Ruin’s whale emerging from a whirlpool of trash; to abstract, like Josh MacPhee’s graphic blue-and-green grid embedded with the words “aqua para todos!” In the gallery itself, art pieces are punctuated by quotes from scientific and political commentaries on the contemporary state of water in our world.
Regardless of the clarity or obfuscation of storytelling, the overall message of the exhibit is clear: There are as many ways of approaching and working with contemporary water issues as there are voices communicating what’s possible.
Lawson says this diverse artistic conversation seeks to soothe viewers and would-be activists rather than overwhelm them. Given the scope of issues like climate change and global water pollution, “it can be really difficult to focus on [these problems] in any meaningful or sustained way without feeling like we’re doomed,” she says. “This exhibit attempts to create small moments of engagement with the issues, through each interaction with one of the prints, in order to foster awareness and concern but in a way that doesn’t make change seem impossible.”
In this way, an exhibition like “Wellspring” can become “a useful buoy in a sea of bad news,” as the artists say in their statement. Like the little boy watching spirits of past and future flow beneath the surface, we have the chance to reflect on what is, in order to change what could be.
“Wellspring: A Portfolio of Prints Celebrating Water” is on view at The Gallery at Studio IX through September 1.
Artist Mark Cline is known for his eye-catching, large-scale foam and fiberglass sculptures that are installed in unexpected places. He and his apprentice, Brently Hilliard, will be celebrated at the Virginia Folklife Apprenticeship Showcase, along with 14 other master/apprentice pairs on May 5 at James Monroe’s Highland. Photo by Pat Jarrett/Virginia Humanities
If you’ve seen a parade of 8-foot-tall ants climbing the side of a building, a life-sized foam replica of Stonehenge, or a T-Rex lunging through the trees with a Union soldier in its mouth, then you know the work of Mark Cline.
Dubbed “Virginia’s Roadside Attraction King” by Atlas Obscura, Cline has spent decades building foam and fiberglass sculptures, many inspired by monster and science-fiction movies. He’s got thousands of works at truck stops, amusement parks, restaurants, and other unexpected sites in the commonwealth and around the country.
Despite his relative fame as an artist, the Waynesboro native doesn’t seek accolades. “One time NPR asked me, ‘How do you want to be remembered? Give us three words.’ And I said, ‘A good man.’ They were expecting ‘a sculptor’ or ‘an entertainer,’ but none of that’s important. It’s really not important,” he says.
What matters to Cline is knowing that every project created in his studio in Natural Bridge, Virginia, entertains the people who see it. Whether he’s built a giant octopus eating a boat in a lake or installed Spiderman scaling down the outside of an old building, his projects mean something.
“[Seeing these sculptures] gives people a chance to smile. It gives them a chance to laugh, and laughter has been proven to heal people,” he says. “I had a conversation with my daughter earlier today saying, ‘Honey, if you can find something that you go into in your life that helps people, then you have found your place in heaven.’ Because that’s where heaven is. It’s a place that’s above poverty. It’s above hate. It’s above pettiness. It’s all about healing, and you’ve got to do it through whatever talents you have.”
You could call it divine intervention that Cline became a sculptor at all. He describes being 19 years old, “jobless, penniless, and fresh out of high school with no immediate or long-range plans.” One day, sitting on a park bench and feeling frustrated, he asked himself what he wanted out of life. As he wrote in his journal, he realized he wanted happiness—and the only way he would find it was by helping others.
He hitchhiked to Waynesboro, went to the employment office, and asked for a job. “They said, ‘We don’t have anything.’ I said, ‘Well, okay.’ I turned around and was getting ready to walk out the door—I had my hand on the doorknob—and the lady says, ‘We have something.’ I said, ‘I’ll take it.’”
The job was with Red Mill Manufacturing, a plant where they made figurines out of resin mixed with pecan shell flour. After work one day, a co-worker showed Cline how to make a mold of his hand. It was a revelation. “I said, ‘I can make all kinds of stuff out of this.’ He said, ‘You sure can, Mark. Here’s a five-gallon bucket. Go home and play with it.’”
That fortuitous connection gave Cline an outlet for the overactive imagination he’d embraced as a child, back when he built inventive props for school plays and pulled practical jokes like slicing off a fake hand in art class. The adult version of his creative streak became sculpting with fiberglass.
He taught himself how to do it, since “there was nobody out there to show me how it was done.” As a result, he developed his own technique—and for now he’s the only one in the world who sculpts the way he does.
As part of the Virginia Folklife Apprenticeship Program at Virginia Humanities, which pairs master artists with vetted apprentices, Cline is passing on his creative approach for the very first time. He’s begun teaching and mentoring Brently Hilliard in fiberglass sculpture. Through the process of mutual discovery, he hopes to transmit the aspects of the craft that matter most to him.
“I could teach anybody how to be a sculptor,” Cline says, “but it’s no good unless you’re using your talents for something good. So ultimately I would like to see [Hilliard] use whatever I teach him to help others and inspire them in some way.”
Being an artist isn’t easy, he says. The work itself requires a willingness to suffer. “I lost my first wife over it. I had two major fires. I came so close to going bankrupt, one time I was on the courthouse steps.” But he welcomes the failures as well as triumphs “because that’s where you learn.”
Turns out the young man sitting on that park bench had it right. “Twenty-four hours a day on this planet, someone is being entertained by something that I’ve built, something that came out of me, something that I created,” he says. “My goal was to create happiness, and that’s exactly what this stuff does.”
Cline and his apprentice, Brently Hilliard, will be celebrated at the Virginia Folklife Apprenticeship Showcase, along with 14 other master/apprentice pairs on May 5 at James Monroe’s Highland.
Kent Morris’ “Unvanished” is at Kluge-Ruhe Aboriginal Art Collection through May 5. Photo by Tom Cogill
Kent Morris stands in the lobby of the Kluge-Ruhe Aboriginal Art Collection with a big grin on his face. He’s just in from a birding excursion through Charlottesville-area marshes, and swiping through photos on his phone: here’s a few of a bald eagle, and a few of its nest. Here’s one of a native bird perched in a budding tree, and one of Morris himself, standing in shin-deep water, his digital camera slung over his shoulder.
Morris, a Barkindji artist who lives and works in St. Kilda, an inner suburb of Melbourne, Australia, is in town for his photography exhibition “Unvanished,” on view at the Kluge-Ruhe through May 5. It’s his first full exhibition outside of Australia, and after showing a few more photos, he slips his phone into his pocket and heads into the gallery room.
Standing in the middle of the room, surrounded by colorful, geometric, symmetrical images, he asks if I know what I’m looking at. I do not.
“Birds on roofs!” he exclaims, his laughter echoing out of the gallery.
When I see it, I almost feel silly for not noticing it before—it’s right there.
Boon Wurrung (St Kilda) – Rainbow Lorikeet, 2017. Image courtesy of the artist
“I’m trying to make what’s unseen, seen,” says Morris. “Unvanished” is a story of journey and travel, of connections to country. It is a story of survival via forced adaptation, he says, a story of people whose cultures and histories have been wiped from the physical landscape and survived in objects (such as the shields Morris’ images reference) and in people.
Many Aboriginal language, tribal, and nation groups have strong connections to birds—spiritual, ecological—and with “Unvanished,” Morris adds one of shared experience. Like Aboriginal peoples, birds have been forced out of their habitats by Western culture and urbanization. They perch not on trees, but on roofs.
“We’ll start here,” says Morris, crossing the gallery to stand in front of “Barkindji (Bourke)-Magpie-lark,” an image of a black and white magpie-lark (or peewee) perched on a corrugated metal roof, a blue cable under its foot.
“This is shot on my country, on Barkindji country,” in what is now called Bourke, in the outback of northwestern New South Wales, says Morris.
The peewee is an important figure in the Barkindji creation story. Two traveling rainbow serpents knock the peewee out of his nest and chase him, and in their path leave two rivers, including the Darling River, the lifeblood of the Barkindji people.
While visiting family and walking Barkindji country, Morris spotted a peewee perched on the roof of the local bowling club, which has become a gathering place for Aboriginal peoples in the area. “It was a really classic moment, because, here is the creator, here now, on a contemporary place where we all gather and exchange stories and histories and meet to find each other,” he says.
Some of Morris’ paternal great great uncles and aunts were forcibly removed from their ancestral land by the government, placed on a truck and carted away; his father, like many other Aboriginal teenagers, was fostered by a white family. When Morris walks this land, he feels connected to it, and it pains him to see that there’s “really nothing to recognize” Aboriginal culture here.
Boon Wurrung (St Kilda) – Sulphur-crested Cockatoo, 2017. Image courtesy of the artist
What’s more, Western farming practices are destroying the Darling River. People today are not living in sync with nature, but we should reflect, deeply, on our relationship to the land upon which we live, and aim to live in balance with it, says Morris, explaining his use of mirroring and symmetry.
“Culture and knowledge has been, in areas, really fragmented and displaced,” he says, and his work aims to “piece it back together into something that is a whole.”
In another image there’s a blue-faced honeyeater on the roof of his sister’s house in Hervey Bay, in Queensland, on the land of the Butchulla people. The 10th image is of a corella on a roof in Broken Hill, the town where Morris’ father grew up. As Morris travels to maintain his ties to family, to country, he creates visible evidence to keep his culture strong.
Morris understands this duty as an artist, and as a Barkindji man. “You are part of something, he says. “You have responsibilities. Your ancestors are watching, your elders are watching.”
To people who have not been removed from their land or forced to give up their culture, the story Morris’ photography tells might seem remarkable. It is absolutely compelling, and Morris wants people to know it is not unique. It is imperative to acknowledge that this has been done not just to him and his family, he says, but to millions of people all over the world, including here in the Charlottesville area, where it happened to the people of the Monacan Indian Nation.
It is also imperative to acknowledge that many of these identities, these cultures, have not vanished. They have adapted, and art can be an easy way of getting people to begin to understand this.
“There’s a lot in these birds on roofs,” says Morris, his hearty laughter reverberating through the gallery. “I’m telling ya!”
Kent Morris’ “Unvanished” is at Kluge-Ruhe Aboriginal Art Collection through May 5.
“There’s an incredible well of creativity that it takes to endure your humanity when it feels like you’re not in the right skin.”
Vanessa German in Avery Court, Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, CT, 2016. Photo: Allen Phillips / Wadsworth Atheneum.
Vanessa German grew up in Los Angeles in a creative household, wearing clothes her artist mother made, writing stories, and crafting creations from the scrap materials her mom laid out on the dining room table for her and her siblings.
“We were makers as a way of life,” says German, the 2018 recipient of the $200,000 Don Tyson Prize, which recognizes “significant achievements in the field of American art.”
“My earliest memories of joy and knowing and understanding a sense of euphoria in being alive was through making things—the joy of gluing lace to cardboard and realizing I could make a separate reality in a story different than what existed in living reality. That is the way we came to know ourselves.”
She speaks on the phone from an artist residency in Mexico, where she is preparing a new body of work for a solo show, opening in Los Angeles in March. This new work is her special baby, she says, because it will be installed in the city “where I came to love the feeling of making art, the process of being in materials—being in a relationship with them and activating that relationship with intention.”
The as-yet-untitled new work is a series of sculptures and wall works constructed inside the frames of tennis rackets. “There is a point of classical mechanics,” German says, “that talks about the moment of inertia, the torque that it takes to bring something back to center.” The tennis rackets represent her experience of growing up black in L.A. “when hip-hop became hip-hop and AIDS became AIDS,” she says. Like her previous work, it reckons with mortality. But it also explores what it meant “to be alive in a culture of celebrity,” she says, in which Leonardo DiCaprio and other child stars were among her classmates and she learned to play tennis in Compton where Venus and Serena Williams practiced.
It’s about “what it was to be black in that environment and creative and sort of wild…how you make yourself as a black person…and what that is to find your center, the force of motion.”
After her exhibition opens inLos Angeles, German will come to Charlottesville for a week-long residency at The Fralin Museum of Art at UVA, where her sculpture and sound installation, “sometimes.we.cannot.be.with.our.bodies,” opens this week.
She created this work, which premiered in 2017 at the Mattress Factory in Pittsburgh—where she has lived since 2001 —in response to the “ongoing deaths” and unsolved murders of black women and girls in Pittsburgh.
“I think of it as an act of restorative justice, a healing ceremony by sight,” she says.
Some of the sculptures in the installation are heads without bodies, solemn faces, and closed eyes, adorned with headpieces made of found objects, from tree branches to ceramic figurines. Other sculptures are vivaciously dressed bodies without heads, their expressive fingers pointing, flipping the bird, or forming fists.
She found some of the materials that compose the sculptures in her neighborhood of Homewood—in the alleyway near her house, on the street, in dumpsters—and some items people left on her porch. Once, a person left an entire box of shoes—large, glittery, funny, and beautiful shoes, she says, that were likely used in a drag performance.
She is particularly moved by the lives of black transgender women, and notes the prevalence of violence against them. “There’s an incredible well of creativity that it takes to endure your humanity when it feels like you’re not in the right skin,” German says.
Vanessa German, American, b. 1976. “sometimes.we.cannot.be.with.our.bodies.”, 2017. Mixed-media installation. Image courtesy of the Mattress Factory, Pittsburgh, PA. Photographed by Tom Little.
“sometimes.we.cannot.be.with.our.bodies” can be read in two ways. The first is the experience of someone whose loved one has been murdered in the street and she cannot go to her because the body is cordoned off by police tape. The second is the interiority of trauma itself and the dissociation a person may experience from her own body in order to survive the experience.
“As a descendant of enslaved Africans,” German says, “the soul of my culture, the soul of my people, is you attend to a body in a very special way in the space they have died. The ways bodies are tended to in a Western capitalist, patriarchal culture contributes to the trauma.”
She recalls how the body of Michael Brown, an unarmed teenager shot by a police officer in Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014, lay uncovered in the street. “This continued the horror, for his body to be treated like he wasn’t a person, like he wasn’t a boy just an hour before,” she says.
Yet there is something of triumph and celebration in her installation. With its vibrant colors and the sound of dance music and uplifting voices mixed among whispers, it is, German says, “a force that can galvanize the sense of terror and tragedy and simultaneously connect that tragedy with the beauty and miracle it was that our people lived and were whole, miraculous, stunning human beings.”
“sometimes.we.cannot.be.with.our.bodies” will be on view at The Fralin February 22-July 7. Vanessa German will be in residence at the museum March 25-29, and will give a public talk on March 28.
