Beryl Solla – C-VILLE Weekly

Believing in ‘yes’

Attempting to sum up a person’s life in a few words is often an unreasonable, almost futile, effort. But James Yates has a word for his wife, artist Beryl Solla, who died February 19 after a 13-year battle against cancer: Yes.

At some point during their 43-year marriage, Solla made a wooden folk-art inspired sculpture for Yates, a cutout wood angel holding a banner that says “yes.”

“It was mainly in response to my tendency to focus on what was wrong with the world, to focus on the negative,” says Yates, also an artist. “She really encouraged me to focus on what I could say ‘yes’ to in the world. I said ‘yes’ to summer, said ‘yes’ to flowers. I said ‘yes’ to spring, said ‘yes’ to a garden.”

Best known for her large mosaic murals (including one at McGuffey Park), often made in collaboration with people of all ages, Solla taught at Piedmont Virginia Community College for 15 years. As chair of PVCC’s visual and performing arts department, she advocated relentlessly on behalf of students and faculty to ensure that they had what they needed—a flat space for officeless adjunct professors to grade portfolios, a cup of tea and an ottoman for a pregnant student, a “yes” to a fantastical idea—to make and teach art.

She went out of her way to believe in people, says Lou Haney, a multimedia artist who Solla brought into the teaching fold at PVCC. “She had a way of lifting you up, and you wanted to prove her right,” she says, adding that people often went beyond the boundaries of what they thought they could do, because Solla believed they could.

Solla always spoke her mind, and her honesty was sometimes intimidating, particularly during portfolio critiques, says her longtime friend, colleague, and fellow artist Fenella Belle. “She always found something nice to say about even the most unimpressive piece…unless you hadn’t worked on it. …She did not have time for people who are full of shit.” But even that came from nurturing kindness, from knowing that everyone has something to offer the world. It was “remarkable mentoring,” says Belle.

Solla believed that art was play. She made art accessible and she made art fun. She painted the walls of PVCC’s basement-level art department in bright colors and peppered the walls of other campus buildings with student artwork. For 14 years, she made heaps of banana bread and hot chocolate for visitors to the popular “Let There Be Light” winter solstice outdoor light art show that she and Yates founded. She started a free community film series at the school. She held tile art workshops throughout the state via the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. She was funny. She paired the annual PVCC student art show with a “chocolate chow-down” to get more people in the room. Her favorite band was Talking Heads. Her students and colleagues adored her, and she adored them right back. She loved her husband, their two children, and three grandchildren deeply.

Solla “was an amazing gardener,” says Yates, who plans to continue tending to her patch. But Solla planted more than flowers, says photographer Stacey Evans, another longtime friend and colleague of Solla’s, and “although she has passed, what she has planted in Charlottesville will continue to grow.” It will. Yes.

Light in the distance: ‘Let There Be Light’ adapts to the pandemic

A few months ago, James Yates awoke from a nightmare. He was hosting “Let There Be Light”—the same luminesce-focused art exhibit he has helmed for the past 13 years at Piedmont Virginia Community College—but there was a problem. “Nobody was wearing masks, and everybody was crowding together,” he says. “I woke up in a panic and realized we can’t do ‘Let There Be Light’ at PVCC this year.”

Yates arranged a meeting with Beryl Solla, PVCC’s chair of performing and visual arts and curator of “Let There Be Light,” to weigh their options. They agreed immediately that the program shouldn’t be canceled outright—for a number of reasons, Solla says, “we need it more than we’ve ever needed it before.”

In years past, “Let There Be Light’’ was headquartered at PVCC. The programming—which consists of several Charlottesville artists’ effulgent creations—took place outside on the college campus with refreshments, conversation, and a chance to warm up inside.

But the exhibition couldn’t exist in its typical form, which necessitated creative problem-solving. Yates thought of “Yard Dreams,” a 2016 project he had organized where installations were set up on various Belmont lawns. After some discussion, he and Solla decided to adopt the same structure for the winter solstice event.

This year, 23 “Let There Be Light” exhibits will be scattered across the city. Maps will guide people from location to location, and everyone will be asked to follow standard safety procedures, like staying in their cars when possible and wearing a mask when outside.

The curators are excited to see what might result from the restrained event, and Solla wonders how the pieces might transform it. “Drive-by art…art that’s meant to be seen at 40 miles an hour, is just so odd and surprising,” she says.

The foundational aspects of “Let There Be Light” remain unchanged. For example, the program’s emphasis on the secular will be preserved. “Separating it from Christmas,” Yates says, was a priority since its creation. The seeds for an illuminated art event were planted in his head when he was a “wee child,” and he and his family would drive around town to see neighbors’ light displays. “I wanted to replicate that magical feeling,” he says, while providing an alternative to the “hyper-commercialization of the holidays.”

This year’s program features many familiar artists, including PVCC professor Fenella Belle whose latest creation, “Border Lines,” enigmatically promises an “exploration of the role lines play in dividing and connecting us.”

Choreographer and filmmaker Shandoah Goldman returns to present two short, COVID-related films in a drive-in format at the Woolen Mills Chapel, and C. James Cunningham’s piece, “SOS,” will “be floating in the sky above the Downtown Mall,” says Yates.

Yates and Solla say that even when the arts world returns to normal, they’ll consider keeping the multiple locations as a new level of interactivity. Solla doesn’t anticipate pushback from the artists, who are a “peculiar breed…ready to try anything.”

They were, after all, amenable to this year’s changes, and willing to adapt so that a program intended to combat darkness could continue to do so in a particularly dim year. Solla says they all agreed: “We need the light, we need the love, we need the vision for the future.”