"Anora" is the opening-night movie at this year's Virginia Film Festival.
By Justin Humphreys and Tami Keaveny Images courtesy VFF
This year the Virginia Film Festival coincides with Halloween, and along with some great horror movies, the five-day program offers the escape of comedy, journeys to the unknown, classic stories retold, cautionary technology tales, and documented accounts of war, redemption, and environmental peril, plus invaluable on-stage discussions.
After exiting your seat, you can offer your opinion by casting a vote at a kiosk to rate the film you’ve seen (the people and projects on the following pages get our vote). And when the festival goes dark, you’ll leave the theater with roughly 36 hours before voting begins in the most consequential election of our time. So watch, listen, and vote, vote, vote—especially on November 5!—TK
Watch list
Memoir of a Snail (with discussion)
October 31 | Culbreth Theater Memoir of a Snail, the newest film from Australian writer-director-animator Adam Elliot, promises to be as challenging, deeply human, and character-driven as Elliot’s touching Mary and Max (2009). Filmed meticulously in labor-intensive stop-motion animation, Memoir of a Snail follows a twin brother and sister on their thorny path through childhood into adult life. Elliot’s adult-themed animation is full of pathos and wry humor, and is not recommended for small children. Listen for voice performances by outstanding talents like Dominique Pinon and Nick Cave.—JH
The Glassworker
November 2 | Violet Crown 1 & 2 Director-animator-composer Usman Riaz’s The Glassworker is not only his first feature, but also Pakistan’s first full-length, hand-drawn animated film. The influence of master animator Hayao Miyazaki is vividly apparent in The Glassworker’s overall style and design—there are few better living animators to draw inspiration from. This anti-war allegory is a reminder of the respect mature animation receives outside of the United States, and with hand-drawn animation being under-represented worldwide, let’s hope The Glassworker gets a broad American release.—JH
Amadeus
November 1 | Violet Crown 3 In 1984, director Milos Forman lavishly brought Peter Shaffer’s play Amadeus to the screen, and it caused a sensation with audiences and at the Oscars. It tells the largely fictionalized story of a rivalry between the manic but prodigiously brilliant Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (Tom Hulce) and Salieri (F. Murray Abraham). The two leads give arguably the signature performances of their careers, and are backed by an excellent supporting cast including a young Cynthia Nixon, Simon Callow, and the late Vincent Schiavelli. Among the film’s many other virtues is the extraordinary old-age makeup by the incomparable Dick Smith.—JH
Luther: Never Too Much(with discussion)
November 1 | Culbreth Theater Dawn Porter’s documentary Luther: Never Too Much chronicles the life of R&B legend Luther Vandross. The film’s title is derived from the eponymous track of Vandross’ first solo album—the first of 11 Vandross records to go platinum. Porter traces the late “Velvet Voice’s” career, from his beginnings as a backup singer for David Bowie, Chaka Khan, and Chic, to his own highly influential and successful career. Among many other topics, she explores why he was so private about his homosexuality, and the criticism he endured for gaining weight. The rich retrospective reveals how the popular image of public figures is often deeply skewed.—JH
Saturday Night(with discussion)
November 2 | Violet Crown 5 The Not Ready for Prime Time Players broke into the cultural zeitgeist when “NBC’s Saturday Night” premiered on October 11, 1975, with George Carlin as the host, and musical guests Billy Preston and Janis Ian. Jason Reitman’s Saturday Night dramatizes the backstage chaos, personality clashes, and wild antics that led up to the moment when Chevy Chase looked into the camera and shouted, “Live from New York, it’s Saturday Night!” for the very first time. Jon Batiste is behind the film’s music, Matt Wood stars as John Belushi, Dylan O’Brien is Dan Aykroyd, and Emmy Award-winner Lamorne Morris who plays Garrett Morris (no relation) will be on stage for a post-screening discussion.—TK
From his first film, Baby It’s You, directed by John Sayles, to his recent role as Dr. Martin “Papa” Brenner in Netflix’s “Stranger Things” and a star turn in Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer, Matthew Modine’s accomplishments in film, television, and on stage define the range of his talent. In addition to Sayles, the Golden Globe Award-winning actor has also worked with directors Oliver Stone, Stanley Kubrick, Robert Altman, Spike Lee, and Jonathan Demme, to name a few. He’s been directing since the ’90s, and is the co-founder of the production company Cinco Dedos Peliculas. At the Virginia Film Festival, Modine will participate in discussions following the screening of 1984’s Birdy, and the documentary I Hope This Helps!. He answered a few questions for us by email ahead of his appearances.—TK
C-VILLE Weekly: What attracted you to produce the documentary I Hope This Helps!?
Matthew Modine: My producing partner at Cinco Dedos Peliculas, Adam Rackoff, knows that I am curious about consciousness. What is it? When did we become conscious of our consciousness? When did humans become self-aware of our existence?
These are impossible questions to answer and a fascinating subject to delve through. I believe human consciousness has slowly evolved over millions of years. By contrast, artificial intelligence is pretty much brand new, and something that is evolving way, way, way too fast. If we get this wrong—if we don’t have guardrails in place—we will not be able to put this horse back in the barn.
If you have concerns about the consolidation of power, the distribution of news and current events, ‘deepfakes,’ the freedom of movement, you should watch this movement closely.
There’s no way to know what countries the U.S. is continually suspicious of—aren’t already way ahead of the west in this space. “Artificial General Intelligence” is already happening. For sure. This means AI is now able to improve itself—with no human intervention. That should concern all of us. I don’t think it’s hyperbole to sound the bell of caution. I Hope This Helps! humorously illustrates where we are, and where this AI shop is headed.
You’ve worked with an impressive list of directors. Who stands out?
Many of the directors I’ve had the pleasure of working with are still living. So I wouldn’t want to pick favorites. Suffice it to say, I’ve learned something useful from each of them.
What role has had the most personal effect on you?
Maybe Louden Swain, from Vision Quest. It’s a coming-of-age story about a high-school wrestler. I learned from the experience how important it is to maintain focus and that whatever it is we hope to accomplish demands effort and self-determination. Some folks are gifted with natural genius and athletic abilities. But even those who are blessed have to put in the effort to master a craft.
How did you prepare to play Dr. Martin Brenner in “Stranger Things”?
First off, I do not enjoy playing “bad” guys. I get no pleasure from it. The Duffer Brothers, Ross and Matt, wrote terrific scripts and gave me space to create a person that is a conundrum. Someone the audience would be confused by. His look, clothing, hair, speech pattern, that was good fun to pull together with the show’s creative team.
In 1985, New York magazine noted that you and Matthew Broderick were fine actors, but not part of the Brat Pack. Did the Brat Pack label have any effect on your roles or social engagements at the time?
Matthew and I, simply by living in NYC, would have been 3,000 miles away from that silliness. Matthew is a very talented and disciplined theater actor. If he was going out in those days, I’d bet it was with legends from the theater world. I was busy going from film project to film project, two years in England with Stanley Kubrick, during the height of the Brat Pack era. There wasn’t any time in our lives for being in a club.
You are known for your work as an environmental activist. What is your current focus?
Being an environmentalist isn’t a hobby. It’s a demanding commitment to protecting the entirety of nature. The world is like a spider’s web and what we do to a single thread has an impact upon the entire web.
An oil tanker sinking doesn’t just affect the place it sunk and spilled its millions of gallons. The repercussions are far-reaching. The nuclear disaster at Fukushima is an example of how a nuclear explosion in a considerably small location can affect the entire Pacific Ocean and all the creatures within it.
So my focus is global. We have searched the universe looking for “Goldilocks” planets—places that resemble our home—and so far found none. This should magnify our responsibility to protecting all life on the earth and the soil, air, and water, and demanding peaceful resolution through diplomacy to or momentary differences.
What was your reaction when you discovered that the Trump campaign used clips of you from the movie Full Metal Jacket in an online post?
I think my statement on the subject covers how I felt.
[In his statement published in Entertainment Weekly, Modine said, “… Trump has twisted and profoundly distorted Kubrick’s powerful anti-war film into a perverse, homophobic, and manipulative tool of propaganda.”]
With such an accomplished career, what would you change?
We cannot change the past. So it’s a total waste of time to live in regret. I’m here. I’m here now. Believe it or not, 99 percent of life is trying to accomplish something so that we are appreciated, maybe even loved, for what we happily give to others. That means for me, joyfully and gleefully doing for others.
ByLisa Provence, Kristie Smeltzer, and CM Turner Images courtesy VFF
Mapping the movement
Georgia O’Keeffe: the Brightness of Light
November 3 | Culbreth Theatre With discussion
Academy and Emmy Award-winning independent filmmaker Paul Wagner has directed many amazing documentaries that shed light on subjects in American culture. His new film, Georgia O’Keeffe: the Brightness of Light, will screen at this year’s VAFF with a panel discussion, followed by a post-screening reception with the filmmakers at The Fralin Museum of Art at UVA.
Completed over two years during the COVID-19 pandemic shutdown, the film was shot in nearly every location in the United States where the “mother of American modernism” lived and worked. Through diligent efforts in researching and interviewing, Wagner and his team, including Ellen Casey Wagner, uncovered rare instances of the artist in archival film footage that bring O’Keeffe to life for a new generation of fine-art enthusiasts.
One of the most significant artists of the 20th century, O’Keeffe is known for her contributions to the Modernist movement, including her radical depictions of flowers and scenes set in the American Southwest. However, it’s O’Keeffe’s connections to Charlottesville that Wagner believes will leave the largest impact on local audiences.
In 2018, The Fralin mounted the exhibition “Unexpected O’Keeffe: The Virginia Watercolors and Later Paintings,” covering the five summers the artist spent in Charlottesville between 1912 and 1916. “Not only was this of interest as a largely unknown local story, it turned out that her time in Charlottesville attending and teaching at UVA marked a very important moment in her development as an artist,” Wagner says. “It was here at UVA that she discovered the theories of Arthur Wesley Dow that liberated her approach to art from the strictures of 19th-century European realism.”
Wagner was drawn to O’Keeffe as a subject because of the local connection, but also because of the enormous amount of information now available about the artist. Since director Perry Miller Adato released his 1977 documentary Georgia O’Keeffe, countless articles, exhibitions, and books have been produced covering her oeuvre and contributions to culture. “For these reasons,” Wagner says, “we now have a completely different, and deeper, understanding of who O’Keeffe was as an artist, as a woman, and as an American.”—CMT
Mother’s moon
Nightbitch
November 2 | The Paramount Theater With discussion
Screenwriter and director Marielle Heller’s Nightbitch, adapted from Rachel Yoder’s 2021 debut novel of the same name, chronicles the days of Mother (Amy Adams), a professional artist who pauses her career to be a stay-at-home toddler mom in the ‘burbs while Husband (Scoot McNairy) travels frequently for work. Mother also happens to be turning into a dog.
Billed as a blend of comedy and horror, the film uses magical realism to take the transformations of a mother’s experience a step further than what most—if word on the street is to be believed—go through. However, the extended metaphor at Nightbitch’s heart seems apt. While not a mother myself, a year-long stint as a nanny to three boys under 6 had me eating scraps off others’ plates, sniffing butts, and occasionally barking at the moon. But here’s the thing: I could clock out—something Mother seems desperate to have the chance to do in Nightbitch’s trailer as she aggressively washes a cat’s bum in the tub, bemoaning, “Nobody in this family can clean their own butts!”
In Nightbitch, the audience sees a woman grappling with the messy aspects of parenting, which differ from the joys of motherhood—if greeting cards are to be believed. The film relies on voiceover (as novel adaptations are wont do) and alternate versions of moments (fantasy vs. reality) to show the tension between Mother’s interior and exterior selves. But her transformation doesn’t seem to be all bad, with moments of authenticity ensuing as Mother embraces her new, more feral, self. Early reviews laud six-time Academy Award-nominee Adams’ performance, praising her bone-deep commitment to the role. That feedback bodes well for the film, because the audience’s belief in Mother’s transformation hinges on Adams as the foundation they’ve built this tail, I mean tale, upon.—KS
Surviving the system
Juvenile: Five Stories
November 2 | Violet Crown 5
Three million young people are arrested every year, says Juvenile: Five Stories director Joann Self Selvidge. “Not all of them end up incarcerated, but all of them end up entangled in these systems that weigh them down, and keep them from realizing their potential.”
Selvidge didn’t start out to be an award-winning documentary filmmaker. The UC Berkeley comparative literature major just liked to tell stories.
Returning to her hometown of Memphis, Tennessee, she found plenty of stories to tell, starting with WLOK, the first Black-owned and -operated radio station in Memphis. “I had been doing oral histories,” she says, and she realized the WLOK story would “make an amazing documentary.”
Inspiration for Juvenile: Five Stories came from a public defender friend who was working on a jail diversion program for people with serious mental health issues. Selvidge was drawn to those stories. “I had personal experience with mental health institutionalization when I was in high school,” she says. And she wanted to explore how young people get access to care and “navigate these systems set up to criminalize them.”
Forming the relationships to make the film took years. “Things have changed dramatically in the world of documentary filmmaking,” she notes. There were always ethical practices, especially when dealing with minors. “Now there are equity practices to give [the young people] more agency in how their story was told.”
Through a Twitter callout to her connections with youth justice leaders across the country, Selvidge and her co-director Sarah Fleming found Romeo, Ariel, Michael, Shimaine, and Ja’Vaune. They came from different parts of the country and they all had different paths into the system: violence, sexual abuse, home instability, mental illness, substance abuse.
Finding Michael, the only white kid of the five, was the most difficult because “wealth and whiteness keep you out of the system,” says Selvidge.
The five were between 18 and 23 when they told her their stories. She hired young actors to tell their backstories in impressionistic, cinematic sequences. “We were dealing with histories of extreme trauma,” she explains. “We had to make decisions about how we’re going to portray that … We were very intentional for this film not to be, like, trauma porn.”
The five young people whose stories Selvidge documented seem to be doing amazingly well. “They’re all strong because they survived,” she says.
Two of them—Shimaine Holley, founder of Change Is Inevitable, and Romeo Gonzalez, a re-entry specialist and mentor—will appear with Selvidge at the November 2 Violet Crown screening.
“If there’s one thing I learned over and over and over again,” says Selvidge, “the best way for systems to reduce their harm and to change their policies and practices is when young people are given the power and resources to be in positions where they’re heard and can hold groups accountable. That’s when things start to change.”—LP
Thriller with a side of horror trivia
Catch a Killer
October 30 | Violet Crown 3
Writer and director Teddy Grennan doesn’t like blood. While living in Los Angeles, he wrote an animated feature called Holy Cow, about a bull who realizes his future is on the grill and with the help of a caterpillar, attempts to escape to India. The film, full of goodwill and karma, didn’t get made and the experience was frustrating, says Grennan.
His breakthrough realization: “Violence translates into every language.” And that the appetite for horror is insatiable.
After “boohooing into my drink, I wanted to move into bloody thrillers,” says Grennan. He shot Ravage in Virginia with Bruce Dern, and says the movie has done well financially.
“I knew going into this if I was doing a lo-fi film, it was not going to be about my first break-up or my mom or my dad,” he explains. “I was going to make it about blood and guts, and I knew I could get people’s money I’ve known for years and make enough to pay it back.”
In the opening montage, the addresses of crime scenes seem vaguely familiar: Elm Street. Amityville Circle. Christine Street. Not surprisingly, the movie’s wannabe detective and horror buff Otto soon begins to connect the dots on the trail of a serial murderer.
Catch a Killer, Grennan’s fourth film, is also a story of “star-crossed lovers,” he suggests. Winsome actors Sam Brooks and Tu Morrow play Otto and his pregnant girlfriend, Lex, as they set up house and try to figure out what’s next in the grisly tableau of murders.
Viewers will recognize a couple of notable Charlottesville locations, but the setting is an anonymous city. And as a bonus for horror fans, can you spot Joshua Leonard from The Blair Witch Project?
Twelve years ago Grennan and his wife moved to Somerset in Orange County, next door to the scene of the notorious alleged 2001 poisoning of Ham Somerville by his wife, known as Black Widow, at Mt. Athos.
He’s made four movies in Virginia, including Wicked Games, but his fifth film will be shot in Kentucky, because he had a tough time rounding up a film crew here. “This was a bear,” he says. “After COVID, the crews went away,” at least from central Virginia.
He describes his next effort, The Growing Season, as Witness meets The Blind Eye, with a good dose of Training Day.
Catch a Killer has already garnered accolades: the audience award for Spotlight Feature at the Nashville Film Festival, and Best Thriller Feature at the Atlanta Horror Film Festival.
“I knew it would be good business—if I didn’t botch it—doing thrillers,” he says. And one of these days, maybe he’ll get to make that lo-fi movie about his first girlfriend in Vermont.—LP
Visual concepts
Designing the Production featuring Kalina Ivanov and David Crank
November 2 | Irving Theater in the CODE Building
Production design is an integral aspect of filmmaking that largely defines the look and feel of the world on screen. Working closely with directors and cinematographers, production designers are responsible for developing the aesthetics of sets, locations, props, costumes, and more that allow viewers to immerse themselves in cinematic stories. This work is essential in communicating mood and driving narratives and character arcs established in a film’s script.
Tyler Coates, an editor at The Hollywood Reporter, moderates a panel featuring 2024 VAFF Craft Award-winner Kalina Ivanov (“The Penguin,” “Lovecraft Country,” The Boys in the Boat) and Richmond-based Academy Award-nominated production designer David Crank (Knives Out, The Master, Inherent Vice). The panel will discuss the development of visual concepts, scouting and choosing locations, the manufacturing of physical sets, historical research, and defining the aesthetic environments for film and television productions.
Crank has worked behind the scenes in the entertainment industry for more than 30 years, coming to film and television sets after designing scenery for theater productions from high school through his graduate studies at Carnegie Mellon University. As a former studio art student, Crank says the skills needed for drawing and painting are the same as those needed for production design, with the two disciplines constantly influencing each other within his practice, “either in intent or in skills.”
Designing for directors such as Paul Thomas Anderson, Paul Greengrass, Rian Johnson, and Terrence Malick, Crank is drawn to working with filmmakers who write their own material, and are thus primarily concerned with storytelling. “That is where the meat of the script is,” Crank says, “and as a designer, good storytelling is what gives you the most room for imagination and creating.”
Crank has also worked with two Academy Award-nominated production designers with Charlottesville connections: Jack Fisk (Killers of the Flower Moon, The Revenant, There Will be Blood) and Ruth De Jong (Oppenheimer, Nope, “Yellowstone”). “I think we three have a very similar way of hands-on working and certainly the same sense of humor,” says Crank. “We each have continued on successfully with our own styles without each other, but that is hugely due to Jack’s influence and guidance.”
Living in Virginia has afforded the production designer a unique experience that’s shaped his life as much as his career. “It’s given me a life full of friends who mostly aren’t in the same industry as me, which makes for very interesting dinner conversations,” Crank says. “I think it has also contributed to a certain outsider mentality, which for me is fine.”—CMT
Working with both parents and students, Price Thomas aims to end generational poverty. Photo by Eze Amos.
As the executive director of City of Promise, Price Thomas is working to improve education access in Charlottesville. But for the born-and-raised local, this job is more than a profession—it’s personal.
“This is Charlottesville, a part of my story,” he says, “and I want the next chapter to be marked by something better than the one previous.”
Located in the heart of the 10th and Page neighborhood, City of Promise has been working toward interrupting local cycles of generational poverty through education for more than a decade.
“A lot of what we’re experiencing are reverberations of issues that are going on around the state, around the country,” Thomas says. “But those aren’t sidewalks I’ve walked, those aren’t people I know, those aren’t schools that I went to.”
“There is a piece of this that is objectively personal for me … I can’t do this and go home, because this is home for me.”
The son of two local educators, Thomas attended Charlottesville City and Albemarle County schools. After graduating from William & Mary, where he was a four-year starter on the soccer team, Thomas played professional soccer in Europe before returning stateside to work as a copy editor. Over the last several years, he’s set down roots in Charlottesville, where he is raising two children with his wife, Caitlin.
Thomas’ work with City of Promise is only his latest position in nonprofits. Prior to joining COP in May 2023, he worked with The Montpelier Foundation and United Way of Greater Charlottesville.
City of Promise takes a “whole family” approach to education, and believes that one of the first steps to improve education access (and disrupt generational poverty) is to meet families’ needs by providing resources or connecting people with the appropriate nonprofit. Supplied photo.
“Charlottesville is a small town, and the nonprofit world of Charlottesville is even smaller,” he says. Through his work with The Montpelier Foundation and United Way, he met and learned from other nonprofit leaders, including previous directors of City of Promise. In his 18 months on the job at COP, he’s been figuring out what unique “flavor” he brings to the organization.
City of Promise “started way before me, will live on and succeed far past me,” he says. “But in this moment of time, what is my flavor? … I want us to be both taken very seriously and also very approachable.” Transparency and authenticity between City of Promise and the community are all priorities for the executive director, but not at the expense of agency. “We’ll walk alongside [community members], but we’ll also hold them accountable.”
In the beginning
Inspired by a work group of the Charlottesville Dialogue on Race in 2010, City of Promise developed through a Department of Education Promise Neighborhood planning grant of $470,000 that was awarded to Children Youth and Family Services in 2011. The national, place-based initiative bolsters communities experiencing barriers to education success, including economic hardship and disparity, through funding and recommending strategies and solutions.
City of Promise did not receive implementation funding through the DOE Promise Neighborhood program, but the initial grant was enough to get the nonprofit off the ground. Over the last decade, COP’s focus on improving education access and outcomes has remained at the core of its mission—especially in the area of literacy.
Despite district reading scores hovering near the state average, Charlottesville City Schools have one of the highest literacy gaps in Virginia. As a district, 65 percent of its students achieved proficiency in reading for the 2023-2024 school year, compared to a state average of 73 percent. The data breakdown shows a more striking achievement gap: During the 2023-2024 school year, 40 percent of Black CCS students passed English reading testing, compared to 89 percent of their white peers.
Supplied photo.
Coming into City of Promise, Thomas took the opportunity to refocus the nonprofit’s offerings, taking a “whole family” approach to education access.
“It’s a mindset of helping our community members—parents and students—to feel both supported and challenged to that level of excellence,” says Thomas. “I don’t care where you came from, or how much money you have, or the car you drive, or the clothes you wear, the color of your skin—your job’s to be great. My job’s to help you be great. But ultimately, you’re going to leave the school reading the same books as that kid from Rugby Road, full stop. Period. The way you get there might be a little different, and that’s okay.”
City of Promise cornerstone programs include the Pathway Coaching, Dreambuilders, and LaunchPad Initiative, a pilot program in partnership with CCS and the University of Virginia education school that deploys the Virginia Community School Framework. The LaunchPad Initiative addresses non-academic barriers to support under-resourced students and families, thus improving outcomes. While currently only at Trailblazer (formerly Venable) Elementary, COP hopes to expand the initiative to the remaining CCS elementary schools.
The LaunchPad Initiative is the earliest direct (that is, not accessed through a parent already receiving coaching) program offered by City of Promise.
“It’s about quality at every developmental level. … Starting earlier is critically important,” Thomas says. “Often our theory of intervention is a little too late. We’re starting a little too late, and we’re working uphill. As we start to shape ourselves as an organization, as we start to partner with other nonprofits and for profits, there’s always that little bell that goes off that’s like, we’ve got to do this quicker.”
Similar to the LaunchPad Initiative, COP also offers support through Pathway Coaching. Both offerings aim to bolster students’ academic and socioemotional growth. Coaches employed by the nonprofit mentor students between fifth and 12th grade, helping with access to academic and extracurricular opportunities.
Dreambuilders, City of Promise’s only program that requires an application, fosters family and student success by providing parents and their children with tools for self-sufficiency, including tailored instruction and microfinancing of $5,000. The program utilizes evidence-based resources like the National Center for Families Learning frameworks, but takes an individualized approach tailored to participant needs.
“Everything should feel like it fits together; these are not intended to be three distinct programs. They are really intended to be kind of three self-reinforcing pieces of the same whole,” says Thomas. “If our adults are more efficacious and more confident, that’s great for our kids, who are receiving a whole host of high-quality services.”
Beyond programming, students and families involved in the LaunchPad Initiative, Pathway Coaching, or Dreambuilders can access resources through City of Promise’s Gateway Services. While the application-based financial support service is a critical component of COP’s network, the nonprofit is also helping community members by acting as a convener of resources.
Getting resourceful
Meeting participants’ basic needs, whether through directly providing resources or connecting people with the appropriate nonprofit, is a key first step in improving education access and disrupting generational poverty.
Navigating Charlottesville’s expansive network of nonprofits can be confusing, but Thomas says City of Promise is uniquely positioned, literally and strategically, to help community members locate and access the right resources. The nonprofit’s location in the 10th and Page neighborhood allows not only more convenient access for many of the students and families it serves, but for the organization to more effectively build relationships and trust within the community.
“City of Promise remains an intimate, proximal organization that is able to be nimble and is able to have more of a finger on the pulse,” says Thomas. “That is what’s most important to us.”
Addressing barriers beyond the classroom is a key part of COP’s work to improve education access. While the nonprofit can’t fully resource every program participant alone, it can help connect people with other local organizations—including ReadyKids for teen mental health, Network2Work for jobs and job training, and Cav Futures Foundation for mentoring.
Supplied photo.
By more intentionally utilizing the large nonprofit community in the Charlottesville area, City of Promise hopes to collaboratively help families access resources in a way that is both more effective and more expansive.
“For these kids, for these families, it’s not just housing, it’s not just workforce development, it’s not just child care, health care; it’s everything altogether all the time,” he says. “We have to understand that we can’t isolate these tenants in this constellation of care. … We have to figure out how to link arms with other community organizations.”
Meeting participants’ immediate needs while simultaneously building a more proactive support network is a difficult balancing act for any organization, including City of Promise.
“We’re fighting this battle between people with immediate needs that we need to react to, but also not doing that at the expense of being thoughtful about what happens tomorrow,” he says.
At the end of the day, the quantitative, simple answer for how the nonprofit can most effectively help community members is money. Whether through funding for programs or resources, everything boils down to cash flow. But to make a meaningful dent in disrupting cycles of generational poverty, Thomas says City of Promise needs community buy-in and feedback.
“It’s not cheap, and I don’t think it should be. I don’t think we should pretend the folks who live in public housing and these kids and these families should have access to anything less than the rest of us, than your kids, my kids, and all these other little knuckleheads. … That’s [why] I’m here: to kick and scream for [it],” he says. “I think it’s my job now to be the loudest person in the room, but I don’t expect that to be the case for a long time. I don’t want it to be the case for a long time.”
An agentic community and participants not only boosts individual success, but helps City of Promise learn what is and isn’t working directly from the people it hopes to help.
“I think sometimes [nonprofits] say we’re the helpers, we know what the help is. … Feedback has to be incorporated and I want [people] to feel like that’s available,” says Thomas. “The demonstration of success is not how I feel about it or whether people liked that I did it. It’s, does it work for the people for whom it is intended to work for? And at the end of the day, if we can’t say yes to that, we gotta find a way to make that happen.”
Thomas is under no illusions that City of Promise will end generational poverty in his time as executive director, but he is fighting to leave the nonprofit—and Charlottesville—better through his work.
“I want to make sure that we leave this in a way that we furthered the mission, that we’ve moved it forward, that we’ve gotten closer to whatever that huge goal is, that first pie in the sky—we’re going to end generational poverty,” he says. “We have to be very clear that it’s not going to happen today, tomorrow or next week. It’s going to happen by a mosaic of 1,000 little things every single day.”
Draft horse Big John stands at an imposing 20 hands tall (that’s 6'8"). Like Colby, he lives on the farm as an “organization ambassador,” and won’t be put up for adoption. Photo by Tristan Williams.
Colby’s Crew started with one horse and one decision from the heart.
Colby, a 4-year-old chestnut stallion with white markings, had run out of options. Allison (Ally) Smith, an experienced equestrian studying nursing and training horses on the side, saw an online post about him: “Bound for slaughter. Needs experienced handler.”
“He was flashy and beautiful, and they were only asking $875,” Ally recalls. She bought him, sight unseen.
Ally’s wife Olivia, who is active on social media, posted a video on Facebook of Colby in the kill pen (where animals are held before being shipped to slaughter). “This was July 2020, the middle of the pandemic, when TikTok was just taking off,” she says, “and the video blew up.”
Thirty days later, the shipper arrived at Ally’s family’s Warrenton farm with Colby. The horse was spirited, she had been told; in reality, he was almost feral. The truck driver was afraid to go into the van, so Ally walked in with a lead rope and brought Colby out. “The shipper’s mouth dropped open,” Olivia recalls. “Ally was yelling at her father, ‘Close the gate! Close the gate!’ because she knew if Colby got loose in the field we’d never catch him.”
That’s when Ally turned to Olivia and said, “I’m going to ride him.”
Ally went out to the paddock 10 times a day, working to build Colby’s trust. He was in poor condition and had clearly been mistreated, kicking and biting at any touch. But Ally’s patience and calm won out, as she and Colby developed a deep bond. Within a month he was letting her ride him. Olivia filmed and posted the whole process, and created an internet phenom. By early 2021, Ally and Olivia decided to take on another rescue; then came two more. And then they met Big John.
“We went to an auction in West Virginia one weekend in April 2021,” Ally recalls. “We were just going to look, strolling around, and I went by this stall and said, ‘Oh my God!’ I hadn’t been around draft horses before—this guy didn’t even fit in the stall.” She ran to get her wife, and when they came back a girl was riding Big John around.
Ally Smith and Colby, the horse she rescued in 2020, who later became an internet phenom. Photo by Tristan Williams.
“I looked up, and up, and up,” Olivia says. (Big John is a Belgian, the second-largest draft breed, and he’s 20 hands—which is 6’8″ at the shoulder.) “He was so lame, and he was exhausted. His feet were in terrible shape, he had scars, he had sores, but he was trying to do whatever was asked of him.”
This time it was Olivia who said, “I’m going to buy that horse.”
She started posting Big John videos and pleas for donations, and her online followers responded: “We had $5,000 pledged in 15 minutes.” Fortunately, their trailer was large enough for Big John (“I was scared at first, but he was so gentle,” says Ally), and a neighbor had a field available for his quarantine. When he was released into the field, the giant Belgian who had been worked almost to death took a long roll and then a good look around. “Then he kind of collapsed,” recalls Olivia. “He had been drugged to get him through the auction.”
That was when the pair decided they wanted to save horses that had reached the bottom.
“We hadn’t started out thinking of this as a career,” Olivia says. “But the internet was pushing us along, saying, ‘You need to start a 501(c)(3).’” Colby’s Crew Rescue was founded in 2021, and in 2022 the couple moved to Keswick to build the organization, while Ally continues her graduate nursing studies at UVA. This year CCR saved more than 600 animals, buying them before slaughter or through owner surrenders.
The two women began going to kill pens as well. They never knew what they would find there. They once discovered 13 Belgians waiting to be shipped. (Draft horses bring a good price when you’re selling meat by the pound.)
Olivia had had it. “I said, ‘We’re buying all of them.’ I went online and stayed online until we had raised enough to pay for the first four to six months of care for every one of those horses.”
A young mare facing severe medical issues, Sterling recently underwent eye and dental surgery. Photo by Tristan Williams.
That has become CCR’s methodology. Getting a rescue horse from purchase through quarantine, vet evaluation and routine treatment, rehabilitation, and training costs on average $4,500; CCR’s online ask is calculated to cover both the animal’s purchase price and its maintenance cost through adoption. Clearly, that figure can increase substantially if the animal has serious injuries or illness, is pregnant, or needs extensive training, so CCR also charges an adoption fee. Still, some animals are just not suitable for adoption, and at any one time, CCR has about 50 animals in sanctuary farms, whether for hospice or retirement. And then there are the 10 or so equines that will stay at CCR as “organization ambassadors”—like Colby and Big John.
Equine rescue, while heartwarming, takes an enormous amount of labor and expert help. CCR works closely with vets at Virginia Tech’s Marion duPont Scott Equine Medical Center in Leesburg, Virginia, and the University of Pennsylvania’s New Bolton Center. (One of the largest kill pens is in New Holland, Pennsylvania, close to Lancaster and Amish country, where a large percentage of the rescue animals come.)
CCR arranges for a vet to be on site to triage animals as soon as they are purchased. Unless they need emergency care, the animals are sent to one of five quarantine farms CCR contracts with for 60 to 90 days of quarantine and further evaluation. If humane euthanasia is necessary, it’s done by a licensed vet.
Every animal gets a vet check weekly (more often if needed); a farrier visit every six weeks for hoof care; and a full wellness check including grooming and lots of love every day. Once it’s fit, the animal is brought to the Keswick facility to be evaluated by Ally and Olivia, who assign the horses to one of CCR’s network of trainers for at least 30 days of training to get them ready for adoption.
Every CCR adopter gets vetted, including home photos and veterinarian references. The adoption contract is strict. Every animal has been microchipped, and will be tracked by CCR; monthly photo updates are required; the adopter has to keep CCR informed of any sale or transfer; and there’s a $10,000 penalty for breaking the contract. For its part, CCR will take back any animal for any reason, and if that animal requires surgery or humane euthanasia, CCR will help cover the cost.
Every Colby’s Crew Rescue horse gets a vet check weekly, a farrier visit for hoof care, and a full wellness check before being brought to the Keswick facility to be evaluated by Ally and Olivia. Photo by Tristan Williams.
Ally’s equine expertise and ability to bond with weary, sick, and traumatized animals is at the heart of Colby’s Crew, while Olivia’s impressive social media skills and ability to capture the pathos and triumphs of its work have made CCR famous. The Crew has almost 4 million followers on Facebook, TikTok, and Instagram who donate, share, and devotedly follow the rescued horses. “We raise all our money online, through donations—we don’t do solicitations, we don’t have corporate sponsors,” says Olivia. “Ninety-five percent of the money we take in goes back into buying and caring for our rescues.”
CCR gets some online criticism claiming it is supporting kill pens by buying from them, but the couple doesn’t see it that way. They see their job as saving sentient beings that deserve better than a truck ride to a cruel death. Eliminating the slaughter pipeline will likely take public pressure and political action; last year, the U.S. House of Representatives considered a bill to ban equine slaughter or export for human consumption, and this year animal advocates in Canada are pushing for a ban on the export of live horses for food.
Animal-lovers, of course, know that CCR’s equines are actually rescued. Online scammers post kill-pen photos with pleas for donations to “save this animal” when the horse has already been sold, or killed, or never existed.
Happily, in the last few years CCR has built an enormous community that is invested in Colby, Big John, and all their equine friends. Sure, these fans respond to calls for money—but they also clamor for updates on Sterling, a young mare facing severe medical issues; on Dudley, the newborn donkey who needed emergency care for deformed legs; and Onyx, the big black draft mule whose brother Obsidian was rescued as well. Visitors and adopters who come to the Keswick farm ask to say hello to Big John and his understudy, Big Sam, who is only 18 hands (6′ tall). And they are excited to see each and every animal that will be rescued next.
… It takes a village
Perhaps this area’s best-known equine rescue is Hope’s Legacy, also named for a special horse. “Hope was an off-the-track thoroughbred,” says Maya Proulx, Hope’s Legacy executive director. “She’d been off the track only six months, and I was her fifth owner. She was one of the sweetest mares I ever met.” The organization’s name honors Hope and all the horses that might easily have been written off.
A Nelson County native and lifelong horse person, Proulx founded Hope’s Legacy as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit in 2008. All its rescue animals have been donated. About half are “owner surrenders,” animals at risk of being auctioned off when their owners die, or face serious illness or financial setbacks, while the rest have been seized by law enforcement in cases of neglect or abuse.
“Most animal control offices don’t have facilities for large animals,” Proulx says, “so if there are horses involved, they have to scramble. I wanted to serve as a resource for them.” Hope’s Legacy has taken in neglected animals from the 2015 Peaceable Farm raid in Orange County; a 2016 Nottoway County seizure that included pregnant mares; and a 2023 Shenandoah County case involving 98 neglected thoroughbreds.
The organization also runs twice-yearly training sessions that are open to animal control officers from all over the state. “Virginia has no requirement for equine training for these people, and many don’t know anything about handling horses,” says Proulx.
At the moment, Hope’s Legacy has 74 horses in rescue—35 living on its 172-acre primary farm in Afton, and the rest in foster homes. Proulx credits the organization’s network of vets, fosterers, and trainers, as well as “120 incredibly dedicated volunteers” who do everything from feeding (two shifts every day) and barn care, to working with the horses on being haltered, led, and handled. One of the feeding shift volunteers has fundraising experience, and now works full-time raising money for Hope’s Legacy and its equines.
Hope’s Legacy runs a variety of activities to build community awareness and generate donations, as well as educational programs for kids (including the popular Books at the Barn). “Part of our mission is to end neglect and abuse,” says Proulx, “and that starts with education.”
What do we always say? If you’ve got it, haunt it—and Charlottesville’s got “it” in spades, as long as “it” is a frightening amount of Halloween (and pre-Halloween) fun. You’ve got just over three weeks to drink in all the boos you can handle, and we’ve scared up the best options in (and out of, if you’ve got your broom handy) town. Happy hauntings!
Let’s boo this!
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While we prefer to gorge on Laffy Taffy, bite-sized Snickers, and Dubble Bubble, we know some of you crave a little, shall we say, balance. Don your costume for the YMCA Gatorade Halloween Hustle—a family-friendly 10k run (or two-mile walk, which we hear includes treats and surprises) and sweat out the sugar. Proceeds from the event support YMCA financial assistance, so everyone has access to the facility. $40-75, 8:30-10:30am. October 26, Brooks Family YMCA. piedmontymca.org
Poison pen
You don’t have to write the great American novel to gain notoriety around these parts. Instead, enter C-VILLE’s annual Two- Sentence Horror Story Contest and hear your words read aloud by actors from Live Arts theater (and published in the October 30 issue of C-VILLE). Remember: two sentences only, by the stroke of midnight on October 11. Visit bit.ly/2024cville horrorstorycontest to enter.
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Yappy Halloween!
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Three for the doggos
Strut Your Mutt Halloween Pageant
A benefit for Caring for Creatures, The Shops at Stonefield’s annual pageant includes a K-9 costume contest (with cash prizes!), trick-or-treat goodie bags, a raffle for handmade quilts by award-winning quilter Lolly Schiffman, live music, and vendors. $10-20, noon-4pm. October 19, The Shops at Stonefield. strutyourmutthalloweenpageant.org
Pups on parade
Here’s your chance to show off Fido in his Sherlock Holmes get-up and Fifi dressed as the cutest raccoon this side of the Ivy landfill. The annual Downtown Mall Doggie Howl-O-Ween pooch parade and costume contest has categories for the funniest, most creative, most Halloween-y, best group theme, and best in show. The evening also includes dog trick-or-treating, a photographer, a caricature artist, and $2,000 in raffles and prizes. Suggested donation of $15 benefits Hooves and Paws Animal Rescue, 5-8pm. October 25, Central Place. pawprintsboutique.com
Howl~O~Ween
Keswick Vineyards hosts its annual Howl-O-Ween event, where your furry friends come dressed in their cutest costumes and parade around (literally, there’s a puppy parade in the tasting room) for all to see. A costume contest follows, so tell your pals: Don’t be a haunt mess. Free, noon-4pm. October 27, Keswick Vineyards. keswickvineyards.com
Rock on
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Well these sure do sound like a ghould time.
Spooky Funk Halloween Party Music Pop~Up
Dance party alert! DJ Ryan (aka Kendall Street Company’s drummer) will spin the tunes all night—you come ready to party, drink, and dance your boo-ty (get it?) off. Free, 6-9pm. October 25, Flying Fox Winery & Vineyard. flyingfoxvineyard.com
Fifth Annual Samhuinn Fest at Thistlerock with House of Hamill & the Donnybrooks
For the uninitiated, Halloween began more than 2,000 years ago as an ancient Celtic fire festival, Samhuinn (“sow-in”). Thistlerock Mead Company pays homage to the holiday’s origins, carrying on the traditions. Participate in fairy house-building workshops, crown-making, pumpkin-carving, and more, plus live music and fire-cooked food. Free-$15, 2-10pm. October 26, Thistlerock Mead Company. thistlerockmead.com
Ghouls Night Out
IX Art Park hosts this Halloween-themed costume rave in its Looking Glass gallery. Be prepared for spooky and surreal to collide in this immersive environment with lights, installations, and cutting-edge DJ-led beats. $20-75, 8pm-2am. October 26, IX Art Park. ixartpark.org
The Pollocks Howl~o~ween
Local favorite The Pollocks take the stage for a “spine-tingling night of music and mayhem.” $15, 7-9:30pm. October 26, The Batesville Market. batesvillemarket.com
Hard Rock Halloween
Van Halen and Stone Temple Pilots tribute bands Bad Halen and Sex Type Things, respectively, take the stage at Rapture for a hard-rock show. Free, 10pm. October 31, Rapture. rapturerestaurant.com
Get your fill
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Nothing says Halloween like a stomach full of mini MilkyWays. Here’s where to grab a handful (and then some).
Downtown Safe Halloween
Ting Pavilion hosts this Charlottesville Parks & Rec-sponsored free event, with live performances and a DJ, plus crafts, games, a costume contest—whew! (There’s also a quiet zone for those who are scared of crowds.) Trick-or-treating downtown follows the event from 4-4:30pm. 2-4pm, October 19. Ting Pavilion. tingpavilion.com
Trick~or~Treating on the Lawn
A tradition that started in the late 1980s, Trick-or-Treating on the Lawn is for costumed kids of all ages, who are invited to visit each of the 54 Lawn rooms (and the Range) to scavenge for sweets. Free parking is available from 3:30pm at the John Paul Jones Arena garage, South and West lots, and from 4pm in the Culbreth Road garage. Hourly parking is also available nearby. Free, 5-7pm. October 31, The Lawn and Range, UVA. studentaffairs.virginia.edu
Party like a rock star
Annual favorite the Mock Stars Ball returns for two evenings of intentional camp paired with some serious rock chops. Local musicians combine forces to form supergroup cover bands and impersonate big-timers such as Billie Eilish, The Cranberries, Sublime, Backstreet Boys, Brooks & Dunn, Smashing Pumpkins, and many more in a benefit for The Shelter for Help in Emergency in honor of Whitney French. $20-25, 8pm. October 25 and 26, The Southern Café & Music Hall. thesoutherncville.com
Photo by Tristan Williams.
It’s craftacular
Ready to (cat) scratch your creative itch? These three spots have you covered this season.
Halloween Mask~Making Workshop
Head over the mountain for this one, a mask-making class at Staunton’s Art Hive. Ideal for all ages and skill levels, the two-hour workshop will take you through the process of creating a personalized mask, starting with design and sketching and ending with final touches like glitter, feathers, or fabric. All materials are provided. 11am-1pm, $15. October 12, Art Hive Creative Reuse and Art Center, Staunton. arthivestudio.net
Halloween Macrame
The Scrappy Elephant invites you to make a Halloween-themed (a ghost! a jack ‘o lantern!) macrame craft. Says the creative reuse retailer: “This simple project is perfect for those who have never done macrame as well as those more experienced.” For ages 12 and up. $30, 2:30-4pm. October 20, The Scrappy Elephant. scrappyelephant.com
Paint + Sip Costume Party
Follow the instructor’s directions to create your own version of Batty Moonrise, a spooky skyline featuring (did you know?) the only mammal that can truly fly. Pro Re Nata hosts—and a free drink is included in the price of your $45 ticket. Oh, and come dressed up—it’s on Hallow’s Eve Eve! 6-8pm, October 30. Pro Re Nata. blueridgebrushes.com
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Get lost
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Make your way through one of the Blue Ridge Mountain Maze’s corn mazes (now located at Blue Toad Hard Cider, near Wintergreen). Equipped with just a crayon and a blank survival guide, you’ll scout an escape path through five acres while taking in a panoramic view of the mountains. Tickets include access to plenty of family-friendly attractions, like the country store, farm animals, movies in the meadow, and the Farmy Fun Zone. Up for a more chilling experience? Come back at night to navigate the maze by moonlight.
Child’s play
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For two evenings, Virginia Discovery Museum opens its doors for Boo Bash—carnival games, activities, and crafts. Plus, says the museum’s website, “Conduct eccentric experiments with UVA L.E.A.D. in the Mad Science Lab, concoct kooky potions in the Witch’s Cabin, dance the boogie-man boogie in the glow-in-the-dark Monster Mash room.” Proceeds support VADM’s programming. $18-65, 5:30-7:30pm. October 24 and 25, Virginia Discovery Museum. vadm.org
Witch you were here
Halloween’s not all plastic pumpkins and sticky children (blech!). For those of you with more sophisticated taste, try these.
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Haunted Happy Hour
Before the October 18 showing of Live Arts’ What the Constitution Means to Me, enjoy spooky drinks and $20 tarot readings by Jess Bronson of Sealed in the Stars on the theater’s rooftop terrace. Free, 5:30pm. October 18, Live Arts. livearts.org
Fall of the House of Usher screening
Enjoy live piano accompaniment from UVA film lecturer Matt Marshall while watching Jean Epstein’s 1928 surrealist adaptation of Edgar Allan Poe’s maddening novel. $5, 8pm. October 24, The Looking Glass at IX Art Park. ixartpark.org
Witches Tea Service
On West Main, Cakebloom hosts a proper tea service, with a “spoookkkyyy menu of tricks and treats.” Not hard to solve that mystery: We’re betting cake will be on the table. Come dressed in your favorite costume and be entered to win a free eight-slice sampler or, if you’re a runner-up, a free five-slice sampler. $45, noon. October 26 and 27, Cakebloom. cakebloom.com
Frights, Flights, & Bites: Halloween @ Ethos
Ethos Wine & Tea invites you for a trick-or-treat-style tasting (plus snacks!) of natural and local wines and organic teas. The event will take place on the sidewalk outside the Main Street café. $30-35, 6-9pm. October 31, Ethos Wine & Tea. ethoswineandtea.com
Halloween Organ Concert
Drink in a short concert of spooky organ music, followed by an up-close tour of the organ itself (we assume organ the instrument, but it’s Halloween, so who knows?). All ages are welcome to this free event. 4-4:30pm, October 31. Westminster Presbyterian Church. westminsterorganconcertseries.org
It’s late afternoon on a soccer field, at the tail end of summer. The sinking sun is casting long shadows, and the last of the mosquitoes are homing in on anything with blood. But the women on the field don’t notice the little buzzers; they’re concentrating on their drills.
Running, passing, tackling—but this game is played with a ball shaped like a honeydew melon, and passing is two-handed, underhand, always backward. To tackle, two arms full-body grab the ball carrier. The women also practice binding (a following teammate leans a shoulder into the ball-carrier’s hip) to drive through an opponent. Then three players use these skills to get around two opponents. “Call for the ball! Talk to each other!” yells Coach Clare O’Reilly. Water break, and some work on ruck skills before actual playing time.
No, you are not in Australia. This is Charlottesville, and you’re watching the Blue Ridge Bears, our local women’s rugby club.
Women’s rugby is having a big moment. If you paid attention to the Paris Olympics, you likely heard about the American women’s rugby sevens team beating powerhouse Australia to win bronze, with a heart-stopping last-minute full-field run to goal by center Alex Sedrick. And you probably saw a host of social media posts from Team USA’s center Ilona Maher promoting rugby, strong women, and body positivity. Not many women’s rugby players have been contestants on “Dancing With the Stars,” or cover models for Sports Illustrated’s Swimsuit Issue, but Maher has the attitude—and the killer red lipstick—to pull it off.
“As soon as the Olympics started, our email blew up,” says Blue Ridge Bears Club Administrator Angela Sorrentino. “We got a huge influx of players—we have from 20 to 30 members now.”
Charlottesville’s women’s rugby team is growing in size—and power. Photo by Tristan Williams.
But it’s not just Maher and the medal. Rugby, and women’s rugby in particular, has been among the fastest-growing sports for the last decade, both in the USA and worldwide. In 2019, World Rugby launched a global campaign promoting young female players as “Unstoppables,” and developed a toolkit called Try and Stop Us to help clubs drive recruitment. As of last year, according to World Rugby, the number of active registered female players increased by 34 percent, to just under 320,000; the number of female participants (someone who has tried rugby in school programs or clubs) grew by 52 percent, to more than 1.3 million young women and girls.
In the U.S., the growth of collegiate women’s rugby in the 1970s (helped by Title IX) led to the formation of a U.S. national team in 1987. Nicknamed the Eagles, the team won the inaugural 1991 Women’s World Cup, and finished second in the two subsequent World Cups. More recently, high-profile events like the Olympics have helped drive interest in the sport.
Another factor has been the increasing sense of empowerment among young girls and women—the feeling that they can be big, strong, athletic, and at home with it. UVA women’s rugby Head Coach Nancy Kechner, who began playing rugby at UVA and has been a volunteer coach for the club there for 27 years, calls it “the most empowering sport for women.”
“Its rules are exactly the same as for the men’s game,” she says. “It’s for women who want to do something different, and challenge themselves. This game is all about flow, about moving as one, and there’s a lot of decision-making on the fly.”
What draws players to the Bears, Sorrentino says, is the opportunity to keep playing a team sport into their post-academic lives. “It may seem kind of crazy to start with rugby—there’s a lot of misconceptions about it. But for rugby, physical attributes don’t really matter. Small players can be fast, and really good at tackling; some large players may think they can’t run, but there’s a place for everyone.”
No question, though, that rugby is a contact sport. O’Reilly stresses that many of the drills, and the laws (rugby has laws instead of rules, she says, because they are “open to interpretation”) are focused on safety. Tackling a ball player above the sternum, or shoving instead of grabbing with the arm, is a penalty. And there is no blocking or running interference like there is in football. Kechner, who has coached O’Reilly and several other Bears players, says rugby is about “contact, not collision.”
The teams form a scrum to restart play during their September 28 game (the Bears’ first win of the season). Photo by Tristan Williams.
For many players, rugby’s free-form nature is part of its appeal. Teams can play on a football field or soccer pitch, and there’s no special equipment beyond a mouth guard, cleats, and maybe a scrum cap. There are two versions: rugby sevens (seven on a side, playing seven-minute halves) and rugby 15s (15 on a side, playing 40-minute halves). Players are basically forwards or backs—with some interesting specialty names like scrum-half, hooker, and loosehead or tighthead props—but there’s no hierarchy, and any player can score. The ball is always in play, and the game only stops for penalties, out of bounds, and serious injuries—after which most players get bandaged up and go back in.
O’Reilly is a case in point. On the evening that I observe practice, she has an inch or so of stitches near her eye. “Yeah, I got injured,” she says, no big deal—apparently her eye and a teammate’s hand ended up near the ball at the same time. But none of the women at practice seem too worried about injuries.
The team is a real mix. Almost everyone here tonight has participated in sports for most of their lives, but only seven have played rugby before, four of them at UVA. They range in age from early 20s to early 50s, from tall to short, from thin to stocky. There are plenty of tattoos and a good bit of brightly dyed hair, and T-shirts ranging from “Ireland Rugby” and “Cape Fear Sevens” to “Queen City Unity” (a Staunton-based nonprofit) and “National Geographic.”
Bears player Kelly Graves, 22, participated in a range of sports in high school: cross country, track, softball. She started playing rugby at Christopher Newport University. “My sister played rugby, and I wanted to try it, but CNU didn’t have a women’s rugby team until my sophomore year,” she recalls. When she moved to Charlottesville after graduating last December, she was happy to find the Bears. “This is the most inclusive sport,” Graves says enthusiastically. “There’s a place for everybody, literally. You need sprinters, you need tacklers. Taller people can be harder to tackle, and playing the sidelines you need to be faster.”
Saoirse Teevan-Kamhawi, 23, grew up participating in tennis, karate, and rowing, and when she came to UVA, a colleague in her running club got Teevan-Kamhawi into rugby. She’s now working in Harrisonburg, where there’s no rugby club, so she was excited to find the Bears. “It’s a great group,” she says. “People who play rugby are just the nicest; they’re easy to be around. In rugby, you have to be willing to look a little silly and fall on your face sometimes—and we teach people how to fall. But you also have to be willing to put your heart into it. The whole game is about supporting your fellow players.”
Courtney Russ, 37, is a little older than her club mates but found the Bears for similar reasons. An athlete all through school—soccer in high school, field hockey in college—she says she “was looking for a team sport, and found this team just before the [August] call for new players. I’m new to Charlottesville, and was looking for a way to meet people.” (The group makes an effort to socialize—beers, bowling, group workouts.) As a beginning player, Russ appreciates O’Reilly and fellow coach Taylor Torro focusing on skill development: “They’re good about pairing a new person with a veteran.” The best part? “Rugby is a different way to use your body. Everyone finds a way to feel powerful and strong.”
UVA women’s rugby Head Coach Nancy Kechner says rugby is about “contact, not collision.” Photo by Tristan Williams.
That’s the goal of another recent recruit, Jen Truslow. At 53, she is the oldest Bear, but she’s not new to rugby. She was a high school exchange student in Australia, and learned Aussie rules rugby there, but when she came back to the United States, there was nowhere to play. “When I was a kid, women’s sports were second-tier,” she recalls. “No one encouraged me, girls weren’t trained to be aggressive.” But she kept her interest in the game, and after a recent weight loss, “I was feeling good and decided to try it—I’m not getting any younger—and these women have been kind and welcoming,” Truslow says, as she heads out for more drills after the water break. “And I’m pretty tough!”
Some athletes who started playing rugby in college found other college sports too competitive—meaning it was hard to get on a team because there were so many skilled players that coaches could afford to make cuts. After college, outlets are limited, especially for team sports. And full-time employment doesn’t leave a lot of hours for athletics. But all these women want to stay active, and enjoy the social interaction of being on a team. The club welcomes all comers 18 years and older. There’s a rookie skills clinic every month, and no one gets cut.
Sorrentino, who started playing rugby in 2017 at college in upstate New York, came to Charlottesville in 2021 for an internship at UVA (she’s a pediatric dietitian). She decided to stay, and began looking for a rugby club. At that point, just after the pandemic, the Bears were inactive, and Sorrentino took on reviving the club. Last year, she recruited another player to be social media director. As of this year, the Bears are an official nonprofit, and players will start paying dues to support the outfit.
The Virginia Rugby Football Club, Charlottesville’s men’s rugby group—founded in the 1960s, it’s “the oldest rugby club south of the Mason-Dixon line,” according to its Facebook page—has been supportive, Sorrentino says,
“When we were getting started, they invited us over to practice with them, which was nice but a little intimidating,” she says. The Bears now use the same practice field as VRFC, behind the Veterans of Foreign Wars Post 1827, two evenings a week.
The Bears are still in the building phase, as are other clubs in the region. The group schedules scrimmages and friendly games with the women’s teams from UVA and Virginia Commonwealth University, as well as clubs from Richmond and Raleigh, North Carolina. They also play in local tournaments—the Cville Sevens last June, and the Christmas Sevens tournament in Glen Allen. O’Reilly is excited because the influx of players means the Bears may be able to field a team to play rugby 15s next year.
New players are always welcome to come out for the monthly skills session—if you’d rather watch than play, fans are welcome too. And get ready: March 2025 will see the launch of Women’s Elite Rugby, the first U.S. professional women’s rugby league, followed by the Women’s Rugby World Cup in England in August. In the meantime, Sorrentino is looking for a few good Bears sponsors. Consider having your organization’s logo on the backs of these strong women. As Kechner said about Ilona Maher, “She’s a great role model—one big gorgeous badass!”
A dearth of fresh food in Fifeville means all eyes are on 501 Cherry Ave. Photo by Eze Amos.
There are no places on Cherry Avenue or West Main Street where residents of the Fifeville neighborhood can walk to buy fresh ingredients to prepare nutritious meals, but Aleen Carey doesn’t want you to call the area a food desert.
“A desert is a naturally occurring state,” said Carey, the co-executive director of Cultivate Charlottesville. “Not having any grocery stores or Black-owned businesses or the food access that the community wants, that is not naturally occurring. That is man-made. So instead of a food desert, we call it a food apartheid.”
That term was coined by New York food justice activist Karen Washington to draw attention to the interconnections between access to food and other socioeconomic and health inequities.
Cultivate Charlottesville formed in 2020 when local organizations Food Justice Network, the Urban Agriculture Collective of Charlottesville, and the City Schoolyard Garden merged to put a more intentional focus on those interconnections at the local level.
Borrowing a phrase from food justice activist Karen Washington, Cultivate Charlottesville’s Aleen Carey says the lack of access to fresh produce in Fifeville has caused a “food apartheid.” Photo by Eze Amos.
The nonprofit is active on many fronts including administering the city’s Food Equity Initiative, trying to secure new garden space in Washington Park—and assisting with a broader effort to bring a community grocery store to Fifeville. Woodard Properties, the new owner of 501 Cherry Ave., agreed in September 2023 to provide space for one as part of a rezoning.
But to make the idea a reality, the community will have to organize.
Buy back the block?
Carey was one member of an August 24 panel discussion at the Jefferson School African American Heritage Center, an event the Fifeville Neighborhood Association organized for the public to learn more about the opportunities on Cherry Avenue.
Deanna McDonald of RN Heartwork is partnering with the Fifeville Neighborhood Association on the effort to increase awareness of the space.
“I come to this project as it relates [to] health equity, food equity, and food security,” McDonald told the crowd of about a hundred people.
For decades, Estes Market at 501 Cherry Ave. served as a place to buy fresh food, but people who lived in the area in the late 20th century said the market played a much larger role.
“Estes was more than just a grocery store,” said Sarad Davenport, a longtime resident of Fifeville who served as moderator of August’s Buy Back the Block event. “It was a community center. In fact, I learned how to play chess in Estes’ parking lot.”
Once a booming grocery store, Estes Foodliner stands now as a shell of its former self. Photo by Eze Amos.
Davenport is the host of “Can I Talk To You, C-Ville?,” a series of programs put on by Vinegar Hill Magazine including one held September 23 that illuminated more details on the status of negotiations for how the space might be operated as a grocery.
Dorenda Johnson has lived in the neighborhood for 55 years and remembers more than just Estes Market.
“I can remember on Fifth Street there was Bell’s Store and Allen’s Store and down the street on Cherry Avenue was Estes [IGA],” she said. “All of those neighborhoods around those stores were predominantly Black neighborhoods and it was bustling and busy.”
Andrea Douglas, the Heritage Center’s executive director, said there was a time when ownership of commercial businesses was more diverse in central Charlottesville.
“There were seven grocery stores run by Black people in this community,” Douglas said.
One of those, at 333 W. Main St., was run by George Inge, whose establishment was a pillar of the community from 1891 to 1979 (and stands today as Tavern & Grocery restaurant). The structure built in 1820 survived the razing of Vinegar Hill and Garrett Street while many others, like Allen’s Store, did not.
According to research conducted by journalist Jordy Yager, Allen’s Store opened on Sixth Street SE in 1944 and closed when the property was taken by eminent domain as part of the Garrett Street urban renewal project in the 1970s, leading to the creation of what would become known as Friendship Court. Its owners, Kenneth Walker Allen and Dorothy Mae Murray Allen, would later relocate their business to the Rose Hill neighborhood in the space that is now home to MarieBette Café and Bakery.
Douglas said efforts to bring a new grocery store to serve the neighborhood is part of a long movement to restore what was lost during urban renewal.
When she was a child, Johnson said she would spend her days in Tonsler Park walking to and from what is now Prospect Avenue. Her parents worked hard to buy their own house, as did so many others.
“Now when I go through those neighborhoods it’s very discouraging and I see it’s no longer the predominantly Black neighborhoods,” Johnson said. “We have $700,000 homes that were bought for barely half of that. What would our parents say?”
After Emancipation, many people enslaved in Albemarle County and on plantations, such as the Oak Lawn estate on Cherry Avenue, would settle in a Charlottesville that was growing in the late 19th century.
“After the [Civil] war, a number of folks who were enslaved there moved into what is the Fifeville neighborhood,” said Jalane Schmidt, an associate professor of religious studies at UVA.
This included figures such as Benjamin Tonsler, who had been born into servitude in Earlysville in 1854. After receiving an education in Hampton, Tonsler returned to Charlottesville and became a leader in the community along with Inge. Another group, called the Piedmont Industrial and Land Improvement Company, was formed in the last decade of the 19th century to promote Black ownership of real property. They did so through the Four Hundreds Club, an informal group of Black families belonging to the middle class, who purchased lots of land priced at $400.
“There is a direct connection between emancipation, personal economy, land ownership, entrepreneurship, and food security,” Schmidt said. “How to put those pieces together that have been shattered is the question that we’re dealing with now.”
Redeveloping the Estes Market
Woodard Properties bought 501 Cherry Ave. in August 2022 for $3.5 million, the latest in a series of purchases the company has made in the area in recent years. Woodard is partnering with the Piedmont Housing Alliance to build 71 apartment units that will be rented to households with incomes below 60 percent of the area’s median income.
One condition of a rezoning granted by City Council in September 2023 is that a portion of the property be set aside for the Music Resource Center as well as an area that would be reserved for a very specific reason.
“Owner agrees to reserve a minimum of 5,000 square feet of commercial space at the Property for lease to a small grocery store or neighborhood grocery store that sells fresh produce,” reads binding language in the rezoning agreement. “The space will be reserved exclusively for a grocery store use until the issuance of any certificate of occupancy for the Project.”
Anthony Woodard, CEO of Woodard Properties, says that means the space will be held for someone to either buy or lease it from the company. Anyone who wants to operate a grocery would need to come up with the funding to get the space ready.
“We are building a commercial shell for a grocery market, which would not include interior construction, furnishings, or equipment specific to the grocery’s operation, because a grocery operator has specific needs that they know best,” Woodard said in an email.
Woodard said the total cost is estimated at around $50 million to construct the two buildings that make up the project.
The City of Charlottesville continues to review the preliminary site plan for the project, an iterative process designed to make sure that the building will be up to code.
The grocery store at 501 Cherry Ave. was once a bustling centerpiece of the Fifeville community. “In fact, I learned how to play chess in Estes’ parking lot,” says resident Sarad Davenport. Photo by Eze Amos.
City Council has signaled a willingness to provide $3.15 million in direct funding for the housing portion of the project over the next two years. The Piedmont Housing Alliance applied this year for $1.285 million in low-income housing tax credits but did not make the cut in a crowded field of applicants.
Sunshine Mathon, executive director of PHA, said there are alternative funding options that might allow construction to get underway within the next 15 months.
“We have other funding pathways we are pursuing that I am optimistic about, and would allow us to still start construction in 2025,” Mathon said in an email. “Everyone on the team is working diligently to make this happen.”
Woodard said that to cover the full costs, rent will likely need to be higher than market rate unless an operating subsidy can be identified.
Davenport cautioned against rushing ahead too fast with the project without doing true community engagement.
“Sometimes you can think you are doing the right thing but you haven’t really listened to people, and then you end up doing something that’s catastrophic and you look 40 years later and it’s like, that was a tragedy,” she said. “It did more harm than good.”
Elsewhere on Cherry Avenue
Woodard Properties owns a good portion of Cherry Avenue, having slowly acquired real estate along the roadway over the years. That includes the Cherry Avenue Shopping Center, which the company purchased for $1.9 million in April 2021, and the undeveloped parking lot across the street, bought in July of that year for $1.55 million. The Black-owned Royalty Eats catering company operates out of the shopping center and served food at the August 24 event. Woodard said there are no plans to do anything with these locations beyond what’s already been done; the company refurbished the shopping center soon after purchasing it.
The Salvation Army owns two properties on Cherry Avenue, including its storefront and a lot where a fast food restaurant used to stand. There are three stand-alone convenience stores in addition to a fourth inside the Cherry Avenue Shopping Center. Each store is owned by a different entity and none offer fresh produce.
The fog over the future of 21st-century Fifeville cleared a little in October 2023 when the University of Virginia purchased the 5.2-acre Oak Lawn estate belonging to the Fife family, whose name has been appended to the whole neighborhood. The UVA Health system will soon begin a community engagement effort for the future of that property as well as land to the north, which it purchased in August 2016.
As part of the Memory Project initiative, Schmidt and her students have researched the Oak Lawn estate and found that James Fife enslaved at least 22 men, women, and children by the time of emancipation. More than 100 years later, expansion of the UVA Medical Center displaced people who had settled in the predominantly Black neighborhood of Gospel Hill, a neighborhood that no longer exists, reducing the number of people who could walk to places like Estes Market and other Black-owned businesses.
“Land use and food security are tied to one another and that means listening to the community and folks in the community who remember what things were like when there were these hubs,” Schmidt said.
Carey said one purpose of both Cultivate Charlottesville and the Food Justice Network is to ask people what it would take to achieve food equity. She said that will take Black ownership.
“As we’re talking about 501 Cherry Ave. right now, and who might own that building or who might own the business there, one of the key pieces is, will that be a person of color?” Carey said. “Will that be somebody Black who can restore some of that community wealth building to the area?”
The Fifeville Neighborhood Association is seeking to educate the public on three potential models for ownership of the store. One would be a traditional model where the business owners take on all of the risks of the enterprise.
Another would be a nonprofit model, and a third would be a cooperative-ownership model where members of the store would govern its operations. To that end, a group called the Charlottesville Community Food Co-Op is being formed.
Mathon is hopeful the grocery space can become part of the residential development, a value-add that could attract additional funds for the overall project.
“I am working actively to pursue resources for the grocery as I see a direct positive benefit to have the grocery onsite for our future residents,” he said.
Neighborhood skepticism
Many in the Fifeville neighborhood are dubious about why a new apartment building is planned for 501 Cherry Ave. They’re also wary of the name attached to the project.
“Just the name Woodard … It is not a name that a lot of people think much of, me being one if I’m being honest,” Johnson said. “You just constantly see take. They just seem to take. They’ve infiltrated all of those neighborhoods.”
Johnson said nearby residents already suffer the impacts of traffic congestion and a new apartment building will make things worse.
“Cherry Avenue from anywhere between 3pm and 6pm. is a total nightmare,” Johnson said, adding that many continue to have fears Tonsler Park will be taken for private use.
At the moment, the city’s Parks & Recreation Department is soliciting feedback for future amenities for the park, which is owned by the City of Charlottesville. The current year budget for the Commonwealth of Virginia granted $250,000 to the city to assist with the Tonsler Basketball League, now run by former city councilor Wes Bellamy.
Schmidt said part of the conversation needs to be about returning to the spirit of the Four Hundreds Club and making sure there’s an effort to keep Black property owners in place and stop the turnover that has been occurring for decades.
“We also need to have a conversation about who’s selling these,” Schmidt said. “We have folks in the neighborhood that you remember that were pillars of the community but their children don’t live here any more. And when mom and dad die, they come back to settle the estate.”
According to Schmidt, one solution would be to establish incentives for sales to community organizations like PHA. The Piedmont Community Land Trust, a local nonprofit that works to secure affordable housing options in the area, has been purchasing properties in the Orangedale section of the neighborhood to offer homeownership opportunities.
Carey said she is not an expert on housing, but said these conversations are crucial to finding solutions.
“There are three different things going on Cherry Avenue right now: if you’re looking at the park, if you’re looking at 501 Cherry, and if you’re looking at Oak Lawn,” Carey said. “How do you have a conversation that pulls those together so things aren’t done individually?”
Carey said that should include conversations with other neighborhoods affected by the same pressures such as Rose Hill, Ridge Street, and 10th and Page.
City Council adopted a small area plan for Cherry Avenue in March 2021, the same meeting at which they adopted a new affordable housing plan. The small area plan called for an analysis of renovations and teardowns of existing stock, but it’s not clear if the city has conducted that work. The new zoning code designates the road as Commercial Mixed Use 3 in part because of the advocacy of the Fifeville Neighborhood Association.
Following publication, Woodard Properties sent a comment: “We are excited to be working with the Fifeville Neighborhood Association, Piedmont Housing Alliance, and Music Resource Center on this special project that will provide not only healthy food, but also youth programming and affordable housing to Fifeville. This project builds on our commitment to be one of the problem solvers in Charlottesville and the Fifeville neighborhood.”
Speak! founder Christina Ball started the language center as Ecco Italy, a celebration of Italian culture, with cooking classes, movie screenings, and travel partners. Photo by Eze Amos.
Twenty years ago, Christina Ball was teaching evening Italian courses to adult continuing education students at the University of Virginia. She had come up in academic spaces, doing a Ph.D. at Yale and teaching for a while at Wake Forest before moving to Charlottesville. But as she watched the waitlists for those evening courses grow, she realized: Not everyone is a UVA student. There are countless people in this community who want to learn to speak a new language, and there’s nowhere for them to learn.
She had gotten to know Mark and Victoria Cave, who were starting their Italian coffee bar, Milano, in Main Street Market, and they generously offered her the space to spin off on her own. It was perfect: Ball was focused on helping people get ready to travel to Italy, and now they could practice over a proper caffè. Ecco Italy, as she called the new venture, quickly became something bigger than a place to learn to speak Italian. It was a celebration of Italian culture, with cooking classes, movie screenings, and travel partners. It was a bridge to Italy.
Five years later, Ecco Italy had become Speak! Language Center. “That’s when I had to really learn to run a business,” Ball says, “to find the partnerships, to make a profit, and not just do this as a hobby.” The list of languages got longer, the team got bigger, and the company’s scope got wider. In the years since, they have taught 22 languages: Swahili, Czech, Pashto, Korean, Hebrew, and many more. The team now includes teachers and staff members working remotely from Argentina, Portugal, Bangladesh, and Ukraine. The company’s B-Speak! program, which coaches international students in professional English online, started at UVA’s Darden School of Business and now serves business schools across the U.S. Two decades in, Speak! is becoming a national brand.
Yet it remains an essentially local business.
Language is fundamentally a mode of connection, and learning languages well requires real connections with real human beings. This basic observation about the nature of languages fits well with developments in the study of language acquisition over the last few decades. If your goal is to know a language the way a native speaker knows a language, learning formal grammar rules is surprisingly unimportant. (A native Spanish speaker probably can’t explain to you when to use the subjunctive in Spanish any better than you can explain when to use the pluperfect in English!) What is important is what language educators call comprehensible input. You need meaningful messages you can understand—as many of them as you can possibly get. It is even better if those messages come from a person with whom you have a real relationship rather than from a book of exercises or a chatbot.
Ball is generous but firm when someone mentions programs like Duolingo or Babbel (or Rosetta Stone, in the old days). “We love those apps because they are a cheap and quick way for people to experiment with different languages and sounds,” she says. They help people develop an interest in a language. But when they’re ready to get serious, they need to spend time with real human beings. Even better, they need to spend time with a human being who cares about what they have to say and who is willing to slow down and engage in a way that they can understand. This is what parents do for children as they are learning, and it is what a good teacher does for a student. Teachers connect with their students, and the connection itself is what drives the learning.
In the wake of the pandemic, a lot of us have been thinking again about the need for connection. The isolation of quarantine was hard. It pushed many of us more online, in hopes of maintaining our relationships from a distance. And that often worked! We were able to stay in touch with those we couldn’t touch. Some of us even found new connections, new communities, that we might never have found otherwise. Speak! has flourished by moving some of its work online, connecting with teachers and students in every part of the world.
But moving online is double-edged. It connects us with those at a distance while pulling us away, or at least threatening to pull us away, from those up close. We have seen it in our politics, where we hear more from influencers and talking heads than we do from neighbors; we have seen it in our cities, where it becomes easier to order something direct from a factory far away than to go to the Downtown Mall; we have seen it in our work, where even the occasional stolen minute of water cooler gossip has given way to the crisp efficiency of a Zoom meeting that begins precisely on time. We all know these tensions. These are the cliches of daily life now.
James Barton helped start Studio IX and Vault Virginia, two of the growing number of coworking spaces in Charlottesville. As a language lover himself (he played soccer in Mexico as a high schooler and studied for his MBA in China), Barton was a natural partner for a company like Speak!. But more importantly, he shares with Ball a deep concern for the difficulties of developing real connections between real human beings. His coworking spaces are not just meant to provide a desk and a wifi connection; they’re meant to provide community.
At the center of his work at Vault Virginia, housed in the Bradbury Building on the Downtown Mall, is The Guild. He calls The Guild a “culture club.” It’s an effort to create a better, more engaging water cooler for Charlottesville’s remote workers and entrepreneurs. The natural tendency in our society right now is toward isolation, Barton acknowledges, even after the pandemic. It’s easy just to go back home at night and withdraw into our devices. But “humans are social creatures,” he says. “The work each of us does is, ideally, an expression of who we are and the good we hope to bring into the world. I believe that we are much more capable of achieving that when we put ourselves in spaces where we can support and inspire one another.”
Vault Virginia and The Guild are attempts to create such a space. “I want people to have something of substance to do on weeknights,” Barton says. A concert, a film, a gallery talk.
Speak! moved into Vault Virginia last month in large part because Ball and Barton recognized each other as kindred spirits. Ball has already started to contribute to Vault’s weeknight offerings with a free event she calls Tea and Travel, where people can come to learn about a new place from someone who has spent time in the culture—Micronesia in May, Tuscany in June, Portugal in July. In August, more than 80 people came out to learn something about Sicily. This month, Ball is launching informal conversation hours at the Bradbury Café, where people can come and practice their Spanish, Italian, or French—also for free—with a Speak! teacher. So even as she develops her online programs, Ball is investing deeply in face-to-face relationships. Together with Barton, she is working to create the kinds of spaces that spark new connections between people who live here in Charlottesville, and also between Charlottesville and the rest of the world.
Language Café, informal weekly meetups for Speak! students to practice their speaking skills, launched this month. Photo by Eze Amos.
Ball grew up around Italian culture (her grandmother was from Gaeta, not far from Naples), but the first language she fell in love with was French. She found her way to Italian in college, while studying art history at Bowdoin. She came to the work of language teaching as a Europhile. But now, Speak!’s biggest languages are Spanish and, perhaps surprisingly, English. “I never thought I would teach English,” Ball admits. But Spanish and English are the languages that this community most needs.
Speak! now works extensively with the University of Virginia, for example, helping Spanish-speaking workers train for new jobs that require English and running language and culture courses for English-speakers who work with Spanish-speakers. Ball has also been nurturing relationships with a variety of local companies with multilingual teams. This fall, Speak! will start teaching Spanish to construction workers at Martin Horn and employees at the Farmington Country Club.
For those of us who live most of our lives in monolingual spaces, it can be easy to overlook how many of the relationships that make our communities work depend on the ability to speak across cultural lines. It can also be easy to overlook how connected we are to other parts of the globe. The students at Speak! are a window into the sheer variety of those connections: one has coworkers from the Caribbean, another is getting to know in-laws in Mexico, another is planning a research project in Portugal, another is heading to college in Japan, another has a daughter working in Lebanon.
Franco Perez is one of the Spanish teachers at Speak!. Perez grew up in Esperanza, Argentina—a city about the size of Charlottesville—and lives now in Buenos Aires. He’s worked with Ball for the last two years to develop their online Spanish course. He’s met a number of Speak! students who were traveling in South America. Now, for the first time, he’s in Charlottesville. He’s showcasing Argentinian films in the Vault Virginia screening room, hosting Spanish conversation hours, meeting some of his longtime online students in the flesh, and, of course, he says, “exploring the beautiful mountains and vineyards that Charlottesville is known for.”
For all the growth that Speak! has experienced over the last two decades, Ball is in some ways returning to her roots. All those years ago, from her space above Milano, she was helping people engage deeply in a new culture—its language, yes, but also its food, art, and customs. Now, from her new space above the Bradbury Café, she’s back at it. She has even re-focused on the needs of travelers, building out a new online course series for English-speakers preparing to go to Portugal or France. (“This is my passion project right now,” she says. “This is what I do on the nights and the weekends.”) But her bridges are much bigger now, and they bring as many people here as they send out into the world.
There is a lot of pressure on businesses to expand their reach by going online. Ball has done some of that—and quite successfully. But what makes Speak! unique among language centers is its rootedness in a particular place and its commitment to real human beings. Moving to the Downtown Mall, she says, means she can “go all in on Charlottesville.”
Local artist Somé Louis has found space for exploration and expression by participating in CBAC exhibitions. Photo by Eze Amos.
When you want to initiate change—real change—it’s hard to do it alone. The time, effort, versatility, and resources it takes to affect progress as an individual requires a level of passion and privilege most of us cannot afford when there are children to raise and bills to be paid. But when change needs to happen, people have a tendency to step out and find each other.
When you’re part of a collective, you’re part of a democratic collaboration of efforts. You find ways to work together, to do what’s best for everyone involved. You embody gestalt, and organize yourselves into a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts, enabling the collective to achieve advances that extend beyond itself.
This is exactly the kind of work the Charlottesville Black Arts Collective is achieving: initiating change for the betterment of our community, and for Black creatives throughout the commonwealth. The drive to open up opportunities that explore and evoke the essence of Black culture is on full view in the CBAC’s upcoming exhibition “Sugah: Black Love Endures,” which opens at McGuffey Art Center on September 6.
Community commitments
The story of the Charlottesville Black Arts Collective began in 2020, with another artist-run cooperative, the McGuffey Art Center. Two members of McGuffey’s Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Committee reached out to Black creatives in the area, seeking individuals interested in curating an exhibition of works by Black artists. Instead of an individual taking the helm, a small group coalesced and agreed to curate the show together. The process served as a catalyst for the creation of the CBAC, which debuted “Water: The Agony and Ecstasy of the Black Experience” in 2021, its first curatorial effort at McGuffey.
“Love is in the Hair,” by “Sugah: Black Love Endures” exhibiting artist Cherrish Smith. Image curtesy of the CBAC.
Since then, the CBAC has partnered with the arts center to mount exhibitions each year, including the 2022 show “Lay My Burdens Down,” and 2023’s “Blackity Black Black,” an embrace of quintessentially Black aesthetics. In this relationship between hosting venue and curatorial collective, McGuffey sponsors the shows, while the CBAC creates open calls, curates the exhibitions, and works directly with the exhibiting artists. McGuffey members help with the art installation process, publicity, and—crucially—provide gallery space for the shows to take place.
“This partnership allows us to help amplify Black art and provide a means of sharing Black art with McGuffey members and visitors as well as helps broaden the diversity of work and artists showing work at McGuffey,” notes CBAC member Kori Price. When asked about the partnership between the CBAC and MAC, Bill LeSueur, operations manager at McGuffey Art Center, added, “It’s mutually beneficial. The search for inspiration is continual. MAC will continue to support CBAC and open up opportunities for underrepresented artists. This establishes a model for future partnerships and additional collaborations.”
Progressive partnerships
As an untethered, volunteer-based collective of artists and art enthusiasts, the CBAC seeks out this type of community partnership to facilitate opportunities for artists in and around Charlottesville, centering Black voices and their creative work. While these opportunities most often take the form of exhibitions geared toward showcasing and selling artwork, the CBAC also aims to support artists by providing workshops to share skills and learn from each other, as well as critiques to provide feedback to creatives, and social gatherings such as community cookouts to strengthen existing relationships and foster new connections.
Tori Cherry, Leslie Taylor-Lillard, Kori Price, Benita Mayo, Kweisi Morris, Tobiah Mundt, Derrick J. Waller, and Mavis Waller currently make up the member roster of the Charlottesville Black Arts Collective. The CBAC is adamant about forming connections with community partners to expand the reach of Black artists throughout the greater- Charlottesville area—in addition to McGuffey, the group has established partnerships with Alamo Drafthouse, New City Arts, Second Street Gallery, and Studio Ix—creating platforms for their experiences to be shared through “a Black lens with clarity and creativity,” as Price puts it.
How sweet it is
Since its inception, the CBAC has focused on curating exhibitions and experiences around ideas that are unique or essential to Black culture. Themes that encourage the expression of Black joy have become especially important to the collective, like 2023’s “Blackity Black Black” and “Black Eyed Peas, Greens, and Cornbread”—an exhibition in celebration of new beginnings and the future—mounted at Studio Ix earlier this year. “Black love seemed like a natural next step for us,” says Price. “We all felt that the way in which love is expressed within the Black community was unique and were curious to see the ways in which artists might choose to depict and communicate love through their art.”
Richmond-based artist P. Muzi Branch’s “Bi-Cultural,” on exhibit in “Sugah: Black Love Endures.” Image curtesy of the CBAC.
Featuring works from P. Muzi Branch, Lizzie Brown, Chris Green, Jae Johnson, Leslie Lillard, Somé Louis, Tobiah Mundt, Maiya Pittman, Kori Price, Joshua Ray, Dorothy Rice, Cherrish Smith, and JaVori Warren, “Sugah” (pronounced SHU-gah) explores aspects of love related to the familial, the romantic, the self, and the cultural. Paintings, photographs, fiber arts, and mixed media works depicting affectionate embraces, acts of service, and cultural expressions define the look and feel of the exhibition.
Exhibiting artists Dorothy Rice and Cherrish Smith both chose to explore external identity markers in their respective works, “The Sisters Braid Love” and “Love is in the Hair.” In her exhibition application, Smith—the youngest artist in the show and a repeat participant in CBAC exhibitions—explained, “Black hair is art in itself … Black hair is love, and it helps me freely be me no matter how I choose to wear it!”
Drawing inspiration from Gustav Klimt’s “The Kiss,” Lizzie Brown’s contribution to “Sugah” explores romantic love with a nod to art history. As the artist explains, “The intimacy, peace, and security shared between the two lovers is further emphasized through the use of circular motifs, which are symbolic of the wholeness and intricacies of their connection.”
Lizzie Brown’s “Intimacy: The Forehead Kiss” will be exhibited in “Sugah: Black Love Endures.” Image curtesy of the CBAC.
Local artist Somé Louis, who previously showed with the CBAC in “Blackity Black Black,” presents “Gestures of Play,” an embroidered handkerchief that captures the energy of childhood exuberance, documenting dance-like movements. The depiction of dance is “an act that binds me to my cousins and aunties in the Caribbean, who all studied dance, and understood movement through dance in a variety of ways,” Louis wrote in her exhibition application. Speaking on her experiences with the CBAC, Louis says, “It’s always great to find a space that allows for expression and exploration as an artist, which I have found as part of the CBAC exhibitions.”
Richmond-based artist P. Muzi Branch is also showing with the CBAC again after his inclusion in “Blackity Black Black.” Expressing the importance of the opportunities afforded by the collective, Branch asserts, “The CBAC group, through presenting thematic exhibitions, is affirming Black American visual art as a legitimate cultural genre that speaks for, informs about, and undergirds the Black community. African American visual art has unique ethnic norms, ideological themes, and aesthetic qualities that set it apart from all other culture-based art. The term ‘Black art’ is a cultural designation, not a racial one.”
Call and response
The affirmation of Black art and the expansion of cultural understanding and appreciation is at the heart of CBAC endeavors like “Sugah: Black Love Endures.” The benefits of this work extend beyond individual accolades and artistic achievements, impacting not just Black creative communities, but the entire Charlottesville community. As Price confirms, “The art in our shows is for everyone and provides a wonderful opportunity for patrons to explore new art and discover new artists.”
New exhibition opportunities attract new talent, enticing artists to show work in this area for the first time, or to show their work for the first time period. New artists bring new ideas, new expressions, new aesthetics to bear, and we all benefit by getting to see and experience novel examples of art and entertainment. New works creating stronger impacts on audiences bring new attention to an art scene. Viewers come to discover artists and works that resonate with them. New audiences strengthen creative communities by investing their time and resources into galleries and venues, which in turn use those investments to strengthen their programs that benefit artists and audiences, creating a mutually beneficial cycle of cultural and capital exchange.
It’s through this lens that the full scope of the CBAC’s efforts can be understood. The message behind many of the works in “Sugah: Black Love Endures” is that to feel love is to feel safe, secure, supported. When we show up for Black artists, we offer our support. We offer a sense of security and commitment to culture and community. We offer love, and may that love ever endure.
