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Choice cuts

By Lisa 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

Categories
News

City of Promise’s Price Thomas talks about his hopes for the nonprofit

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.”

Categories
Culture Living

Two horse-lovers mobilize social media to save animals from slaughter

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.”

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24 spooktacular activities for your pre-Hallow’s Eve to-do list

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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

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Local women’s rugby club takes off

Photo by Tristan Williams.

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!”

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How a coalition is trying to return Black grocery store ownership to Charlottesville

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.”

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News

Together with Vault Virginia, Speak! is creating community—at home and abroad

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.”

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Arts Culture News

The Charlottesville Black Arts Collective creates and engages community

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.

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News

America’s culture war is running right through central Virginia’s schools

Orange County High School. File photo.

On September 28, 2021, former Virginia governor Terry McAuliffe said something during the second gubernatorial debate that would spark a movement of conservatives in the state: “I don’t think parents should be telling schools what they should teach.”

The Hill would later describe McAuliffe’s statement as “deserving of a top listing in the Hall of Fame of Political Blunders.” His opponent, current Gov. Glenn Youngkin, would seize upon the gaffe, running the statement ad nauseam in attack ads and quoting it in speeches for the remainder of his campaign. He would coin the term that became a catch-all for everything from divisive content policies, transgender bathroom laws, and discussions about America’s history of slavery and racism: “parents’ rights.”

Since then, a wave of hard-right conservatives and Christian nationalists have come out of the woodwork to run in local elections for school boards, launching crusades against everything from library books to nicknames. In a matter of months, local offices were swarmed with new candidates who had big ideas, bold stances, and hot takes on how to make their little corners of America “great” again. 

In the months following Youngkin’s victory, there was no shortage of firebrands on hand in those areas to carry the MAGA torch at the local level. With the 2024 presidential election on the horizon, the battle lines for America’s cultural civil war run once again through central Virginia. And in Orange County, a parent and her son are preparing for battle. 

A parent’s rights

Laws are hypothetical. Fundamentally, a law is an enforced mandate that, if one commits x action, then y will be the resulting consequence. As a result, political discourse and debate is often based in theoretical discussions involving statistics, principles, and potential outcomes. Over time, talking about statistics and hypotheticals instead of actual people begins to obscure the core truth about the administration of government: The law does not affect hypothetical Americans, but real people, with rights, families, and values. 

Emily Potts is not hypothetical.

Potts, a transgender woman who lives in Orange County with her non-binary child Jace, a 10th grader at Orange County High School, is among the few LGBTQ+ people living openly in one of the most conservative counties in the greater Charlottesville region. “There’s a lot more allies than you might expect,” Potts says. “But there’s not a lot of trans people anywhere in our area, much less in Orange County.”

Potts might have begun living openly as transgender in 2021, but she began her journey as a trans woman long before that. 

“I’ve kind of known since I was 5 that there was … something going on,” she says. “But when I hit puberty was when I knew [for sure].”

Parents are often credited with having a kind of intuition when it comes to their children’s identity and sexuality. Potts says she had a somewhat different experience. 

“My dad had no idea,” she says. “We had to work through some stuff, but we’re good now. My mom has since passed away, but she knew. I had told her a long time ago.” Potts trails off. Her mother, she recalls, sent her to a psychologist (“And not the good kind,” she says. “Think conversion therapy”) followed by military school in Georgia. 

 Shortly after Potts and Jace arrived in Orange County from Culpeper in 2021, Jace began living openly as non-binary. Around five months later, Emily came out as transgender and began her journey, too. 

“I came out after I got sober,” Potts says. “I was self-medicating, trying to suppress it. Once I got into recovery, I realized that I couldn’t keep living like that. I think seeing Jace’s courage in coming out really helped me get the courage to do the same.”

Around the time Potts and her son were beginning their journey as transgender, the parents’ rights movement was taking hold in Virginia. They knew that because they were among the few people living openly as transgender in Orange County, the issue was too important to remain silent.

“This is going to get children hurt,” Potts recalls thinking. 

Freedom*

Chelsea Quintern, a former correctional and probation officer, was among those riding the wave of parents’ rights sweeping across the state. 

Quintern began her public life in 2022, after being elected to the Orange County School Board. She came out swinging, introducing two resolutions that made national headlines and put her on the radar of just about every conservative in the state. The less controversial of her proposed resolutions was the one aimed at critical race theory. It abandoned the formal, referential language of Youngkin’s executive order, and states that “Critical Race Theory endorses discrimination of individuals based on race.” But it was her LGBTQ+ policies and beliefs that brought national news coverage.  

“When I heard about her transgender policy, my first thought was that it would get someone killed,” Potts says. “A lot of times, teachers are like the last line of defense for kids who don’t have a great situation at home. If you take that from them, and give them nowhere they can be themselves with people they can trust, you’re going to see kids getting hurt. Dying.”

Quintern introduced her Divisive Content Resolution at the same time as her Sexually Explicit Materials resolution, and it made headlines that day thanks to its last provision: that teachers inform parents if a student is LGBTQ+. 

“The Orange County School Board declares that students shall not be subjected, but not limited, to curriculum, materials, and discussions relating to sexual orientation, gender identity, or any other sexually explicit subject without explicit consent from their parent(s),” the draft read. “Further … the [OCPS] Board requires schools to notify parents of healthcare services and involvement in critical decisions affecting students’ physical, mental, and emotional well-being; including, but not limited to self-identification.”

Quintern’s policy was as brazen as it was vague. To put it simply, she proposed that school teachers and administrators be forced to inform a parent if their child was a member of the LGBTQ+ community. 

If there were people who reacted positively to this proposal, they were drowned out by the apoplectic response from the dissenters. The Washington Post ran a story about it, and Change.org petitions, blog posts, and social media posts popped up everywhere. Quintern, to her credit, didn’t flinch, showing local conservatives she was the real deal. A true MAGA acolyte. 

On the day of the school board vote, students carried signs expressing outrage, while parents, current and former teachers, administrators, PTA and education department officials, and even Emily Potts took to the podium to eviscerate Quintern’s proposal as a poorly veiled attempt at notoriety. 

“Your ‘therefore’ clause is so broad it would require parental notification if a teacher mentions her husband,” said former PTA president Jennifer Heinz. “If you really meant to say, ‘Don’t say gay,’ please don’t insult us by using this ruse of ‘parental notification.’”

While the CRT resolution was passed 3-2, the Sexually Explicit Materials resolution would ultimately fail with the same margin. Quintern, who did not respond to requests for comment on this article, would go on to suggest that this was her attempt to “focus on classroom learning.”

“As a board member who was elected during the wave of parental rights, it was very disheartening to know that as a collective, the Orange County School Board decided not to definitively stand up for them,” she told the Orange County Review in 2022. “The law is clear: A parent has a fundamental right to make decisions concerning the upbringing, education, and care of the parent’s child. I vow to continue to fight for these rights during my tenure.”

Potts attended one of the school board meetings and it was her first time coming out (literally) as a transgender woman. She said the amount of support she received from people was tremendous, but it was not the only response.

“One of the local Republican organizations started passing around my business card at their meetings,” Potts says. “They’ve essentially blacklisted my business in Orange. I haven’t had a single client from Orange County ever since.”

Fifteen-year-old Jace Potts is glad the resolution failed, even if it wouldn’t have affected them.

“There’s not a huge LGBT community in the school, but I’m not the only one,” they say. “I have a friend who has only come out to their sister because their parents said if they were LGBT, they would kick them out.”

Jace says the unnamed friend lives in near-constant fear of someone outing them to their parents. If Quintern’s policy had gone into effect, any teacher intuitive enough to discern what was going on, or who overheard a conversation, would be forced to blow the whistle.

“I know it could be a lot worse,” Jace says. “The politics stuff hasn’t had as much of an effect on school life as we were worried it might.”

When the Sexually Explicit Material resolution was voted down, both Potts and her child say they were relieved, but felt like it would not end there. And it didn’t. 

Emily Potts says her child, Jace, gave her the courage to come out as trans. Now, the two Orange County residents are navigating an increasingly hostile public school environment. Photo by Eze Amos.

Other people’s children

On May 20, 2024, Quintern, together with District 1’s Melissa Anderson, again made headlines when they made a sudden reversal on Orange County School Board’s membership in the Charlottesville-based Virginia School Board Association, and abruptly called a vote on pulling Orange County School Board out of the VSBA entirely. All but three county school boards in the state (Warren, Orange, and Rockingham) are members of the bipartisan organization. Planning sessions do not schedule time for public comment.

Political bias, criticism of Youngkin, and a lack of utility in its services were all cited as reasons for the board’s withdrawal.  

Among other useful perks, like a $2,000 discount on BoardDocs, a school board meeting software, the VSBA assists school systems with legal aid and policy review for school systems—at much lower costs than what an independent attorney would charge. Warren County School Board, the first to decide to leave the VSBA, saw costs skyrocket afterwards, and many expect the same thing to happen in Orange. 

VSBA has not commented on the school systems that have exercised their choice to withdraw from the organizations. However, a Q&A published by the VSBA addressed many of these allegations of political bias.

“VSBA operates as a nonpartisan association, emphasizing a commitment to issues rather than political affiliations,” the undated document reads. “Its unwavering stance centers around opposing any measures that compromise the autonomy of local school divisions, a position that has remained consistent throughout the association’s 116-year history.”

While leaving the VSBA may have been ill-advised, it was not the decision itself that drew the most criticism, but the way in which the decision was made. VSBA membership renewal was listed as a discussion item in the planning session, not an action item. As an action item, it likely would have been postponed for public input much in the way past important decisions have been, including Quintern’s two controversial resolutions two years prior. 

Two weeks later, the public was finally able to comment on the matter. While those in support praised the Orange County School Board for fulfilling the conservative agenda it had promised, those in opposition said it was fulfilling this agenda at the expense of the people who depend on the public school system.

An OCPS elementary school teacher, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said the politicization of public schools has left educators and administrators feeling like the school board is playing for a different team.

“Teachers and children [feel] like they aren’t supported,” she says. “They live in constant fear of retaliation. Like they are walking on eggshells. There’s a lot of anxiety.”

Her biggest concern about the VSBA withdrawal is that it would take resources away from a school system that, from a faculty perspective, should be focusing on more pressing priorities. 

“People are consistently sick as there is no funding for building improvements,” she says. “Teachers are being pushed to their breaking points, but are not being listened to.”

When the parents’ rights movement swept across Virginia, it was supported by concerned parents who felt like control over their children’s educational experience was being eliminated by those in power. In Orange over the past two years, Quintern, Anderson, and those like them have continuously faced criticism from parents over concerns that their policies were motivated by their own political ambition, and that their children would ultimately pay the price. 

This criticism came from OCPS parents, whose rights got Quintern and so many others like her elected. But when it came time to protect them, many are left feeling like it was never about parents deciding what their kids learn in school, but Christian conservatives deciding what their children learn in school. Or what other people’s children learn in public school—Quintern’s children don’t attend OCPS.

Categories
Arts Culture

Listen to this

Meet the 12 young local acts reviving Charlottesville's music scene. Photo by Tristan Williams.

By Tami Keaveny, CM Turner, and Ella Powell

Charlottesville is a city of music fans and aficionados. We have an abundance of sonic riches in the national tours that touch down at our venues, and we’ve built a few careers here as well (looking at you, jam daddy DMB). There’s a lot of talk about who knows whom and who does what in our music kingdom. But the proliferation of the scene belongs to those who workshop it year-round. It got quiet for a while—but when the mics were turned back on, we started to hear new names repeated by tastemakers and see them listed on music calendars around town. What has emerged is a new generation of talented performers who are invigorating Charlottesville‘s music scene. 

Breaking through

Photo by Tristan Williams.

Palmyra

palmyratheband.com

With a setlist of songs that play out like confessionals, Americana holler-core trio Palmyra creates instant chemistry with its audience through its authentic yearn-folk sound. As Palmyra puts it, “The best music is honest music.” 

Setting out from the Shenandoah Valley, Sasha Landon (mandolin/guitar), Teddy Chipouras (guitar/banjo), and Mānoa Bell (standup bass) have been road-doggin’ full-time as Palmyra for the past three years—earning plenty of accolades and admiration along the way. Through unfiltered live sets and an amicable internet presence, the band has built a following of devoted fans up and down the East Coast and is bound to secure even more followers in support of Illiterate Light on its upcoming Arches Tour. 

The city of Charlottesville has become a beloved stop for Palmyra. “We’ve found community with bands and young people in the area that are as stoked to be at a show as we are,” says Landon. Palmyra’s arrangements often reflect a kind of “medium is the message” approach, where crescendos of euphoric sound waves break on the rocky shores of disquieted doubt and distress, where a single song runs the gamut of emotions like a punch to the gut. This angst and exuberance carries through in tunes like “Happy Pills” and “Park Bench.” 

Recently signed to the late John Prine’s Oh Boy Records, Palmyra plans to release a debut full-length album in the spring of 2025. Recorded in Richmond and Harrisonburg, it’s a truly Virginia-made project. 

The record label’s commitment to raising the Palmyra banner has extended to a re-release of the band’s EP Belladonna on vinyl. You can find Palmyra’s first foray into recording, the EP Shenandoah (2022)—along with a slew of singles—on streaming platforms.—CMT

Up close and personal

Photo by Lily Garay.

Chloë Ester

IG: @chloeester 

Chloë Ester’s distinctive style is hard to pin down in a way that’s both exciting and engaging for audiences discovering this introspective and unguarded songwriter. Pulling elements from dream pop, emo-folk, indie, and alternative rock, Chloë Ester and her band—Ryan Lee (lead guitar), Garrett Moore (drums), and Jacob Sommerio (bass)—deliver tight instrumentation that never feels overwrought. Simultaneously harsh and soothing, dreamy and intense, Chloë Ester’s clear, magnetic voice carries crushingly vulnerable lines conveying fear and confusion, with a kind of reluctant acceptance and understanding of the eventualities of the human condition. She’s a natural storyteller, and her narrative-driven arrangements work to capture a feeling or memory through a small, specific moment: an interaction with a family member, an awkward instance from childhood, a first date. Her debut EP Dying All The Time (2020) is available for streaming and her sophomore release Asleep In A Fire is expected to be available in 2025.—CMT

For the love

Supplied photo.

Waasi

IG: @itswaasi

Committed to authenticity and experimentation, Waasi unifies alt hip-hop, R&B, and soul in his ever-evolving sound. Smooth and sharp-witted, Waasi’s ability to alternate between laidback lyricism and verbal vehemence marks his albums as showcases in versatility. A lifelong resident of Charlottesville, Waasi cut his teeth in the underground scene. He credits local luminaries like Danny Shea, Jeyon Falsini, and the Rugged Arts crew for putting him on early in his career and providing platforms to perform his particular brand of musicality. As his experience and experimentations expand, Waasi has turned inward, making music that’s personally meaningful and introspective. He acknowledges the therapeutic aspects of creative expression and notes that his newer music reflects the more mature sound of a more mature musician. Waasi does indeed have a new album on the way, though the final release date has yet to be determined. For now, you can find his albums From Virginia with Love (2019) and No Love Lost (2021) and the EP BETTERDAZE (2018) on streaming services.—CMT

Sounds like teen spirit

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The Destructors

IG: @thedestructorsband 

Loud, catchy, energetic, fun, and angry, The Destructors is a punk rock/riot grrrl band made up of local teens looking to shake up the status quo. Sisters Ava (bass and vocals) and Savannah (guitar and vocals) joined up with Kat (drums and vocals) through the Music Resource Center just over a year ago and are already making a name for themselves in the local scene. With songs exploring feminism, LGBTQ+ activism, and social dynamics, the group plans to release its debut album Goth Barbie soon.—CMT

What we are looking for

Photo by Tristan Williams.

Tre. Charles

trecharles.com

Tre. Charles keeps a busy tour schedule, living on the road and crisscrossing the mid-Atlantic region for gigs, but he calls Virginia home. The indie soul talent currently “lays his head in Richmond,” but his warm, invigorating music graces C’ville stages so frequently that we think he may have a body double.

“Charlottesville is a tucked-away music gem,” says Charles. “The music appreciation here is eclectic and deep, from roots to electronic, and I attribute that to the diverse population that lives here. I think that the fresh air creates more open mindedness (ha ha), and with places like Ting, Jefferson, Southern, and a slew of other spots, it’s easy to find what you are looking for and what you didn’t know you were looking for.”

Charles’ debut EP, Currently, was chosen as one of WNRN’s top 100 albums of 2023, and Charles is planning to release a full album due by the end of 2024.—TK

Catch this buzz

Photo by Sanjay Suchak.

HASH

IG: @hash_the_band

Formed in 2023, Charlottesville’s next-gen rock band HASH caught a buzz. Due to a fast-growing fandom, locals Hasler Yancey (lead vocals/guitar), Jackson Rosson (bass), Tommy Fruscello (drums), Timothy Langlois (guitar), and Asher Friedman (keys) have been on a performing spree that includes shows with Kendall Street Company, Indecision, and The Barons. The group played The Jefferson Theater in March and Fridays After Five in May then headlined The Southern Café and Music Hall just last week. With a HASH debut EP due this month, the world stage awaits.—TK

Centered on stage

Anya Movius steps into a brighter spotlight
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Anya Movius

anyamovius.com

Standing backstage last September, waiting to audition for her first-year college talent show, Anya Movius put the final touches on the song she was about to perform. 

“I finished one of the songs that I was performing in the audition outside of the audition room,” laughs Movius. “It’s called ‘The Alchemist,’ which is going on the new record.”

The song, it turns out, was ready. Movius made the talent show cut, and the reward went beyond being one of 12 freshmen invited on stage. The night of the show, she says she was anxious in the green room, asking others (including the national youth poet laureate) for advice on how to calm down. When she sat down with her guitar in front of the large audience, she relaxed. “I loved it. The nerves kind of went away as soon as I got out there,” she says.

The singer-songwriter credits her hometown for her creative confidence. Growing up in Charlottesville, Movius says she took every opportunity to learn and perform music. At a young age, she was writing songs and singing for her parents and their friends. From taking classes at The Front Porch music school to signing up at open mics, Movius tapped into the music community and connected with songwriting mentors like Devon Sproule, Paul Curreri, and Michael Clem.

“One of my biggest rewards at the Monday songwriter open mic is watching different participants grow over time with their writing and performing,” says Clem. “With Anya, it’s an extra special case as she was one of the youngest participants ever, and she was wonderful out of the gate.”

Movius’ smart, aware songcraft is lyrically forward, marked by bright, catchy hooks. There’s raw emotion and vulnerability channeling through. Yes, sometimes it’s straight from her journal, but Movius challenges herself to take songwriting beyond self-examination and write from other perspectives. “I think it’s a really interesting way to empathize with people.”

Many of Movius’ songs exhibit a maturity that tells you she is not only writing, but she is listening carefully as well. From the popular Spotify track “Easy Fixes” to one of her favorites “Anastasia,” Movius often goes on an exploration of emotional dialogue. 

“[‘Anastasia’] is about the complexities in queer relationships. Especially in what I’ve seen with friends of mine … I wanted to explore how, in female relationships, and even female friendships, feelings can be more confusing and I wanted to try and encapsulate that in a song.”

When Movius returns to Harvard University this fall, she’ll have finished her first full-length album, From Heart to Hips. She’s been recording and releasing music for years, and she spent the first weeks of August in production at Chris Keup’s White Star Sound, where she delights in the studio work. “It’s the most magical part of the process for me and I get so excited!”

On August 31, Movius is on the bill at the Club Passim Campfire Festival in Boston, a venue where the founders of folk music, from Dylan to Joni, built the coffeehouse scene. Looking to her next big stage, she carries C’ville’s influence with her.

“I just finished up a song called ‘For Charlottesville,’” she says. “I think it’s an incredibly special place. The chorus goes: ‘I free up the words that I’ve been saving / for Charlottesville and Blue Ridge hills / it’s worth all the waiting.’”—TK

Basement takes

Photo by Alanna Mahon.

Üga Büga

Instagram: @ugabugaband

Stuck between country rock and metal jazz phases, Calloway Jones started Üga Büga as a basement jam three years ago with the itch to rock a little harder. He soon invited his friends Niko Cvetanovich and Jimmy Czywczynski along on a wild ride to write and perform music in a “progressive sludge metal” band. Üga Büga’s distinct aesthetic is signified by stylized umlauts in a name that was originally inspired by a caveman cartoon. The group breaks out of the basement with heavy riffs and a post-apocalyptic concept that proves an impressive combination of technical instrumentation and electrifying rhythm.

Jones says that the band’s album Year of the Hog encapsulates the energy of “an angry Facebook rant about capitalism and political corruption.” Pulling influences from an array of genres including blues and punk in an effort to revitalize metal and refrain from recycling, Calloway says performing in the band “feels like the best possible way to scream into the void.” Üga Büga is also filling the void in a metal community hungry for a bigger local scene.—EP

Playing in time

Supplied photo.

Briar Wilde

Youtube: @BriarWilde 

In Charlottesville’s Briar Wilde, husband and wife duo Shannon O’Leary and Alex Johnson are devoted to a vintage aesthetic. “Briar Wilde is rooted in the tradition of Appalachian ballad-singing, combining influences as disparate as country, folk, and classical music,” says O’Leary. The duo’s authentic sound is masked in antiquity and pays homage to the original Carter Family recordings of the 1927 Bristol Sessions that established the classic conventions of country music.

Recorded in Asheville, North Carolina, Briar Wilde’s self-titled debut EP was made using original 1930s music equipment, resulting in a hauntingly beautiful recording that makes time travel seem possible.—EP

Shake that brain

Supplied photo.

En Regalia

IG: @enregalia

A serendipitous meeting in history class was the spark that formed En Regalia, an alternative rock band made up of recent Monticello High School graduates Kylie Grunsfeld, Ethan Arellano, Jason Bittner, and Jimi Andrade. The group’s EP Charlie, named after an original fifth member, Charlie Dubendorfer, features chill guitar riffs and blissfully melodic vocals. Lead singer Grunsfeld shares coming-of-age stories through rhythmic vibrato and invigorating energy in songs like “Contact High” and “Suncatcher.” En Regalia’s infectious aura is one to revel in, and the group translates youthful endeavors like being in love for the first time into an array of sound that is delightful and relatable. “As a band, we aim to do two things: make people move, and make people think,” says Grunsfeld.—EP

Jazz kicks

Supplied photo.

Loose Champagne

IG: @loosechampagne

Loose Champagne is popping off like an uncorked bottle flowing in a surge of talent all around the UVA music scene with its covers of funk and R&B classics. The six-piece student band found its groove when lead guitarist Miles Miskill transformed his jazz ensemble with pianist Isa Rodriguez and bassist Isabel Xiao into a funkified group complete with rhythm guitarist Dana Sun, drummer Kyle Gresko, and vocalist Calista Nelson. Together, their playful mixture of jazz fusion, smooth funk, and upbeat soul draws inspiration from numerous icons within the genre, including Erykah Badu, The Internet, and Childish Gambino. “One of our motivations and [driving reasons behind] our song choices is wanting to bring in music that is underrepresented at UVA,” says Sun. The band is in the process of writing original music.—EP

Organic chemistry

Supplied photo.

Swamp Street

IG: @swampstreetband

In a moment of suspense, the members of Swamp Street lock eyes before bursting into funky, psychedelic rock, neo soul, and R&B sound. A jam band at heart, the group comprises UVA students Karolyn Yoon on guitar and vocals, Cameron Meredith on bass, and Jeremy Nachison on drums. Yoon and Meredith first discovered their musical chemistry while performing in another band, Mellowdrama, before joining forces with Nachison and keyboardist Kimball Roberts. Magic happens when they’re on the stage together, a spectacle that will soon be recorded in original songs titled “Violet Tide,” “Lady Lady,” “Portals,” and “Skyline Drive,” which they regularly perform live. 

The band offers unique renditions of covers and originals alike as it propels its experimental nature forward in each passionate and provocative performance. Swamp Street channels the energy of artists like D’Angelo and Jeff Buckley as rhythm and blues guide its swagger up on the stage.—EP

Tastemakers’ recommendations

“Buckbilly Deluxe is a new act that we absolutely love. Good old country songs and honky tonk that kicks some ass … Lead guitarist Josh Vana has made some great pickers blush by the fire. They may be most well-known for their ’80’s Chevy truck inspired posters … the ones that keep getting yanked off the Bodo’s bulletin board.”

—Koda Kerl, musician and consulting booker at Dürty Nelly’s

“Charlie Shea gives me goosebumps every time I listen to their mesmerizing lyrics and unique voice, and although they do not have any recorded music out there, they are an artist you will regret missing.”
—Samantha Federico, WCNR, Charlottesville Radio Group 

“I was sent a stream of the new, yet-to-be-released [Babe Lewis, which is the project of Jo Harder] album and it’s really good … hard to categorize: shades of indie rock, shoegaze, psychedelia but without being too on the nose … some finger-picking style guitar mixed in. I was honestly taken aback by how fresh it sounded. Unlike anything I’ve heard from a regional band in some time.”

—Warren Parker, WarHen Records

“Onokio (Zach) is one of the most eccentric and creative people I know. He’s relentlessly making some of the most fascinating electronic music out there.”

—Jeff Gorman, Illiterate Light

“Mayday’s Theo Herrin has become a bit of a fixture at the Southern, hosting our music open mics on Sunday, his charisma and talent on display solo or in his band with sharply tuned pop songs.”

—Danny Shea, The Southern Café and Music Hall

Wanna hear it?

Click here to listen to a sample of songs from artists featured in this new music issue!