In Latin America, kites are serious business, flown, depending on region, on Easter and the Day of the Dead. They’re also widely used for sport. With his “Papalotes en Resistencia” (Kites in Resistance), Federico Cuatlacuatl, an assistant professor of new media in UVA’s art department, uses the culture, heritage, and traditions of that region as tools of activism. Originally from Puebla, Mexico, Cuatlacuatl immigrated to the U.S. in 1999.
Two of Cuatlacuatl’s large gold foil kites are currently on view in Second Street’s Dové Gallery. Sparkling gaily under the gallery spots, they seem joyful and light in both weight and connotation. But the kites contain a deeper, more urgent message: Asylum- seeking children continue to be detained in centers across the U.S.
Cuatlacuatl makes the kites personal to a Charlottesville audience by repurposing tiki lights, like the ones used by neo-Nazis during their August 11, 2017, assault on UVA, to construct the framework.
Generally, in this country, kites are seen as an innocent child’s toys, so there’s a dark irony that these objects of play are used to draw attention to
an appalling human rights crisis.
Originally scheduled for April, Cuatlacuatl’s show included a field trip to Washington, D.C., where UVA students planned to fly the kites in a peaceful protest on the National Mall to showcase the migrant children’s plight. Because of COVID-19, the exhibition was postponed and the kite-flying protest canceled. The project was not lost, though, because Cuatlacuatl’s kites offer the perfect complement in content and form to the “Bearing Witness” work on view in the main gallery.
Many will be shocked, as was I, that one of the migrant children detention centers, the Shenandoah Valley Juvenile Center (which houses seven of these children), is located just over Afton Mountain in Staunton. Visitors to the Second Street show are invited to write letters to the children. (They will be delivered through a contact of the artist’s.) The gallery is also collecting supplies for the migrant children detained in Staunton. Please contact Second Street (secondstreetgallery.org; 977-7284) if you are interested in donating.
The Bridge has kept art opportunities flowing by sharing creative print content, including zines, pamphlets, stickers, and buttons in its Rad Press distribution boxes. Courtesy of the Bridge PAI
How does a community arts organization react to an ongoing pandemic that requires the restriction of in-person gatherings? It gets creative.
“We’re still dreaming big,” says Alan Goffinski, director of The Bridge Progressive Arts Initiative. “One thing that I think we’ve always prided ourselves on as an organization is our ability to shift gears, respond to the creative impulses of our community, and be that resource for artists and culture shapers to plug in and make something happen.”
Programming committee member Federico Cuatlacuatl says, “We’re in the time where community programs have to constantly reinvent ourselves and how we engage, which is challenging and overwhelming, but, at the same time, exciting because we get to pave thatpath. We get to throw out these ideas and exciting new possibilities.”
One of those exciting new possibilities is Rad Press, a collection of newsstands in front of the Bridge gallery space at 209 Monticello Rd., which offers a way to connect the community and elevates the voices of Charlottesville artists. They’re not traditional newspaper boxes in appearance or content. On the outside, they are vibrant works of art thanks to The Bridge PAI programming committee members Cuatlacuatl, Karina Monroy, and Daisa Granger Pascall, and Feminist Union of Charlottes- ville Creatives members Heather Owens and Miranda Elliott Rader. On the inside, they contain a variety of print content, including zines, pamphlets, stickers, and buttons, exploring themes of “revolution, resistance, decolonization, and witchcraft,” according to Cuatlacuatl.
This effort “was a direct response to the Black Lives Matter movement,” Cuatlacuatl says. “It was also a response to the tension our communities are feeling under a pandemic. It was at the same time a response to keep the Bridge going in terms of programming, being active, and responding in regard to all of these phenomena. We’re always keeping in mind, ‘how do we keep artists and communities engaged?’ It was a perfect way to keep everyone involved and tuned in.”
In this time of prolonged isolation, The Bridge PAI recognized the importance of tangible communication. “You’re literally holding the opinions, ideas, and values of your community in your hand,” says Goffinski. “Having that experience of engaging multiple senses in that process of intaking someone else’s ideas is a really valuable and beautiful thing.”
The Bridge PAI reached out to local artists already making print materials related to subjects like anti-racism and anti- fascism, and asked them to participate. Goffinski says the goal is to amplify those artists’ ideas, imagery, and literature.
Lydia Moyer, an artist and UVA associate professor, is a big believer in independent and artist publications, as well as DIY distribution, and says she contributed posters and prints to support and encourage radical thought in Charlottesville.
The Bridge PAI hopes to make Rad Press a permanent fixture. “Radical literature is timeless,” Goffinski says. “There are so many conversations that need to be had about so many things. Every week, something new is in the foreground…we want Rad Press to…be able to shift and morph to include new things as they pop up.”
While Rad Press keeps the conversation going outside, the Bridge’s gallery space has become active again through the STUDI0.00 initiative, which offers free, short-term studio use to artists displaced by the pandemic virus or reckoning with the pandemic of systemic racism, according to Goffinski.
“This is a very basic effort to say to our creative community that we exist for you,” he says. “In a town where space is increasingly more difficult to come by and more expensive, we just never lose sight of the fact that our space is a valuable resource and we don’t want it to sit dormant just because we can’t do what we normally do in it.”
Programming committee member Katie Schetlick says the benefits reach beyond the individual artists themselves. “That space has those huge windows, so it also provides the opportunity to be reminded that people are still making art, which is a hopeful visual.” The initiative has also uncovered new talent. “Some of the artists who have requested space, I’d never seen their work before,” says Schetlick. “It’s been nice to actually learn about these hidden gems that are right here in Charlottesville.”
Genevieve Story took advantage of the empty gallery, using it for leather pyrography, fulfilling orders and preparing offerings for the holiday season. Hoping to have a larger space of her own but unable to acquire it due to economic impacts of the coronavirus, Story had been doing work at her kitchen table. “The offer from the Bridge could not have come at a better time,” she says.
The space continues to be available on a first come, first served basis, and Schetlick encourages others to make a request. “Don’t feel shy about it, even if you just want to go inside and wiggle around and make some funny noises,” she says. “The space is there.”
The Centerpiece Film of the 2019 Virginia Film Festival is Harriet, starring Zackary Momoh as John and Cynthia Erivo as Harriet Tubman. Credit: Glen Wilson / Focus Features
Oscar buzz abounds among the spotlight films screening at the 32nd Annual Virginia Film Festival, from the opening night feature, Just Mercy, starring Michael B. Jordan, to writer-director Noah Baumbach’s Marriage Story with Scarlett Johansson, Adam Driver, Laura Dern, Alan Alda and Ray Liotta. VAFF Director and UVA Vice Provost for the Arts Jody Kielbasa also announced appearances from guest programmers: artist Federico Cuatlacuatl, filmmaker Michelle Jackson, filmmaker and programmer Joe Fab, film scholar Samhita Sunya, artist and scholar Mona Kasra, and Washington Jewish Film Festival director Ilya Tovbis.
Music fans will get an exclusive look at the Bruce Springsteen concert film Western Stars, and actor, writer, and director Ethan Hawke is coming to town to reflect on his career and screen the 2007 film Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead, in which he stars alongside the late Philip Seymour Hoffman.
Ann Dowd known for her role as Aunt Lydia in “The Handmaid’s Tale,” will participate in a discussion following Dismantling Democracy, a political documentary she narrates.
Senior guest programmer Ilana Dontcheva says a synergy emerged among the submitted films, resulting in a new sidebar featuring women writers and directors, and director Wanuri Kahiu will be at the screening of her film, Rafiki (a love story between two women that was banned in 2018 in Kenya), for a conversation about her career and the creation of the Afrobubblegum Movement.
The Virginia Film Festival takes place October 23-27; tickets will go on sale to the public at noon on Monday, September 30. More information can be found at virginiafilmfestival.org.
Indigenous artist Federico Cuatlacuatl, Tom Tom Festival Artist in Residence at The Bridge, paints a mural (design pictured) and opens an exhibition this week. Image courtesy the artist
Federico Cuatlacuatl began making art when he was 7 years old. It was a “survival instinct” that kicked in when his family moved from Cholula, Mexico, to Indiana.
“I knew like, two words of English, and I needed a way to communicate that I felt sad and depressed, and that I missed home, and that I didn’t feel good,” says Cuatlacuatl. Because he couldn’t express those feelings verbally to most of the people around him, he developed a visual language for it.
By high school, Cuatlacuatl was an active, prolific artist. Making work was a continuation of that survival instinct that kicked in when he was little, he says. Growing up undocumented, he knew that he had to work “toward something that would one day be fruitful,” he says.
“And that was my chance: to be an artist.”
Now, Cuatlacuatl is living and working in Charlottesville and teaching art classes at the University of Virginia. He works in a variety of mediums—illustration, animation, painting, installation—and throughout the month of April, as the Tom Tom Festival artist-in-residence at The Bridge Progressive Arts Initiative, he’ll exhibit some of his own work and lead a number of community art projects.
Federico Cuatlacuatl
“I can’t sit still,” Cuatlacuatl says, half-jokingly, as the reason for why he works in so many different mediums. But there’s much more to it than that.
An artist’s flexibility and fluidity is crucial to how he functions within his community, says Cuatlacuatl, and for his own artistic practice, community is paramount. “An artist can function, and must function, in a community, and must respond alongside a community,” he says. “I always like to emphasize that my work is not personal. My work is not talking about my narrative, or me personally. But it uses my narrative to amplify that there [are] thousands of cases like these.”
Broadly, his work focuses on a number of issues, including immigration, recognition, and celebration of indigenous communities, and cultural sustainability. We talk a lot about environmental, social, and economic sustainability, and not enough about cultural sustainability, says Cuatlacuatl. “Culturally, we’re so diverse and so dynamic within our own communities, that we have to understand that, and we have to bring that into the conversation of how we are collaborating and becoming a collective community.” In order to sustain a culture, its traditions must be acknowledged and practiced.
Cuatlacuatl was in the car, on his way to town to begin his professorship at UVA, the weekend of August 11 and 12, 2017. When he arrived, one of the first things he did was respond to the tiki torch march on Grounds —a major trauma for his new community. He deconstructed a tiki torch and made it into a kite, which he flew as a form of peaceful protest against the ideas the torch-wielding neo-Nazis and white supremacists marched for. It was his way of demonstrating that, “with tradition and culture, you can really shift conversations around, literally and also culturally,” he says.
Kites as a form of peaceful protest are the basis of Cuatlacuatl’s “Desencabronamiento” exhibition, which opens Sunday, April 14, at The Bridge PAI. It will feature a variety of kites, all of them traditional Mexican forms, which Cuatlacuatl learned from Mexican master kite maker Pedro Cuacuas. The kites are white, rather than rainbow-hued, to express peace.
Cuatlacuatl expects the sight might conjure up the image of waving a white flag, an action that holds different meanings in different cultures. In the United States, the action of waving a white flag indicates surrender. In other cultures—including Mexico—waving a white flag, or in this case, flying a white kite, means peace. “Let’s talk, let’s enter into dialogue.” Cuatlacuatl’s inviting the latter.
The exhibition title, “Desencabronamiento,” translates literally to “the process of getting un-pissed off.” Cuatlacuatl chose that title because making these kites has been cathartic for him, and he hopes it will be to everyone who gets involved, including the local Latinx high schoolers who are building some of the kites along with him.
Cuatlacuatl’s exhibition of kites, “Desencabronamiento,” opens at The Bridge PAI on Sunday, April 14. Image courtesy the artist
The flight patterns of the kites will be 3-D mapped and made into an animation that will live online. And, along with those Latinx students, Cuatlacuatl has begun work on a mural in the Hogwaller neighborhood, one that will celebrate indigenous communities of many kinds in Virginia. “I think we often forget that we are occupying native land,” says Cuatlacuatl, who wishes there was more acknowledgment of the Monacan Indian Nation—the traditional custodians of the land we now call Charlottesville—and other indigenous peoples throughout the area. And not just their past, but their present and future, too.
The social practice of art is an important agent for social change, says Cuatlacuatl. “I really see social practice as a more powerful way of approaching concerns and issues. You can directly work with communities, confront the issue, and possibly propose advances…shift things around,” he says. “Rather than making things, I’m more interested in making things happen.”
