Tag: Fine Arts

C-VILLE Weekly’s fine arts coverage consists of previews, reviews, gallery listings, and interviews with local fine artists.

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The Bridge PAI celebrates 10 years with a retrospective show

The Bridge exhibition “Looking Forward While Looking Back” will run until October 29. Photo by Martyn Kyle

In the beginning there were two artists, Zack Worrell and Greg Antrim Kelly. They were moved by street art, graffiti, hip-hop, punk, philanthropy and community organizing as art. Then Worrell bought a building. “It was pretty raw,” Kelly says, remembering those first days in the space now known as The Bridge. It had unpainted concrete walls, “and we used clip lamps to light the first show,” he says. But the space manifested exactly what Worrell and Kelly had envisioned: an unintimidating, welcoming place for every person in the community.

“You don’t really need more than 400 square feet to do great things,” Kelly says. “A bigger, more formal space can scare people off, especially people we wanted to connect with.” The character of the place, he says, “is really just an extension of us as people. It didn’t require a lot of conscious thought.”

By 2006, they had a mission statement and a name. Now, a decade later, Kelly, along with Bernard Hankins, Ashley Florence and Tim Popa, have organized a retrospective exhibition called “Looking Forward While Looking Back” to commemorate the last 10 years of The Bridge Progressive Arts Initiative.

As director of The Bridge from 2006 to 2012 (and current curator for the gallery at Studio IX), Kelly curated more than half of the retrospective exhibition that covered his directorship. “The past has lived tucked away,” he says, in the form of handbills, posters and fliers in The Bridge’s archive. The show moves clockwise from the main entrance, highlighting benchmarks and programming both chronologically and thematically. Tables in the center of the room showcase printouts of the original mission statement, annotated to-do lists, Polaroids from community events and influential books. “I wanted to show the process and the things that informed it,” Kelly says, and he encourages visitors to interact with the materials.

“You never knew what to expect,” says former Bridge director Greg Antrim Kelly. There might be slam- dancing one night, an art show with Westhaven community members the next and former UVA president John Casteen sitting in the audience the following evening while his son reads from his latest book of poetry.

The exhibition also features a few select pieces of art that help “tell the narrative of the organization,” Kelly says. One of these is a broadside letterpress printing of a Wendell Berry poem, printed by Virginia Arts of the Book Center co-founder Josef Beery following the poet’s December 2009 visit. Another is a portrait collection of volunteers painted by Eliza Evans.

“What I’m focused on in the first eight years is letting the marketing stuff tell the story with art mixed in,” says Kelly. Florence and Hankins have curated the part that represents The Bridge’s programming from 2013 to 2016, under the directorship of Matthew Slaats (who left in July).

Reflecting on the early years with Worrell, before they had an organization and a name, Kelly says, “It felt vibrant, nascent. That’s my favorite part of anything: the beginning.” Through the visual display of marketing materials, Kelly has created a layering effect intended to represent the constant influx of energy that sustained them. He describes a night when they hosted a punk show and someone got elbowed in the nose. Blood ended up on the wall and they had to hang a show the next day. They hung a piece of art over the stain. “You never knew what to expect,” he says. There might be slam-dancing one night, an art show with Westhaven community members the next and former UVA president John Casteen sitting in the audience the following evening while his son reads from his latest book of poetry.

Kelly’s philosophy as director was “Curate people, not content,” which helped to cultivate an atmosphere of mutual trust between The Bridge and emerging artists. “It’s important for artists to have a space with a very low barrier for access and use, whether financial or the way it’s structured. The Bridge was always really good at that,” Kelly says. “There was an attitude of affirmation. People were encouraged to take risks and fail, to explore ideas. That’s a huge thing for young artists to have that kind of support.”

“Somehow the organization walked this line of being punk and professional at the same time,” he says. “Chaotic but also high-quality. The biggest thing was people felt welcome here.” To Kelly, punk doesn’t mean causing conflict. “It means not being beholden to whatever the norms are, especially if you don’t agree. Not being pinned down, boxed in, labeled or defined by anything other than the moment. That nascent energy as an artist is so much a part of my interest, my personality. How do you push buttons and shake things up out of love, to make things better?”

For Kelly, art has been the channel through which he connects people and makes things better. Through The Bridge, he and Worrell created a place where professional and emerging artists could feel free to express themselves, and connect with people in the city they might not otherwise encounter. “It wasn’t exclusive to art,” Kelly says. “It was more about experiences.”

Contact Raennah Lorne at arts@c-ville.com.

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Artist Rosamond Casey explores how technology has touched our lives

“Tabula Sacra” is part of Rosamond Casey’s exhibition, “Tablet and Cloud,” on display at McGuffey Art Center through October 30. She hosts a First Fridays reception on October 7 and an artist-led discussion on October 12. Courtesy the artist

The impetus for Rosamond Casey’s latest exhibition, “Tablet and Cloud: Pilgrims in Cyberspace,” was a sight that has become so familiar to us that we often overlook it: the tangle of wires beneath our desks. “The way I usually start is I get fixated on a thing, a material or a form so pervasive in our culture it needs to be unpacked,” says Casey, a local artist who has lived in Charlottesville for more than 30 years.

She began her first painting of the underbelly of workspaces two years ago. As society becomes more and more wireless, she recognized the presence of wires as a moment likely nearing its end and wanted to capture it. For her, the tangle of wires represents “a realm of our imagination, a corner of the mind we don’t want to look at.”

“I painted it with a reverence for what it was and what it might symbolize,” she says. She also thinks of it as analogous to social media. “There’s no map, no system, no sense of a neighborhood,” Casey says. “Just a tangle of chaos.”

From this initial idea she constructed a visual narrative that explores our relationship with technology and its impact on human interaction, conveyed through the expressive hands of her painted figures. In “Madonna and Child,” an infant subtly points one finger toward her mother who is preoccupied with her cell phone while a bear hovers over the child.

In “Tabula Sacra,” one hand threads a wire up through a hole in a table while another hand reaches down to receive it, the table bisecting the potential contact. Casey presents the idea of connection via the wires, while the hands that are close but never touching emphasize the withdrawal of human connection as we become more engaged with our devices. “I drew them with sadness,” Casey says. “There’s an aborted sense of touch.”

The title of the exhibition comes from this idea that we’re moving away from personal computers to a “tablet and cloud” culture as we rely more on virtual storage. The juxtaposition of the two terms intrigues Casey, who says, “‘Tablet’ casts back to something ancient while ‘cloud’ suggests a mysterious future.” Incidentally, the term “the cloud” originated because of graphic representations of it by computer scientists and engineers as they attempted to diagram it for patenting purposes. And while there are physical locations for cloud servers, we tend to think of the cloud as the nebulous thing its name suggests.

“We’re taking a pilgrimage through unseen territory, heretofore unknown,” Casey says. The style of her figures is inspired by art from the Middle Ages, in addition to futuristic influences, as she plays with a distortion of time. “These people are of the past or the future because we’re moving through the present so rapidly there is a less fixed idea of what ‘now’ is.”

The very mutability of this present moment spurred Casey to grapple with the visual changes technology has created in our society and to convey a sense of awe for them. “Phones, computers and our faces in the light of our own devices,” she says.

“It makes me think about something my father said: ‘We’re all chewing through this planet like an apple.’ I have this conviction that in spite of investing everything in this future, it will fail us in a dramatic way. It feels fragile to me,” she says. “The Butterfly Effect” is an example of this fragility as one person jumps from a boat, causing it to rock the three remaining individuals, one of whom drops a cell phone into the water.

The human figures are so haunting and compelling, it is a surprise to learn that in her 40 years as an artist she has never painted figurative work before, only abstract. In fact, she says, her current work is so different from anything she’s done that it will not be recognizable to those familiar with her previous work. “It surprised me just as much, how fascinated I was by faces, illuminated, attentive and yet vacant,” she says. The series not only represents a shift in genre for Casey, but medium as well. “This is the first time I’ve done oil painting in my life,” she says.

Even more surprising are her artistic origins. “What has been the ballast of my art life is calligraphy,” she says. “Every art project has some reference to the alphabet.” In “Tablet and Cloud,” the calligraphic mark can be seen in some of the lines and curves delineated by the seemingly random arrangements of wires. “All these years I’ve been breathing life into that line and seeing where it would take me.”

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First Fridays: October 7

Sherrie Hunt’s pieces, on display at Chroma Projects Gallery’s new space, focus on mankind’s connection with nature. Photo by Martyn Kyle

First Fridays

October 7

“I have immense passion for nature and the well-being of our planet, from the tiniest of creatures and flora to the oceans and forest,” says Scottsville artist Sherrie Hunt. “The beauty and mystery of nature feeds my soul and awakens my creative spirit endlessly. On a daily basis, I’m reminded of its fragility,” she says. “I am an advocate of species in jeopardy.”

Most of Hunt’s oil paintings, photography and photographic montage pieces are laced with metaphor—some obvious, some less so—for humankind’s connection with nature. The floating flora and fauna remind the viewer that without attention and care, nothing is secure. By not fully finishing some of the forms, Hunt paints a frightening ghost of extinction into view. In one oil painting, “The Seer,” an intelligent hawk—Hunt’s harbinger for endangerment and extinction—looks into the distance as his form dissolves into the space behind him.

Find Hunt’s work in the new Chroma Projects Gallery space, nestled up against the west side of the Paramount Theater—ascend the short set of exterior stairs and continue to the second floor, then follow a long corridor. Keep an eye out for letterpress artist quotes to show you the way.

Art on the Trax 5784 Three Notch’d Rd., Crozet. “Reoccurring Images,” featuring collage by Rhonda Roebuck.

FF The Bridge Progressive Arts Initiative 209 Monticello Rd. “Looking Forward While Looking Back,” a 10th anniversary retrospective of the Bridge PAI. 5:30-9pm.

FF Chroma Projects Gallery 201 E. Main St. “Floating Worlds,” featuring paintings, photographs and installation pieces by Sherrie Hunt. 5-7pm.

FF City Clay 700 Harris St. #4. An exhibit featuring paintings and Mishima ceramics by Jane Angelhart. 5:30-7:30pm.

FF CitySpace 100 Fifth St. NE “@tribute,” featuring collaborative self-portraits of 17 Computers4Kids youth, made with photographer Eze Amos. 5-7pm.

FF C’ville Arts Cooperative Gallery 118 E. Main St. “Creations from my Head and Heart,” featuring knitted sweaters and innovative collage by Diane Goodbar. 6-8pm.

C’ville Coffee 1301 Harris St. An exhibit featuring acrylic paintings of landscapes, food and local subjects by Caroll Mallin. Through October 30.

Crozet Artisan Depot 5791 Three Notch’d Rd., Crozet. “Reclaiming Independence, Inspiring Craftsmanship,” featuring wood furniture and decorative items by Jacob Strong of StrongWood Designs.

FF Fellini’s #9 200 Market St. “Digital Art,” featuring digital prints by Perry Fitzhugh. 5:30-7pm.

The Fralin Museum at UVA 155 Rugby Rd. “The Great War: Printmakers of World War I,” featuring prints depicting combat scenes in France and the Near East; “New Acquisitions: Photography,” featuring work from Danny Lyon, Shirin Neshat and Eadweard Muybridge; “Oriforme” by Jean Arp; and “On the Fly,” featuring sculpture by Patrick Dougherty.

FF GallerIX 522 Second St. SE. “Inspiring Connections,” featuring paintings of local artists, photographers, musicians and other performers by Aimee McDavitt. 5-7pm.

FF The Garage 250 First St. N. “Garage Sale,” featuring oil and watercolor paintings of second-hand items by Sharon Shapiro. 5-7pm.

FF Graves International Art 306 E. Jefferson St. “Masters of Contemporary Art,” featuring limited-edition original prints, exhibition posters, stone lithography, drypoint etching and more by Ellsworth Kelly, Salvador Dalí, Georges Braque, Damien Hirst, David Hockney, Keith Haring, Roy Lichtenstein, Sam Francis, Philip Pearlstein, John Chamberlain, Andy Warhol, Gerald Laing, Joan Miró, Josef Albers and more. 5-8pm.

FF Kluge-Ruhe Collection 400 Worrell Dr. “On the Fabric of the Ngarrindjeri Body,” drawings, prints and photography by Australian aboriginal artist Damien Shen. 5:30-7:30pm.

FF Les Yeux du Monde 841 Wolf Trap Rd. “Annie Harris Massie: Lightness” featuring landscape paintings that explore the qualities of light that reveal and obscure form. 1-5pm.

Loving Cup Winery 3340 Sutherland Rd., North Garden. An exhibit of photography, pottery and paintings by the BozArt Fine Art Collective. Through October 30.

Martha Jefferson Hospital 500 Martha Jeffer-son Dr. “River,” featuring paintings by Linda Staiger of the natural landscapes of the James and Rivanna rivers on the First Floor Gallery. Bold and texture landscape paintings by Carroll Mallin hang in the main lobby floor.

FF McGuffey Art Center 201 Second St. NW. “Tablet & Cloud: Pilgrims in Cyberspace,” featuring work by Rosamond Casey in the Sarah B. Smith Gallery; “Flight,” featuring McGuffey member artists in the Lower North and South Hall galleries; “Fiber Transformed,” featuring work by contemporary Virginia fiber artists in the Upper North and South Hall galleries.

Mudhouse Coffee 213 W. Main St. “Water Like Memory,” featuring paintings that explore the patterns of surface water as reflections of states of mind and memory by Susan Willis Brodie. Through November 1.

FF Neal Guma Fine Art 105 Third St. NE. Fall show featuring work by Holly Andres, Julie Blackmon, Markus Brunetti, Julie Cockburn and Lois Conner. 5:30-7:30pm.

FF New Dominion Bookshop 404 E. Main St. An exhibit of oil paintings by Warren Boeschenstein. 5:30-7pm.

Scottsville Center for Arts and Nature 401 Valley St., Scottsville. “Another Day at the Office,” featuring Billy Morris’ photographs of the bucolic daily grind.

FF Second Street Gallery 115 Second St. SE. “Bitter, Sweet and Tender,” featuring photography, currency, sculpture and textile by Richmond-based artist Sonya Clark. 5:30-7:30pm.

Shenandoah Valley Art Center 26 S. Wayne Ave., Waynesboro. An exhibit featuring the artwork of the BozArt Fine Art Collective.

FF Spring Street Boutique 107 W. Main St. “Landscapes Near and Far,” featuring water-colors by Phyllis Koch-Sheras. 6-8pm.

FF Studio IX 969 Second St. SE. “Post Medium,” featuring work by UVA Aunspaugh Fifth Year Fellow Sandy William IV that challenges traditional art practices. 5-7pm.

Thomas Jefferson Memorial Church 717 Rugby Rd. An exhibit featuring the work of painter Deborah Rose Guterbock and painter and comics artist A.I. Miller.

FF Welcome Gallery at New City Arts 114 Third St. NE. “Look, Make & Do,” an exhibit featuring drawings, paintings, collages and collaborative installations by Emma Crockatt and Ryan Trott. 5-7:30pm.

FF WVTF & Radio IQ Studio Gallery 218 W. Water St. “Peace Doves,” featuring oil paintings and photography by Zuhal Feraidon. 5-7pm.

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Shakespeare’s First Folio comes to Charlottesville

UVA welcomes the First Folio, a rare collection of Shakespeare’s plays published after his death, to the Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library through October 26. Courtesy UVA, Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library

Seven years after William Shakespeare died in 1616, a collection of his plays was assembled into a single volume for the first time. Only 900 copies were printed—235 survive today. For the first time, one of those First Folios is at the University of Virginia, on loan from the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C., and on display at the Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library through October 26.

The opportunity for the loan became an excuse for a larger exhibition of UVA’s various Shakespeare-related materials in their collections, according to Dr. Molly Schwartzburg, curator of collections at the library.

“When we found that we had been selected to be a venue for the First Folio, we thought why don’t we select a few of our best items to accompany it,” says Schwartzburg. “And then we realized why would we do that work if we aren’t going to select all of our best items? Why don’t we make a whole exhibition out of it? So, we decided to build a large Shakespeare exhibition that would be up all year and then would adjust to accommodate the First Folio. The Folger project inspired us to go whole hog.”

The library went whole hog, indeed. Visitors to the gallery on the main level are treated to a trip through centuries of Shakespeare’s printed history. Early quarto-sized editions of his plays are on display, with texts that may have been authorized, or, just as likely, cribbed by scribbling bootleggers in his audiences. Piracy of entertainment began long before the Internet.

“UVA’s greatest strength is the history of the book,” says Schwartzburg. “Other institutions may be great in theater history. …We decided to look at the printing of Shakespeare up until the present day.”

Each copy of the First Folio is unique, owing to the fact that the typesetters made corrections to their sheets of paper as they worked, but did not discard the flawed drafts. It was a living document throughout its production, which mirrors the doomed struggle to identify definitive versions of any of Shakespeare’s plays.

“There is no such thing as a text of Shakespeare’s plays that is authorized by Shakespeare,” says Schwartzburg.

The plays likely changed even during the Bard’s own life. Scribes copied his drafts for the actors to use, with errors along the way. Like most playwrights, it’s possible he made changes to scripts based on the reactions of audiences and input from actors.

“A play in Shakespeare’s day was probably a fluid thing,” says Schwartzburg.

A comparison of the famous “to be or not to be” soliloquy from various early printings of Hamlet shows wide variation. The first standalone quarto copy of Hamlet from 1603 is about a third shorter than what we are familiar with today, and many alternate lines are substituted. A 1604 edition was close to the First Folio version, but lacked a few key words.

Hamlet is now categorized as a “tragedy,” thanks to the First Folio.

“A key thing that happens with the First Folio is that it starts making claims about the text that don’t exist before,” says Schwartzburg. “It breaks the plays up into categories: tragedies, comedies and histories. …That has a huge impact on how you interpret them and has nothing to do with an intention of the author that you can return to.”

Eighteen of the plays had never been published before the First Folio and might otherwise have been lost. In fact, without the First Folio, Shakespeare might have been forgotten entirely.

The First Folio “tells us a lot about the significance of Shakespeare in the environment of 1622 when the project probably begins,” says Schwartzburg. “It tells of a legacy continuing beyond Shakespeare’s own lifetime, which isn’t the case with a lot of other very popular playwrights of the time whom we’ve never heard of today because they didn’t have someone going out and thinking it’s a good idea to publish and sell an edition of this person’s plays.”

Two of Shakespeare’s friends organized and edited the First Folio, giving it special legitimacy versus some of the standalone copies of his plays (which were never known to have been authorized by Shakespeare or edited by anyone with knowledge of what his intentions were for his work). John Heminges and Henry Condell, both actors in his troupe, the King’s Men, were close enough friends of the Bard to be named in his will.

Without Heminges and Condell, would anyone remember Shakespeare today? What about the thousands of words in the English language that he invented or popularized?

The First Folio led to a Second Folio in 1632 (also on display in the exhibit) with around 1,700 changes from the First Folio. When the Third Folio appeared in 1663, seven more plays were added but only six of those are now accepted as Shakespeare’s work.

Various editions of Shakespeare’s supposed plays blossomed in the centuries since. Editors censored some material and changed lines to fix rhymes that stopped working as accents changed. As generations of publishers have used Shakespeare’s name and work in whatever way that has suited them at a particular moment, the First Folio is the closest thing to a gold standard that actors, directors and fans have.

Contact Jackson Landers at arts@c-ville.com.

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Human/Ties exhibit: ‘Landscapes of Slavery and Segregation’

Recovered and reconstructed Virginia slave dwellings are featured on the Downtown Mall as part of an installation by Encyclopedia Virginia.

Throughout the month of September, an audio-visual exhibition called “Landscapes of Slavery and Segregation” provides historical context to Charlottesville in three different locations: the Downtown Mall, the Jefferson School African American Heritage Center and UVA Grounds.

Curated by Encyclopedia Virginia, a branch of The Virginia Foundation for the Humanities, each site is paired with multimedia components of text, images and audio (accessible at http://landscapes360.oncell.com/) that inform the viewer about the local history of slavery and segregation and encourage critical thinking about our treatment of the past and how it is presented currently.

Emma Lewis (pictured as a child) is a team lead at UVA Medical Center and former resident of Vinegar Hill neighborhood. Image: Gundars Osvalds
Emma Lewis (pictured as a child) is a team lead at UVA Medical Center and former resident of Vinegar Hill neighborhood. Image: Gundars Osvalds

On the Downtown Mall across from the free speech wall, large photographs showcase recovered and reconstructed Virginia slave dwellings, with audio information about how these structures are preserved. At the Jefferson School, an exhibit of vintage photographs from 1963 taken in the historic African-American neighborhood of Vinegar Hill provides insight into residents’ lives there before the area was razed and redeveloped following a city vote in which a poll tax prevented many of the residents from voting. And on UVA Grounds, a walking tour includes audio information about the role of slaves who lived and worked at the university, based on ongoing historical research by UVA’s President’s Commission on Slavery and the university.

The exhibition is part of Human/Ties, the 50th anniversary celebration of the National Endowment for the Humanities that will take place in Charlottesville from September 14-17 and includes other events that examine our local history.

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Anna Tucker illustrates the fun side of planning

For all its utility in tracking our planetary revolutions, earthly seasons and our personal development from one sunrise to the next, time may be the human construct that inspires the most anxiety. If you find conventional planners too rigid, digital calendars too ethereal, if you seem incapable of committing to a routine of tracking your time or if you’ve noticed that self-proclaimed mindfulness adult coloring books actually make you mindless as they distract you from your problems, Anna Tucker has the planner for you.

The 2016 University of Virginia graduate with a degree in media studies and English just completed her Kickstarter campaign last month, raising more than $6,000 to fund her Nevermindful 2017 Weekly Planner + Journal + Coloring Book. On the Kickstarter page, she describes it as “a Swiss army personal planner for space cadets and loony bins who like to fixate, for those of us who get driver amnesia, ask questions to be repeated and doodle in the margins.”

Tucker argues that most adult coloring books advertise themselves as mindful but are actually the opposite, encouraging consumers to zone out. In an e-mail, she writes, “I find it very sad to see industries capitalizing off public anxiety and an individual’s willingness to make changes by providing them with flimsy and temporary solutions to escape or treat symptoms rather than examine the root of the problem. Nevermindful is first and foremost a satirical self-help guide and intro to mindful thinking, but it will also hopefully be a way for people to empower themselves by taking the practice of sustainable stress relief into their own hands.”

The Nevermindful planner sprang from a perfect storm of ideas. As a transfer student from the University of Georgia, Tucker says she came upon mindfulness at the right time. She was adjusting to difficult classes at UVA and enjoyed being intellectually challenged but needed something to prevent burnout. She took a class on mindfulness at UVA’s Contemplative Sciences Center. Meanwhile, in her own planners, calendars and class notes, she was always drawing.

“I’ve always illustrated while writing because it helps me remember,” says Tucker. “I’m a visual person that way. People have always commented on [my illustrations], but I never thought about it until my job this summer.”

As the project coordinator for the vice provost for the arts at UVA, she makes calendars and to-do lists, as well as marketing and promotion materials.

“I kept getting compliments,” she says. “I never realized they could be helpful for someone else until I received positive feedback on them.”

And since graduating, she has had more time on her hands. For the Nevermindful project she commissioned 11 different artists to contribute their art to one month of the year. (Tucker is illustrating April.)

“I asked each person to capture their personality in a way through their art that could be enlightening to people to respond to,” she says. “I told them to try to be like a funny self-help book, what you would tell your best friends if you had a unique insight or mantra that would help people reconsider or reject something.”

She explains that while the planner is illustrated, it allows for coloring and includes games, riddles and tasks, with room for people to add to it in their own way. “It’s a more satirical way to point out that mindfulness and mediation are about confronting things in the present moment,” she says. “We’re trying to combine a calendar and timeline of living with fun things, creative prompts to keep us thinking.”

And Tucker purposefully instilled Nevermindful with a self-consciousness that most planners lack.

“We didn’t want to have a lot of straight lines,” she says. “It’s supposed to capture the idea that we think we can control the future by planning things. But we might as well have fun with it.”

For Tucker, it’s meaningful to have a physical plan and a record of how she spent her time that she can hold in her hands, rather than access digitally.

“It’s more personal to record things in your own handwriting,” Tucker says. “You can learn from yourself in the future and see how far you’ve come. And part of the idea of the book is that planning is stressful, but writing it out makes you feel better to have it outside of your body.”

Tucker has sold 200 copies through Kickstarter, with 10 percent of sales to fund mental health resources for students and community members at the Contemplative Sciences Center. She hopes to have the first batch printed in September. More information is available at never-mindful.com.

Anna Tucker’s Nevermindful planner combines task lists with whimsy, but don’t call it mindfulness. “By taking on the smaller, arguably harmless, target of adult coloring books, we are hoping this test case will give consumers a BS detector for this kind of advertisement in other areas of their life,” she says.

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August First Fridays Guide

Abstract artist Aimee McDavitt’s exhibit, “Broken is Beautiful,” opens August 5 at Studio IX.

Local abstract artist Aimee McDavitt lives with chronic illness, though it is rarely the subject of her art. “My experience has emphasized the importance of learning to seek, create and enjoy happiness within the confines of my situation,” she says. McDavitt’s acrylic works reflect free experimentation of several techniques—drips, drops, swirling, crinkling and color layering—to create texture and mood. Her pieces represent the contrast between what is perceived on the surface versus what actually is, upon delving deeper.

First Fridays – August 5

FF Angelo 220 E. Main St. “Water Lilies,” featuring photographs by Stephanie Gross. 5:30-7:30pm.

Art on the Trax 5784 Three Notch’d Rd., Crozet. “Poetry of the Landscape, Panoramic Views,” featuring en plein air works by Meg West, with a reception on Saturday, August 13 at 4pm.

FF C’ville Arts Cooperative Gallery 118 E. Main St. “Back to Modern,” featuring whimsical jewelry by Stephen Dalton. 6-8pm.

FF Chroma Projects Gallery 201 E. Main St. “Florescence,” featuring paintings by Jennifer Cox, Michelle Gagliano and Rachel Rotenberg. 5-7pm.

The Fralin Museum at UVA 155 Rugby Rd. “Fish and Fowl,” featuring sculptures, paintings and prints; “Casting Shadows: Selections from the Permanent Collection,” featuring the FUNd; “Icons,” by Andy Warhol; “On the Fly,” featuring sculpture by Patrick Dougherty; and “Oriforme,” featuring sculpture by Jean Arp.

FF The Garage 250 First St. N. “You Me We” featuring collaborative drawings and paintings by Ryan Trott, Sarah Yoder and Ken Horne. 5-7pm.

FF Graves International Art 306 E. Jefferson St. “Masters of Contemporary Art,” featuring limited-edition original prints, exhibition posters, stone lithography, drypoint etching and more by Ellsworth Kelly, Salvador Dalí, Georges Braque, Damien Hirst, David Hockney, Keith Haring, Roy Lichtenstein, Sam Francis, Philip Pearlstein, John Chamberlain, Andy Warhol, Gerald Laing, Joan Miró, Josef Albers and more. 5-8pm.

Les Yeux du Monde 841 Wolf Trap Rd. “Summer Light,” featuring various mediums in a group exhibition by several artists.

McGuffey Art Center 201 Second St. NW. “Atonement,” featuring works by Peter Allen in the Sarah B. Smith Gallery and “McGuffey Members Summer Group Show,” featuring various works in the Lower and Upper halls. On view through Sunday, August 14.

Shenandoah Valley Art Center 26 S. Wayne Ave., Waynesboro. An exhibit featuring works by Ashley Sauder Miller.

FF Studio IX 963 Second St. SE. “Broken is Beautiful,” featuring acrylic works by Aimee McDavitt. 5-7pm.

FF Spring Street Boutique 107 W. Main St. “Sea Life,” featuring oil on canvas by Leslie Wade. 6-8pm.

University of Virginia Health System 1215 Lee St. “Strange Objects and Unusual Places,” featuring photography by Fax Ayres.

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ARTS Pick: SEE/HEAR

Second Street Gallery hosts experimental musicians for its music series SEE/HEAR on Tuesday. Photo: Publicity photo

Bassist Chris Dammann’s outfit Restroy plays contemporary tunes from the new release Saturn Returns, and duo Rick Parker and Li Daiguo perform a blend of folk-acoustics and electronica influenced by their respective homes, Brooklyn and China. The collaborative event SEE/HEAR invites guests to take in the Second Street Gallery’s exhibitions while listening to improvisational sounds for an immersive sensory experience.

Tuesday 8/2. $10, 8pm. Second Street Gallery, 115 Second St. SE. secondstreetgallery.org.

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Starving artists find sustenance in local restaurant scene

River Hawkins is The Bebedero’s co-owner and bar manager as well as an artist who found a perfect pairing for his creativity by making a living in the restaurant business. His striking mural dominates the decor and compliments the Veracruz, Mexico, cuisine at the restaurant. Photo: Tom McGovern

Many artists in Charlottesville who don’t have the privilege of pursuing their art full-time have found that employment in the food service industry allows them the flexibility to pursue their creative muse. We scouted around town, found four artists who work in the restaurant business and asked them about their experience in both professions, whether they see any parallels between the two and if one experience informs the other.

River Hawkins

Part-owner and bar manager at The Bebedero, Hawkins started drawing when he was a child. As a bartender in Eugene, Oregon, he would doodle on napkins. And one day, the bar he was working for had an art show.

“I put up one piece, a random, bizarre painting, and someone offered me $100 for it right there,” says Hawkins. “I thought, ‘I should be focusing on this.’”

He’s now worked in bars for 20 years while continuing to create art. And although he’s called Charlottesville home since 2012, he spent part of the last year managing a bar at a boutique resort in Mexico. He returned with a wealth of knowledge just as his boss from The Whiskey Jar was planning to open The Bebedero and needed someone to manage the beverage program.

“It was serendipitous,” Hawkins says.

Not only does he manage The Bebedero’s bar and craft its colorful cocktails, Hawkins also painted the mural there (above), as well as some other pieces. His partners allow him the freedom to be creative, he says, and he even has an art studio in the office space above the restaurant.

“It’s fun because I can paint for my restaurant, a labor of love,” he says. “There is nothing but inspiration to paint for my bar.”

Leah Peeks

A visual artist who manages the bar at The Whiskey Jar, Peeks started working at her family’s restaurant in rural Tennessee at age 13 and has been in the food service industry for most of her life.

“I was always picking up catering gigs or bartending,” says Peeks. “If you’re lucky, you can work three nights a week and make enough to live on, with a social life built in, and have time to work on your art.”

“My major interest in art is all the colors and the interesting things they can do when you fuse them together,” says Peeks. “The emotions they can bring up.” She’s fascinated by a color theory term known as vibrating boundaries.

“Specific colors next to each other cause stress in your eyes as you have trouble perceiving the colors at the same time,” Peeks says. “It’s cool and exhilarating to see what color can do.”

Last summer, she was awarded a two-month residency in Key West. She says it’s a nod to The Whiskey Jar team that she was able to go at all. “They bent over backwards to make sure I could go. And I was able to come back to my job.”

Ryan Manegold

Manegold, a part-time cook at Twisted Branch Tea Bazaar, has been playing guitar since he was 15. He started out in punk and heavy metal bands, then became interested in jazz and attended Shenandoah University to focus on jazz studies. He moved to Charlottesville to work at Blue Mountain Brewery and joined local band The Design as a guitarist, playing funk, soul, hip-hop and rap.

He traveled out West for a while, returned to Charlottesville, got a job on a local farm and started playing bluegrass. He then met local violinist Chris Johnson (who used to tour with The Hackensaw Boys), guitarist Jacob Bennett, mandolinist Alex Bragg and stand-up bassist Kevin Torpey. Together they formed a bluegrass project called Fermata Mafia, and will have their inaugural gig at C’ville-ian Brewing Company on July 30. For the first time since rapping for The Design, Manegold will be doing vocals.

“I just recently started to find my voice when it comes to singing,” he says.

Working as a cook at the Tea Bazaar has also allowed him to explore creativity in the presentation of food and, like Peek, he appreciates the accommodating schedule.

“If I have a gig I can usually get my shift covered,” he says.

Sam Cregger

An Americana guitarist and vocalist who first picked up guitar in the fifth grade, Cregger is currently recording his third album while working as a server at The Whiskey Jar. His experience in the food industry ranges from raising and slaughtering chickens at Bellair Farm to tending bar at Yearbook Taco.

He credits his supportive bosses throughout the years with allowing him flexible hours.

“I get all the availability I need and work only lunches, which is pretty hard to get,” says Cregger.

And while Cregger sees a distinction between his two professions, he notes that he tends to encounter many artistic people as a server. “It seems that a lot of people who want to pursue art in some capacity end up in the restaurant business,” he says. “There’s a community there. I play a lot of bars, and we’re cut from the same cloth. We all understand living paycheck by paycheck.”

Cregger will soon leave Charlottesville for Seattle, where he will continue pursuing music. He thinks he’ll likely work in a restaurant there, too, to help pay the bills.

“If my music never takes off that’s fine,” he says. “I just love doing it.”

Categories
Arts

The Fralin explores iconography through Warhol’s eyes

Andy Warhol’s “Marilyn” (1967) serigraph is on display in UVA’s Fralin Museum of Art’s “Icons” exhibit through September 18. Photo: © 2016 Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc. / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York Rights of Publicity and Persona Rights are used with permission of The Estate of Marilyn Monroe LLC

In “Andy Warhol: Icons,”  The Fralin Museum of Art at UVA brings together prints the Andy Warhol Foundation gave to the museum in 2014, along with works from a number of loaned sources, to explore the concept of icon in both a traditional and contemporary sense. As one of the most prominent 20th century icons, Warhol is both the creator of the work on view and the subject of the show.

The prints are handsomely displayed against black walls, which cause the vivid colors to pop. Marilyn, Liza, Jackie and EIIR—the latter coated in diamond dust—are all here, as well as some lesser-known royals. There’s also what might be the closest thing to an original icon in Warhol’s take on Piero della Francesca’s “Saint Apollonia.” To underscore the point, a 15th-century painting of Saint Apollonia, on loan from the National Gallery of Art, is placed alongside the Warhol versions.

Mao and Elvis, two major 20th century icons whom Warhol immortalized, are missing, along with Elizabeth Taylor. But icons of a different sort, the more unusual “Cowboys and Indians” series, which features Native American figures Geronimo and Sitting Bull, as well as Annie Oakley and Theodore Roosevelt, are hung together in their own room to dramatic effect. In several instances the works are displayed in multiple versions as opposed to just one image. This allows the viewer to see how the application of pigment in the printing process alters the image.

For instance, Marilyn Monroe is transformed from a recognizable representation of herself in one, to a veritable Gorgon in another version, suggesting the steep price of fame. Warhol produced his first Monroe piece, “Marilyn Diptych” (1962), from which these derive, using a “Niagara” publicity still soon after her death to take full advantage of the shock and notoriety surrounding it.

Arguably the most influential 20th century American artist, Warhol challenged entrenched formal and contextual standards. A talented commercial artist with lofty ambitions, he knew what looked good. He also realized that the quintessentially American realms of advertising and mass production yielded the inspiration and means to create something wholly original that would resonate with viewers. When the wagons of the recondite art world initially circled against him, Warhol persevered on his own terms, answering Jasper Johns’ haute art Ballantine Ale cans (“Painted Bronze,” 1960), with his breezy “Campbell’s Soup Cans” (1962). It was an audacious move that signaled a coming sea change.

But what began as conceptually interesting morphed into something different in the post-Factory years as Warhol shifted his attention to portraits of the beautiful people done as commissions and for covers of his Interview magazine. While they enhanced his fame and pocketbook, there’s something hollow about these works. There isn’t any “there” there.

Warhol would agree. He famously said his art didn’t mean anything. Was this a brilliant commentary or shrewd marketing or eccentricity? It’s hard to know. Certainly, for all his coopting and commenting on fame, Warhol was also dazzled by it and pursued it doggedly. In post-Kardashian America, Warhol’s self-promotion appears rather charming, quaint even. But as both acolyte and high priest of the cult of celebrity, he helped usher in the likes of Kim and Kanye.

With eye-popping color, slick presentation and frisson-packed subject matter, Warhol’s work has an easy-on-the-eyes facility. It also brings with it the sex, drugs and rock n’ roll glamour of The Factory and Studio 54. Who doesn’t want a piece of that? On a purely superficial level, the work is easy to understand and recognize for what it is. This also means it’s easy to figure out how much a Warhol costs—important info in this era of billionaires, when keeping up with the Joneses has shifted from pricey handbags and cars to the serious big-ticket items of expensive contemporary art.

For work that isn’t about anything, Warhols continue to raise big questions about what constitutes value and how it is established. In Warhol’s case, there’s been some controversy over attribution with works that were long considered authentic being reassessed. It’s a slippery slope. With the exception of his early work, Warhol was largely removed from it, directing it from afar and then approving and signing it after completion. Add to this the multiple nature of the work and you get something whose value should, by all rights, be adversely affected. And yet Warhol’s popularity remains intact. For someone who questioned the very nature of art, this would be gratifying indeed.

Warhol opened up a door to a world not only populated by the Kardashians, whose baseless fame has endured well beyond their allotted 15 minutes, but also to Jeff Koons and his ilk. Art has become a commodity acquired and traded like any other. To say this has always been the case is simply not true. Picasso was not looking at the bottom line when he was working. Yes, he had an ego and certainly enjoyed the adulation that surrounded him, but his motivation was the creative fire that burned within. The same can be said about the incomparable Gerhard Richter, whose work is substantive, challenging and also commands the stratospheric prices enjoyed by those who have more than a whiff of hucksterism about them. It’s unfortunate that plenty of lesser-known, truly talented artists are overshadowed by the prevailing commercialism and vapidity. If there was room for both, it wouldn’t be so bad, but, as is true in other sectors, there is very little trickle down, and our culture is the worse for it.