Tag: Fine Arts

With its stalwart presence atop the hill at the northwest end of downtown, there’s no doubt that the McGuffey Art Center is a defining part of the local arts community. Its sturdy brick exterior commands respect while its large sash windows hint at the building’s original use as a school. Built in 1916, McGuffey was a public elementary school until 1973. After sitting empty for a couple of years, it was reborn as the community art center in 1975. This month, a series of exhibitions, performances and other activities is scheduled to celebrate the center’s 40th anniversary.

Perhaps one of the most remarkable aspects of McGuffey is that it has been artist-run from the beginning. In the early 1970s, a group of visual and performing artists began working together to create a shared space in Charlottesville.

Dancer Anne Megibow was one of them. “Word got out that there was this old abandoned school and we wanted to do something like the Torpedo Factory,” says Megibow. Founded in 1974, the Torpedo Factory Art Center in Alexandria is a repurposed munitions plant that now houses studios and galleries. Using this as a model, the group formed the McGuffey Art Association and went to work trying to secure a home for their dream. “We met for our very first meeting downstairs in what had been the auditorium. A bunch of us were sitting on the concrete floor talking about art,” says Megibow. Forty years later, the creative community at McGuffey is still actively engaging in that conversation.

The early period of the McGuffey Art Center was one of experimentation and visible engagement with art. Artists moved into the former classrooms, transforming them into shared studios. At that point, members joined simply by expressing an interest. “If you were breathing and you did something artistic, you were in,” jokes Megibow. Studio doors were decorated with whimsical, even provocative, artwork. Hallways were painted with tri-color stripes of red, orange and yellow that curved over doorways and around corners. This mixed well with the building itself, which still had historic window shades adorned with scribbles and graffiti made by past students. Indeed, dramatic structural changes were slow to come to McGuffey, where the main office and original layout of the school remained fully intact for the first few years.

That changed in August 1981, when a two-alarm fire caused by an electrical malfunction threatened the future of McGuffey. “I was in New York and my studio mate called me and said, ‘McGuffey’s burning,’” says Megibow. The flames gutted the main office and damaged other spaces, but the fire department’s quick response saved a significant amount of work. The destruction even had an unexpected upside: Non- vital renovations that had been postponed for years became necessary, including the addition of a small shop to accompany the downstairs gallery.

Since then, the space has evolved. Hallways became gallery space and formal signs were added to studio doors to identify the work inside. Lunchtime performance art began happening with less frequency, before vanishing entirely. In the early 2000s, “There was a lot of talk about professionalizing,” says Rebekah Wostrel, a ceramics artist who has been a McGuffey member for approximately a decade. “I felt that in those first two or three years there was a funkiness that went away. I felt a loss in that regard…not necessarily in a bad way though, and I think we’ve lived into that change pretty well.”

Mirroring this aesthetic progression, McGuffey membership structure evolved as well, developing and refining a jury process. Though the process isn’t perfect, it enables the submission of a portfolio to be reviewed by the membership of McGuffey and guest jurors from City Council or the local arts community. Once accepted, renting and incubator artists receive studio space; associate members work remotely. Of McGuffey’s roughly 170 members, only about 50 have studios in the building and a handful of them have actually remained in the same studios since 1975. There is turnover though, and efforts continue to be made to open up the space to others, addressing the critical need for space. “My career would not have happened without McGuffey,” says painter Cynthia Burke, who has been working in a McGuffey studio since the late 1990s.

As part of the 40th anniversary, McGuffey will host a collective show titled “Past, Present, Future,” with a First Fridays opening reception on October 2. The exhibitions will include an alumni show as well as a display of center memorabilia and a speculative plan for the building’s future, as imagined by UVA School of Architecture students. In addition, McGuffey artists have created 18″x18″ panels of original artwork to be sold as a fundraiser for the association.

During First Fridays, live performances will accompany the exhibitions and a time capsule will be buried in the front lawn of the building at 6pm. Coordinated by Burke, the time capsule reflects the “State of the Arts—Charlottesville, 2015” through an assortment of items from the local arts community, with plans for it to be unearthed in a century, when its recipients can look back and appreciate our local art through the years.

What item would you add to the arts time capsule?

Tell us in the comments below.

“There’s plenty of artisanal food in Charlottesville, so we were just trying to find out what was missing,” jokes Shannon Worrell. Together with Nora Brookfield, Worrell is co-founder of Mi Ossa, a design lab and fashion line that’s located in Charlottesville’s Tenth Street Warehouse. Their business model focuses on fair trade and environmentally friendly ways to design and create textiles, jewelry and other accessories that are handmade yet high fashion.

Featuring pieces primarily made of recycled metal, leather, horn, bone and papier mâché, Mi Ossa embraces an aesthetic that strikes a balance between haute couture and bohemian craftsmanship. In a way, this signature look reflects the business model. A collaborative effort, Mi Ossa works with local artists as well as suppliers from around the world to create its original designs, some of which are further embellished in the studio on Tenth Street.

“There’s this kind of movement to incorporate handmade elements into fashion objects because it makes them luxurious because they’re not mass-produced,” says Worrell. This, she explains, is slow-fashion, the clothing and accessories version of the slow-food movement. Slow-fashion producers invest more in the well-being of the artisans and craftspeople making the goods, as well as the environmental impact of their products.

The idea for the business came from an unexpected inspiration: time spent on construction sites in Haiti. A few years ago, both Worrell and Brookfield volunteered with a Building Goodness Foundation initiative to construct new housing for Haitians who lost their homes in the 2010 earthquake. (In full disclosure, this writer is an employee of the Building Goodness Foundation.) “We’d gone on separate build trips with BGF, and we just wanted to go down there and find something that we could do to help,” says Worrell. “We’re not doctors or architects, so we thought we could go back and figure out how to link together the creative people in Haiti.” The rich traditional art in Haiti provided the entry point they sought.

Mi Ossa set up shop about three and a half years ago. Since then, the business has evolved and grown—sometimes out of creative inspiration, sometimes out of necessity. “We’ve had to make stuff out of the materials we could get,” says Worrell. “We were never going to have everything made in Haiti. We wanted to bring back stuff and make stuff so that it was a collaboration in a way. You have to be willing to improvise. The materials are so elemental that you can make a shovel or a ring out of [one thing], a letter opener or a necklace.”

Most of the materials come from Haiti, El Salvador, Ethiopia and other countries. Worrell and Brookfield primarily source the materials by working with the Hand/Eye Foundation, which, according to Worrell, focuses on “connecting artisans to the world market.” They also work closely with the Artisan Business Network in Haiti and have close ties with Building Goodness Foundation to strengthen Mi Ossa’s relationships outside of the United States. “It’s such an incredible thing that BGF is doing, building homes for people, but [Haitians] need jobs to sustain those homes,” says Brookfield. “We have an interest in working with women artisans and women-owned cooperatives. They’ve done research that shows when women earn an income, communities thrive and they put [the money] back into the community.”

Mi Ossa’s Charlottesville lab is having a similar effect on local artisans. The studio has evolved into something verging on a maker space. Participants work part-time in the studio, crafting and embellishing many of the pieces in the Mi Ossa line as well as creating their own original work. A recent addition to the space is Jess Lee, who hand-dyes and sews textiles under the name Willow Knows. This Saturday, Lee will share some of her skills during a demonstration in Japanese-style shibori dyeing and other techniques to create one-of-a-kind indigo bandanas. “It’s so neat that you can make something but then you can see how she does it herself,” says Brookfield. “You just have a deeper appreciation for that process that she’s going through when you’ve done it yourself.”

As Mi Ossa brings awareness to a more ethical approach to fashion, the business also seeks to expand its offerings of hands-on experiences like this. “That connection to what you’re eating or wearing or buying is so important,” says Worrell. “In the 20th century we’ve gotten so disconnected from the source of everything we buy. And I think people just really crave being connected.”

Ordinarily open only by appointment, the Mi Ossa lab space is open to the public during the annual summer’s end sale through September 19 at the Tenth Street Warehouse (134 10th St. NW.). The indigo dyeing demonstration with Lee takes place on September 19. To reserve a place in the workshop, please e-mail nora@miossa.com.

What local artists contribute to the slow-fashion movement?

Tell us in the comments below.

For Lily Erb, art mirrors life—but only to a certain extent.

The Charlottesville-born and -based artist creates large steel sculptures, most lately composed of numerous steel rods bent into gentle, repetitive curves, then spray-painted in bright, jovial colors. She calls her style “abstract organic” because the pieces don’t resemble actual organic objects. Instead she starts with the idea of natural forms, then follows that concept in a non-representational way.

Her work resembles mountain ridges, split seedpods, the (abstracted) contours of human bodies. “My first memory is not being able to sit on my mom’s lap because she was pregnant with my sister,” she says. “Maybe that has something to do with [my fascination with] fullness and space, because I didn’t know what was in her stomach. I was like, ‘Why can’t I sit here?’”

There is a lot of empty space in her 3-D works, which cover walls and fill rooms without smothering them. “I like making space and I like filling space, but I also like being able to see everything. Something about being able to see every section of a piece is helpful to me,” she says.

Erb began sculpting in college after she signed up for what she thought was a sewing class. But Women’s Fabrication turned out to be a toned-down version of shop class, “more of a safe space to first learn the equipment as opposed to being around all the guys who are making cars and taking up a lot of space with their macho attitudes,” she says.

But from those first sparks, Erb was hooked. “I did torch welding, which is just really hot fire. I would start out with these long straight pieces—I was using coat hangers at that point—to make these forms that are very organic and immediate.”

Her first sculptures were pregnant torsos. Then she made one out of steel. Just like that, she created a structure with volume and emptiness, an absent vessel.

For the first time, Erb began to think of herself as an artist. Sculpting steel lines around what wasn’t there turned her attention to other voluminous organic forms—the contour lines of topography, specifically, and what might lie beneath them.

Erb began to wonder what the inside of a mountain might look like after a summer art course in The Burren, Ireland, “which has all this limestone rock that had been eroded away. It’s sort of like looking at a mountain range uncovered, but 6″ tall.” She also began sculpting abstract mountain ranges that reminded her of home.

Welding is a bit of a lonely business for women, as Erb quickly discovered. “There were women who really liked the class but didn’t end up continuing [to go to the shop] because it’s an intimidating space,” she says. “I just happened to be extremely stubborn, like ‘I’m going to show these people.’”

Show them she did. After college, she spent time in an artist’s residency in Tennessee, then came back to Charlottesville to work in Lauren Hanley’s steel fabrication shop in exchange for studio space.

Eventually Erb bought her own machine, and now she bends steel as much as possible. She sold 30 small sculptures through The Bridge PAI’s 2014 Community Supported Art program, and her work has exhibited all over Charlottesville.

She says it’s fun to be a woman who welds, that her craft feels important in part because “it’s not a skill people often think of women having.”

She no longer fields classroom machismo, but the surprise of strangers can get her hackles up. “I’ll go to pick up my steel and they’re like, ‘Oh, you’re going to bring that in? Is someone going to be there to help you unload it when you get back?’” she says. “Like, ‘No. I’ll be okay. I have muscles.’”

But she goes on to quote Tina Fey: “‘If someone’s in between you and where you want to be in your job, just ignore them and keep going.’ I just ignore them and try not to get angry about it. That’s just part of the game, and I’m still making my art.”

In essence, Erb’s role as a female sculptor plays the same part as her work. Both present the question, in abstract: What truths exist beyond what we see?

“There’s a potential for growth in a seedpod,” she says. “Most vessels contain things that have energy. It’s in this little package, like an egg or an acorn, to help something continue on in its life.”

View and purchase Lily Erb’s work currently on display at tavola’s cicchetti bar, 826 Hinton Ave.

First Fridays: September 4

C’ville Arts Cooperative Gallery 118 E. Main St., Downtown Mall. “Four Seasons,” featuring plein air oil paintings by Meg West. 6-8pm.

CitySpace Gallery 100 Fifth St. NE. “All Pastel Paintings,” featuring work by Piedmont Pastelists. 5:30-7pm.

McGuffey Art Center 201 2nd St NW. “Something Forgotten,” featuring photographs by Kim Kelley-Wagner in the Sarah B. Smith Gallery; and “The 2015 Annual Exhibition,” featuring juried works by the Central Virginia Watercolor Guild. 5:30-7:30pm.

New City Arts 114 Third St. NE. “Animals and Clouds,” featuring prints and paintings by Dean Dass. 5-8pm.

PCA Office Gallery 100 Fifth St. NE. An exhibit by Amy Atticks. 5:30-7pm.

Second Street Gallery 115 Second St. SE. “Labels,” featuring a site-responsive installation of digital prints, vinyl curtain, a searchable web-based database, and audio by Siemon Allen. 6-7:30pm.

Spring Street Boutique 107 W Main St. “Sketches of Scotland,” featuring photographs by Frank Murphy.

The Garage 250 N. First St. “No Precious Thing,” featuring mixed media collage by Mike and Lisa Ryan. 5-7pm.

The Loft at Freeman-Victorius 507 W. Main St. “Joshua Tree Rocks,” featuring photography by Jackson Smith. 5-8pm.

WriterHouse 508 Dale Ave. An exhibit by Kathy Kuhlmann. 5:30-7:30pm.

WVTF & Radio IQ Studio Gallery 216 W. Water St. “Rain Dye,” featuring textiles by Jess Lee. 5-7pm.

Other Exhibits

Chroma @ SCS 214 W. Water St. “Repository of Missing Places,” featuring 30 years of paintings by Richard Crozier.

The Art Box and Creative Farming 2125 Ivy Rd #5. “Cool Landscapes and Warm Flowers,” featuring pastel paintings by Nancy Galloway through the month of September. Reception 4-6pm on September 12.

JMRL Central Library 201 E. Market St. “Portraits: Artistry in Ordinary Architecture,” featuring photographs by Gary Okerlund.

Kluge-Ruhe Aboriginal Art Collection 400 Worrell Dr. “Where the Water Moves, Where It Rests,” featuring eucalyptus bark paintings by Djambawa Marawili AM.

Les Yeux du Monde 841 Wolf Trap Rd. “Views from the Garden,” featuring paintings by Susan Mcalister, through September 20.

Northside Library 705 Rio Rd W. “Recent Oil Paintings,” featuring oil paintings by Randy Baskerville.

The Fralin Museum of Art at UVA 155 Rugby Rd. “Collection,” featuring photography by Sol LeWitt; “Struggle…From the History of the American People,” featuring paintings by Jacob Lawrence; and “Cavaliers Collect,” featuring a variety of genres on loan from UVA alumni and friends.

As the school year gets underway, a group of artists from the McGuffey Art Center is hitting the books. Or rather, they’re cutting, sewing, painting and otherwise transforming books as part of a new exhibition at UVA’s Arthur J. Morris Law Library. Titled “Discarded,” the show draws its name quite literally from a common medium: discarded library books. You see, unlike other libraries, the law library regularly updates its collection with new editions as the laws and regulations in those books change over time.

The event has become an annual tradition for the library, as it seeks to “enrich the experience of our law school community and to give artists an additional venue for their creative productions,” according to law library director Taylor Fitchett.

Since launching in 1999, the library’s annual art opening has had various local connections. “We have drawn from the brilliant pool of creativity at McGuffey on numerous occasions, but for this show we are using the women of McGuffey exclusively,” says Fitchett.

One of these women is L. Michelle Geiger, an organizer of and contributor to the show. “As an artist I have spent a lot of time with paper, as a printmaker, collecting and making books,” she says. “This is really one of the first times that I have gone beyond the folded page and made a much larger, sculptural piece.”

Artists have freedom in how they approach their individual contributions. “Each artist was given a book—or many books in the case of some—and the only instructions were to use the book in some way,” says Geiger. “Ninni Baeckstrom encased one in cement; Eileen French has drawn the book flying toward the viewer; I deconstructed the books and made kinetic sculptures of seaweed and dipped smaller pieces of paper in wax to make barnacles. There was no wrong answer.”

“Discarded” features work by Baeckstrom, French, Fenella Belle, Cynthia Burke, Nina Burke, Brielle DuFlon, Stacey Evans, Judy McLeod, Janet Grahame Nault, Susan Northington, Kelly Doyle Oakes and Jeannine Barton Regan.

Many of these artists have worked in mixed media before and the attention given to the written word in the exhibit is interesting.

“I used a thick volume of Crimes and Punishment to make both of the pieces—not the novel but a textbook of [court] cases and verdicts,” says DuFlon. To assemble one of her pieces, titled “Bedtime Reading/Rest Assured,” she layered and coated pages of the book to create a paper-based fabric that she could sew into a pillowcase. Through pattern cutting, stitching and edging, she created the illusion of a lace-edged pillowcase using only paper. The art is assembled with a pillow stuffed inside and at first glance looks almost inviting.

“The idea behind this pillow was to create something that one could rest one’s head on, but after reading the literature that the pillowcase was made of, one wouldn’t want to,” DuFlon says. “I chose some truly disturbing and relevant cases to create this pillow… I’m interested in the way that we live with the awareness of what is happening around us. Some of us feel safe with the knowledge of a law enforcement system, others of us don’t. There are fair and unfair trials. All of these issues are enough to lose sleep over.“

An opening reception for “Discarded” will be held on September 3 at 5pm and will feature a live performance art piece by Anne Megibow. The exhibition will remain on display throughout the academic year and is open to the public during the library’s regular hours.

Ix Art Park sets the stage

This fall, the Ix Art Park will host an expanded schedule of community events thanks to a partnership with WTJU 91.1FM. Together, the two organizations teamed up to participate in the Levitt AMP Music Series. Organized by Levitt Pavilions, the music series was created in 2014 as a way to present free concerts for small and midsize towns around the country. It builds on the Signature Levitt Program, which does the same in large cities.

“It was just such a perfect fit for WTJU’s mission to bring people together through music, as well as the Ix Art Park’s mission to engage in creative placemaking,” says WTJU general manager Nathan Moore. We got together and put in an application.”

An online voting process then confirmed Charlottesville as one of 10 host cities, each of which receive funding to present 10 community concerts in 2015. “The community needs more opportunities to mingle, meet, break bread, dance and let go,” says Ix Art Park’s Brian Wimer. “It’s free. And everyone’s invited. We’ll have country, folk, funk, Latin (from Mexico to Brazil), jazz, marching band and even klezmer—plus, of course, lots of that indie rock which makes up Charlottesville’s strong music scene.”

To this end, some of the events in the series will be partnerships with local groups including The Bridge PAI, Tom Tom Founders Festival and Cville Sabroso. The list of performers includes plenty of local favorites like Lester Seal, John D’earth, Pantherburn, the (All New) Acorn Sisters and the Sally Rose Band. You can also expect to hear many of the performers from the series on WTJU, giving on-air interviews or in-studio performances to help get the word out.

The first of these Charlottesville concerts takes place on September 5 with Nashville musician and cartoonist Guy Gilchrist. “Getting him was a minor miracle,” says Wimer. Charlottesville’s own Red & The Romantics open. The free Levitt AMP Charlottesville Music Series continues through November 6.

What other types of art events does Charlottesville need?

Tell us in the comments below.

Hospitals aren’t exactly known as hubs of creative engagement. Yet the trend of visual art in hospitals is on the rise thanks to studies that show scientific links between patients, art and lowered stress levels.

While Charlottesville may have yet to see the type of full-fledged contemporary art installations as Indiana University School of Medicine at Illinois or the Cleveland Clinic’s Arts & Medicine Institute, UVA Health South Rehabilitation Hospital is changing its clinical aesthetic with the help of local artist and gallery owner Hamid Karimi.

Reinvention is a bit of a theme for Karimi, whose work includes figurative, abstract and landscape paintings rendered in oil, acrylic and pastel (occasionally). Though he recently dove into a rainy days series, which features images depicted through the rain-slicked windshield of a car, the Tehran-born Charlottesvillian rejects the idea of stylistic repetition.

“Being creative means you have to go back to the drawing board over and over,” he says. “A lot of artists believe that if you really want to make a name for yourself you have to find one style and stick to it. But you’re not creative when you’re copying the same thing. Art has to be experimental.”

The philosophy of art seems to weigh more heavily on Karimi’s mind than most—likely because he began his career in, well, you guessed it. “I first studied western philosophy at the University of Oslo,” Karimi says. “Everything is based on logical reasoning. I took a course in art where we asked things like, ‘How can you distinguish beautiful art from ugly art? What is our artistic faculty? How can we tell that one piece of art is different from another?’”

The course, he says, did not involve painting, and he felt like the discussion went way above his head. So he dabbled in visual self-expression for the first time, attempting to experience what his classmates spoke about. “But then I thought that I wasn’t good at it so I left the brush,” he says. Discouraged, he abandoned the craft only to return again years later—then give it up, return and give up once again.

Then, a few years ago, he told a friend that he wished ‘I could do something magic like create art.” When his friend gently suggested he just do it already, Karimi got angry with himself.

“All along I told myself that painting is something I am not good at, it is beyond my skills,” he says. “Why am I telling myself that? I thought, ‘I’ve only tried a couple times. Maybe I’m not trying hard enough.’ After that, all of a sudden, I got better and better and better. I filled my whole house with paintings.”

Eventually, he began selling his work and donating it to friends. Most recently he founded Barboursville Fine Arts Gallery, which features the work of 11 local painters and sculptors, including his own. “I want to share art with the community,” he says.

One of his abstract pieces made it into the hands of Dianna Gomez, who works at UVA Health South Rehabilitation Hospital. She began to collect his art, filling her office and turning it into an impromptu gallery space. Noticing how visitors came to admire it, Gomez invited Karimi to exhibit in the hospital. Now more than 90 of his paintings, all of them landscapes, dot the walls across three different floors.

“Hamid has a good variety of paintings and the vibrant colors catch your attention,” Gomez wrote in an e-mail. “I think having a local artist featured at the hospital adds a personal touch to the décor and it makes the patients smile.”

Like many of UVA Health South Rehabilitation Hospital’s patients, who focus on reclaiming physical function and strength after illness or injury, Karimi says his biggest creative process and source of personal joy has been the recreation he’s done on himself.

“One day I was sitting back and wishing that some magic would change my life, that something fun would happen,” he says. “Then I remembered that I have filled my house with paintings. I’m a self-made artist. If I could do things I couldn’t do before, that is the magic. I have the magic on my walls.”

Last weekend marked the annual ritual of the UVA undergraduates move-in, when students and parents haul semester survival gear from SUVs to dorm rooms. This year, the weekend also celebrated a move of a different kind—one with less heavy lifting but far more gusto. On Saturday, New City Arts Initiative moved out of its office at The Haven in a parade of pinwheels as volunteers provided a spark of whimsy while carrying the local arts nonprofit to its new downtown home on Third Street NE.

As New City Arts approaches its sixth anniversary, this move promises to be monumental for the young nonprofit. It’s been five years since NCAI went from working in coffee shops to its first office located in The Haven, Charlottesville’s day shelter for the homeless and very poor. With that move, NCAI Executive Director Maureen Brondyke gained her first office mates as well as a partner organization that would prove vital to her work.

Executive director of the Thomas Jefferson Area Coalition for the Homeless, Kaki Dimock shared an office with Brondyke at The Haven. “[Brondyke] understood the potential intersection between her work and The Haven’s work immediately,” says Dimock. She knew that disenfranchised people are often exploited in the name of making art and worked to create a respectful, nuanced, guest-centered experience at The Haven instead. She understood that the process was more important than the final product.”

Beginning in 2011, New City Arts operated an artist residency program at The Haven. Each year, selected artists would work with shelter’s guests: first as volunteers who interacted in a general way; then, as teaching artists, encouraging creative expression. “The Haven staff—many of whom are poets, artists and musicians themselves—had always hoped for artists to work with guests in some way,” says Brondyke. “The partnership was a natural fit.”

Nine individuals participated as artists during the program’s four-year run, adapting with each cycle for the creation of projects ranging from a community quilt to a collaborative mural. In exchange, New City Arts provided the artists with affordable studio space in order to develop skills and gallery exhibitions to reach the broader community.

With this month’s move, the artist residency program will continue to adapt. Artists who are interested in working with New City Arts can apply before September 1 to be considered for the residency program, which will be held at the Third Street location. For artists who wish to work with The Haven and its guests, however, the NCAI residency no longer has the same hands-on approach. Rather, Brondyke encourages these artists to get involved with the soon-to-launch collaborative project between The Haven and New City Arts known as Housing2Home.

“New City Arts emerged as a real force in this community in the last five years in large part because of Maureen’s vision, strategy and community-building efforts,” Dimock says. “While other arts organizations have struggled or faltered, New City Arts has grown its audiences, created meaningful collaborations and expanded its programming.” This is evident in Brondyke’s planning and execution of the artist residency program, and in her strategic decision to move the organization onto the Downtown Mall at this particular time.

As galleries like Chroma Projects, Warm Springs, and BozART have all been forced to shutter or move off the mall, Brondyke hopes her organization’s new home will help reinvigorate First Fridays. “I think it’s important for the local art community to have a presence on the Downtown Mall because it draws a diverse audience,” she says. “A gallery might not be a visitor’s destination, but if they happen into it by surprise and are exposed to new work, organic arts audience development might occur in a way that an event can’t always facilitate.”

NCAI’s new location will be the organization’s first experience with foot traffic on the Downtown Mall. The space will house the organization’s office and a studio for the revamped artist residency program as well as a gallery.

Since New City Arts will also continue its gallery partnership with the WVTF and Radio IQ studio, the move actually doubles its capacity for monthly exhibitions, which will take place at both galleries beginning in September.

According to Brondyke, we can expect more artist talks and a wider variety of types of work shown—expanding to include multimedia or installation art, and perhaps even performance art. “Once we have the funding for things like a PA system and chairs, we hope the space serves performance artists, musicians and writers in new and unique ways,” Brondyke says.

For now, basic renovations and new furniture are closer on the horizon, along with a crowdfunding campaign that’s expected to launch in about a month.

The New City Arts Initiative gallery will open with “Animals and Clouds” by Dean Dass and a First Fridays reception on September 4. For details, visit newcityarts.org.

What’s your favorite gallery?

Tell us in the comments below.

It took Victor Captain more than 12 months, a brand new birth certificate and his first flight on an airplane to bring his artwork to Charlottesville.

“When I got to New York, my nose was like stuff, stuff, stuff. There was no clean air to breathe,” says Captain. He says it with a smile and sense of humor that belies the improbability of this conversation over iced tea in sunny Belmont.

Captain is a fine artist who lives in Surama, a remote Amazonian village in Guyana. His recent local exhibits materialized thanks to Laura and George Mentore, two UVA anthropology professors who first noticed Captain’s exceptional work in 2011.

“For years, our research has been in his village in Guyana,” Laura Mentore says. “I was so taken by one of his paintings in particular that I wound up purchasing it.”

Captain describes the month-long visits and 24-hour round-trip drives he made to and from Georgetown (the capital of Guyana)—the same route he takes to purchase the acrylics, oils and canvases with which he paints scenes of energy transformation.

“Most of my paintings are based in shamanism and stories of Amerindian people,” he says. “You cannot see with your pure eye the energy that the shaman is using so you paint it in the painting.”

Captain is a member of the indigenous Guyanese tribe the Makushi, whose oral traditions often relate stories of shape shifters called kanaima.

“They’re similar to the people that assassinate people [in the U.S.],” Captain says. “But in those times they had basic bush medicine which they used to transfer the self into a different form: sheeps, animals, whatever. They use this to disguise the self to assassinate people.”

Many of Captain’s paintings feature the subjects of these transformations. “It’s a form which you cannot escape or remove from your body,” he explains. “You just have to live with it and let it pass on through your family line.”

He describes one of his favorite paintings, which shows a mother sitting in a dark open house with her child. “Her baby was really, really sick, and she went to the shaman,” he says. “You find different forms of animals that you cannot see, spiritual animals, within the painting. The Peia man [the Makushi term for shaman], they usually do their work in the night so that nobody sees what is really going on.”

Tradition and modernity find a delicate balance in the lives of the Makushi, Mentore says. “Everyone has family and because of that everyone has somewhere they can call home,” she says. “You go to the capital and people are sleeping on sidewalks. But in Amerindian communities, the lack of money doesn’t translate to hunger and homelessness. At the same time you have young people who have cell phones and Facebook and are training to become doctors and flight attendants. Victor has seen more American movies and music than I have, but at the same time I could trust him with my life in the rainforest. There’s an ability to go between worlds.”

Like the figures in his art, Captain has always been able to move deftly between concrete and ethereal planes.

In secondary school his work was so good his teacher pulled him aside and offered to pay him 3,000 Guyanese dollars ($15) a month to create posters for the school.

After that, he went to a residential two-year program at Bina Hill Institute to study forestry. He was drawing his own portraits for his classroom when “I bump into George Simon, one of the famous Guyanese artists, and he was really interested in my work. He asked if I wanted to keep on doing paintings and artwork, and I said ‘yeah.’ So the community made a project based on Amerindian art and sculpting.”

Captain was 18 when he began to paint in his now signature style. He dropped out of school “because they didn’t like it” and returned to his village, where he alternated between hunting, fishing, logging and painting his vibrant works.

“His father might wake him up one day, say it’s time to go hunting, and he’d be gone for three days,” Mentore says. “He’s doing something that not everyone there does.”

Abandoning the norm is, in fact, a way for Captain to reclaim his roots—on behalf of his entire generation. In Surama, there’s been a rapid loss of indigenous language furthered by the English boarding school system.

“Most of the Amerindian people, they’re losing their culture. And I am one, so it’s the loss of my language,” he says. “What I’m really trying to do is keep the culture going but in art form. The stories and other things. People forget the stories and pretend they are not Amerindian. They want to be someone else.”

When asked why this is important to him, the answer, of course, is obvious. “Because I was born to be that way.”

First Fridays is a monthly art event featuring exhibit openings at many Downtown art galleries and additional exhibition venues. Several spaces offer receptions. Listings are compiled in collaboration with Piedmont Council for the Arts. To list an exhibit, please send information two weeks before opening to arts@c-ville.com.

First Fridays: August 7

C’ville Arts Cooperative Gallery 118 E. Main St., Downtown Mall. “Flights of Fancy,” featuring bead creations by Steve Cunningham. 6-8pm.

CitySpace Gallery 100 Fifth St. NE. An exhibit by Albemarle County Public Schools. 5:30-7pm.

McGuffey Art Center 201 2nd St NW. A mixed media installation by Michelle Geiger and Summer Group Show by the McGuffey members. 5:30-7:30pm.

PCA Office Gallery 100 Fifth St. NE. An exhibit of impasto landscape paintings by Julia Lesnichy. 5:30-7pm.

SCS Gallery 214 W. Water St. “Where Light Comes From,” featuring fantastical paintings by Stephen Kern. 5-7pm.

Spring Street Boutique 107 W. Main St., Downtown Mall. “Southwest Adventures,” featuring oil on canvas by Anne Marshall Block. 6-8pm.

The Garage 250 N. First St. “Potential Energy,” featuring steel sculpture by Lily Erb. 5-7pm.

The Loft at Freeman-Victorius 507 W. Main St. “Round Table Artists,” featuring oil and watercolor by Kathleen Free, Brigitte Turquois Freeman, Judith Minter, Taylor Randolph, Linda Staiger, Virginia Rice Thompson, Laurie Thurneck, and Christine Tucker. 5-8pm.

The Women’s Initiative 1101 E. High St. Landscapes, still life, abstracts and photography featuring the artists of BozART. 5:30-7:30pm.

Other Exhibits

Albemarle County Courthouse 501 Jefferson St. “Members Watercolor Show,” featuring water-based medium by the Central Virginia Watercolor Guild, through October 25.

Brooks Hall at UVA 1702 University Ave. An exhibit by Victor Captain featuring works refelcting his indigenous community in Guyana, South America, through August 14. Reception with the artist at Commonwealth Senior Living, 1550 Pantops Mountain Place on August 16. 3-5pm.

Java Java Café 421 E. Main St. “Hot Flowers, Cool Birds,” featuring paintings by Karen Siegrist.

Les Yeux du Monde 841 Wolf Trap Rd. “Summer Scenes,” featuring oil on canvas by Isabelle Abbot and Priscilla Whitlock, through August 16.

Mudhouse 213 W. Main St., Downtown Mall. “Labradorite #1,” featuring oil on canvas by Mary Jane Nichols.

The Fralin Museum of Art at UVA 155 Rugby Rd. “Collection,” featuring photography by Sol LeWitt, from August 14 through December 20; “Struggle…From the History of the American People,” featuring paintings by Jacob Lawrence, from August 21 through June 6, 2016; and “Cavaliers Collect,” featuring a variety of genres on loan from UVA alumni and friends, from August 28 through December 20.

Thomas Jefferson Memorial Church 717 Rugby Rd. “Earth and Sky,” featuring oil and mixed media paintings by Roger Lehr, with a reception on Sunday, August 9 at noon.