Tag: Fine Arts

When Toronto-based photographer Zun Lee received his first camera, he had “zero passion or desire to do the photography stuff.”

“I was stressed and traveling all the time for work, so a coworker encouraged me to take up photography as a hobby,” Lee said in a recent interview with C-VILLE. “He sent me a camera, so I said I’d try it, but I wasn’t into it.”

Six months later, he was walking down the street when two homeless street kids approached and asked him to take their picture. At first, Lee said, he assumed they wanted money, but all they wanted was a picture—for someone to pay attention to them.

“I found myself in conversation with them for quite some time, and that started my whole practice of street photography,” he said. “The camera became a tool to get closer to strangers in the street, and it became addictive.”

Five years later, Lee still doesn’t like photography. “At least not the technical aspect,” he said. “People approach me about what kind of camera and settings I use and it bores me to tears.”

He’d rather discuss the story behind the lens—the narratives which, in Lee’s case, are widely untold in traditional media.

In his most recent photojournalism project, “Father Figure: Exploring Alternate Notions of Black Fatherhood,” Lee focuses his lens on African-American men in intimate parenting moments with their children. The scenes reveal a variety of quiet emotions, the spectrum of fatherly love, and stand in direct contrast to the pervasive stereotype of absentee black fathers.

He’s spent the last three and a half years getting to know the father figures who don’t make news headlines—those African-American men who might not be legally married or live with their partner or kids, or “may struggle to provide on a consistent basis, but this does not automatically mean that [they are] irresponsible.”

Lee reveals the humanity of men doing their best, tending to babies and small children in strollers, at bath time, in restaurants, while crossing the street. Some photos are posed; others are candid. A girl in a striped shirt and rain boots sits in her father’s lap as he sits astride a motorcycle. A young man grins, running alongside his dad as they cross a city street. A shirtless father holds his daughter with his back to the camera, her hands grasped around his neck and smiling, eyes peeking over his broad shoulders, the thick muscle looped with tattoos.

Lee spends months getting to know his subjects, building rapport and deep connections during dinners, hanging and housework. “I’ve talked to 400 families over the last four years, and only 40 or 50 were interested enough to allow a session,” he said.

In “Father Figure,” Lee seeks to capture what he never had—the answers to deeply personal questions in his own life. In 2004, he learned that his own father was not the man his Korean mother married but an African-American man with whom she had a very brief relationship.

“I grew up in the black community anyway,” he said, “with the stereotypes of absentee black fathers. Then I became part of that narrative, which is what made it so hard for me.” He said his mother doesn’t remember his father’s name, so his work has become the only way to make sense of a complicated past.

“I can’t ask [my father] questions, but through this process of photographing families whose fathers may well have been similar to or like my own father, you’re able to step out of your own resentment and come to terms with your own history,” said Lee

The project has earned Lee national recognition. A book of his works has been shortlisted for the Aperture Foundation PhotoBook Awards and named a winner in the photo books category of the 2015 PDN Photo Annual competition.

It’s also put Lee on the receiving end of hate mail, negative comments, even death threats.

“People feel threatened,” he said. “The comments range from ‘you’re telling lies’ to ‘you found the few fathers that are actually there.’ I don’t get upset. It just tells me I am hitting a nerve, and people have beliefs that are coming out into the open.”

The negative backlash is, he said, a “bizarre” response to gentle, loving images. “I don’t think people think it’s bad, but it shakes up their worldview. I’m not hitting them over the head or attacking anyone or raising my fists. I’m just saying, ‘Look, this is what I’m observing.’”

This larger conversation has become Lee’s impetus to continue. “As much as it was about processing my personal story it was also about providing perspective on a conversation crossing the country. I wouldn’t have done it for years and years if it hadn’t been for that larger conversation.”

That conversation includes police brutality, the school to prison pipeline and the numerous unspoken stereotypes that pervade American perceptions of African-American men.

“When people talk about what we are really witnessing,” Lee said, “not just the events that are unfolding but also how the media covers them, it’s important to me to show more than what’s already out there.”

Zun Lee’s show “Father Figure: Exploring Alternate Notions of Black Fatherhood” opens at the Jefferson School African American Heritage Center on June 5 and runs through August 29.

The vibrant color hits you first—long swaths of it—before your brain can synthesize the spectrum as quilts, bright fabrics cut and pieced together in geometric patterns and draped against high walls and room dividers.

Then you notice the buzz—the palpable warmth of the gallery’s attendees. Three of the exhibited artists, young men in suit jackets sporting bow ties and pocket squares they’ve sewn themselves, explain the intricacies of the craft as they’ve learned it.

“All these are practice bindings,” said one student, pointing to a quilt titled “We Are Somebody,” with a solid black backing and a composition of colorful squares arranged like a 2-D robot. “When you start, you practice on a small square,” he said.

A quilter for the last two and a half years—the length of time this class has been available—he describes evolving from basic quilts made of 4″x 4″ squares to complex zigzag patterns, fusable web overlays and detailed appliqué work. (None of the quilts are formed from premade patterns.)

“When I got started I wasn’t sure how I was going to feel about [quilting], but then I was like ‘Oh, I really like this.’ With each one I made I kept getting more confidence and people would tell me how nice it was, so I kept wanting to do more and try different things and test my skills.”

That’s the goal at the heart of the course: teach young men to strive to do good work that builds character and allows them to expresses the best parts of themselves.

Their beautiful, imaginative results are remarkable not only because they reveal the talent and passion of young men for a historically female-dominated craft, but because these men in particular are residents of the Beaumont Juvenile Correctional Center (JCC), arguably one of the last places you’d expect to find a flourishing quilting scene.

But the 22-person program, believed to be the first quilting class ever offered in a male juvenile correctional center, is indeed flourishing—so much so that the directors plan to double its size and hire current part-time instructor Roy Mitchell on as a full-time staff member.

“My first comment to these individuals when they enter my classroom is that it doesn’t matter what they did, it matters what they do. It’s not where you’ve been, it’s where you’re going. In my class, you are somebody,” said Mitchell.

Mitchell is a nationally recognized quilter who radiates patience and positivity. The first African-American male to be featured in National Quilting Association magazine, he’s known as The Watermelun Man for his collection of quilts featuring “watermelun babies,” sweet characters modeled off black memorabilia and posed with watermelons to “show a positive link between my African-American culture and watermelon,” according to his website.

Mitchell began his own practice of quilting in 1990, when he went with his girlfriend to a state fair in Manassas and balked at the price of a quilt she admired. “I said ‘There’s no way I’ll pay for that.’ I called it a blanket, not knowing how much detail and preparing and planning the colors and design and threads went into it.”

He vowed to make a quilt instead. He joined a class, created a quilt with a double wedding ring pattern, and fell in love with the craft.

“It’s always been a passion from that day,” he said, but his singular dedication began in 2004, when he met the founder of the Daughters of Dorcas & Sons, Ms. Viola Virginia Williams Canady. She became his mentor and personal champion, telling him he would teach one day and asking him to keep the dream alive. Everything she said came true.

As a teacher at JCC, “I’m fulfilling her dream, and these young men are keeping the art alive,” he said.

Mitchell’s students have made and given away over 100 quilts to groups in need, including members of the local homeless population, McGuire Veterans Hospital and Culpeper and Richmond cancer centers. He often takes pictures of the presentation so his students can see where their handiwork lands.

He said that six students from his class have already been released from JCC and are still quilting. One of them joined a quilt guild so he could collect scraps and start his own quilting business, Scrap Quilts.

Lots of students vow to continue the craft once they leave JCC. “I always tell them we’ll meet again in different circumstances and quilt together on the outside,” Mitchell said.

In truth, this exhibit—this room of colorful quilts—represents so much more. It’s the foundation for something that echoes the process Mitchell described in his own work as a quilter.

“I love being able to take something that was a small, plain piece of fabric and make it grow so big,” he said. “The more you get into it, the more you see you can never really finish. I tell my students there is a beginning, a middle and a continuation. You can always learn more.”

The show “We Are Somebody,” featuring work from beginning, intermediate and advanced JCC quilting classes, stopped at The Bridge PAI on an eight-state tour. It showed in Flint, Michigan en route to Charlottesville, and on May 26 it made its way to California.

“The landscape around my Charlottesville home is remarkably like that of Oaxaca, Mexico,” muses Charlottesville-based artist Russ Warren. It has “a spirituality emanating from the atmosphere and the mountainous landscape that seems magical.”

To be honest, despite having spent much of my life in the Blue Ridge Mountains, this is not a comparison I’ve heard before. However, Warren employs this juxtaposition as a way to explore the styles of Mexican folk artists and Spanish Masters alike. This month, an exhibit at Les Yeux du Monde—the gallery run by his wife, Lyn Bolen Warren—showcases a selection of these recent works.

Two of Warren’s large paintings—“La Infanta I” and “La Infanta II”—form a thematic core for the show. Each was inspired by 17th century Spanish painter Diego Velázquez’s portraits of La Infanta Margarita Teresa. Though, it’s more accurate to say that Warren’s “La Infanta” series was influenced by Picasso’s reinterpretations of Velázquez’s paintings—inspiration once removed.

“Picasso, no doubt, has been my biggest influence and he, in turn, was influenced by Velázquez, so I see my own versions of their themes as an extension of that lineage,” Warren says. “I make the works my own by emphasizing what interests me.” This is perhaps most clearly evident in the recurring backlit figure in a doorway, referenced in both the Velázquez and Picasso versions of “Las Meninas” as well as many of Warren’s paintings since the 1980s.

In curating the exhibit, Lyn Bolen Warren says she decided to focus on the Spain theme with Zaragoza and Warren’s other two paintings based on Velázquez’s and Picasso’s “Las Meninas” as the main attractions.

The titular work in the exhibit, “Zaragoza,” is a large triptych that greets one immediately upon entering the gallery. The piece is named after the city near Francisco Goya’s birthplace in Spain, but Warren explains that it was inspired by “images of Zapotecan magotes [indigenous burial mounds in Oaxaca] and layering, to deal with hidden images and memories.” The layering provides a frenetic energy in the piece and it’s easy to imagine the wild movements of Warren’s hand as it dashed across the canvas. Graffiti-like tags and Mexican Día de los Muertos-style skulls sketched with livestock markers coalesce across the lower two-thirds of the scene, filling in below the horizon line, where solid sky-like stretches fill above. Visually, the work complements much of the style and colors in the “La Infanta” paintings in a way that suggests a cohesive story between the three. However, Warren insists there is no narrative. “I prefer ambiguity,” he says. “I like leaving things open-ended so the viewer can insert their own meanings and scenarios.”

Given the large scale of these three paintings, they would be equally at home as a public mural as they are in the white box of the gallery. “I’ve always worked large,” he explains. “Lately I’m making these multi-panel paintings because they allow me to work big in a small studio.”

For now, though, the closest his work comes to public art is a large painting that hangs in the dining room of Martha Jefferson Hospital. “I’m told that [it] evokes a lot of responses, and this is exactly what I am after,” he says. “I enjoy the psychological relationship between the viewer and a large painting in a public space.” That being said, the rest of the Les Yeux du Monde exhibit is comprised of smaller works, but ones that are no less visually interesting or layered.

Indeed, texture is a noteworthy part of Warren’s work in this exhibit—and much of his catalog—whether it’s glass bead gel in Anything Helps, collaged newspaper in “El Perro de la Infanta,” or the jump-rope in “La Infanta I” that’s a real cord of rope glued to the canvas, dangling down. Unusual mediums also find their way into various works.

“The livestock markers are new for me,” Warren says. “I love their phosphorescent colors and the loose oil vehicle in them makes them more painterly in a gestural immediate way.” These provide the distinctive tag-like quality to many of the paintings, evoking the marker pens used by graffiti artists. It’s a look and feel that Warren likes. A lot. In fact, by his count, he completed over 100 livestock marker paintings in 2014 in addition to three large, multi-panel paintings. “It was quite a year. I don’t see myself slowing down,” he says, describing his latest project, a large triptych entitled “Medina” after a lake in Texas. “I turned to subterranean themes after I finished my ‘La Infanta’ series,” he says.

When he’s not painting, Warren still finds time to lead artist critique classes, write poetry and play music. One of the next things on his agenda is playing alongside his brother and sister-in-law at the Old Fiddler’s Convention in Galax, Virginia this August.

“Zaragoza” will remain on display at Les Yeux du Monde through June 7, with a closing reception from 3-5pm that day. A lunch with the artist will be held at noon on May 20 (reservations are required; $15). For more details, visit lesyeuxdumonde.com.

On May 9, Brice Brown and Alan Shockley celebrated their 10th anniversary. And theirs was truly a perfect union, if only for one night.

Their collaborative work, “Glass and Bridle, Pomegranate and Pears: On the Viability and Transience of a Free and Perfect Union,” unveiled at Adventure Farm on Saturday. The one-night-only exhibition was the centerpiece of The Commission, a multimedia celebration held by the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts (VCCA), a working retreat for national and international artists.

Artists are accepted into VCCA’s competitive program for anywhere from two weeks to two months, during which time they receive private studio space and bedrooms, three meals a day and the freedom to work uninterrupted by daily life.

Brown and Shockley met almost a decade ago when they both held residencies at VCCA.

“An artists residency program is like camp. You might have forced socialization with other weirdo artists, which sometimes works well and sometimes doesn’t,” Brown said in an interview with C-VILLE. “I met Alan at lunch. We started talking and, you know, you do that whole ‘Where are you from? What do you do?’ bullshit, and once you get past that you sort of hit it off.” They had similar interests and hatched the idea to collaborate at some point in the future.

In 2007, Brown was given the opportunity to launch a show in the VertexList gallery in Brooklyn, so he and Shockley developed an installation called “Selling the Sound of My Voice.”

“Brice created 88 1′ x 1′ tiles,” Shockley wrote to C-VILLE. “He used a limited palette of themes that repeated in different combinations and colors, and I created a musical piece that had a frame layer of sound plus 88 additional layers that played in the gallery. Each layer corresponded to a specific tile.”

They collaborated remotely, working through themes as Brown sent new images and Shockley experimented with different sound families, recording auctioneers, a fragment from Schubert, overtone singing and the noise of “a strange hand-cranked ‘wheezing’ toy I had found in a discount shop.”

During the exhibition, they gave each tile a cheap price and removed a corresponding layer of sound whenever a painting sold. “The more commercially successful it was, the more it would cease to exist,” Brown said.

Following the success of “Selling the Sound of My Voice,” the pair looked for another chance to collaborate. When one of them saw the VCCA’s call for submissions to The Commission 2015, they decided to give it a shot.

“I did some reading about the site for the project (originally designated as Free Union),” Shockley wrote. “I really liked the story of the town—originally named after a freed slave blacksmith. The site of the Free Union Church gave the town its second name and was constructed by four different congregations who pooled resources and all worshiped there.”

The artists swapped ideas on how to incorporate this historical background into an installation within the existing natural environment of The Commission.

Brown developed 8’x 4′ modular panels to organize the outdoor space like a maze that visitors could walk through. Riffing on notions of blacksmithing, he conceived of wooden frames charred black in the Shou-sugi-ban style, a Japanese art of burning timber, with colorful textile overlays. For these prints, he manipulated images from The Batsford Colour Book of Roses, which he called “this random book I found printed in this amazing way where color is a little off,” and combined them with 19th century etchings of alchemical processes to reference human manipulations of landscape as well as the transformational passage of time.

Shockley worked with natural sounds from the region including recordings of native birds, frogs and insects, as well as water and wind, and composed additional material to fit the modules. “For these,” he wrote, “I’ve taken several 18th- or early 19th century shape note hymns (ones likely to have been performed at the founding of Free Union), and created new works by applying various reductive processes to the original materials.”

In the final exhibition, Shockley’s sounds emanated from small wireless speakers hidden within the walls that Brown built.

As for the show’s intriguing, if unwieldy, title, Shockley explained that the first half  “references the tradition of still life painting, where titles are often formed of simple lists of the objects depicted,” though in this case, Brown said, the items are not actually in the show itself.

“On the Viability and Transience of a Free and Perfect Union” is less conceptual. It not only references Free Union’s historical beginnings but the nature of art, The Commission and the pair’s collaboration itself. As Brown put it, “we only come together for this one transient moment, and we try to make it viable.”

You’re standing in the middle of an open gallery floor, surrounded by white walls hung with prints, paintings, photos and the occasional freestanding sculpture. Works appear to be clustered around intentional themes like color, medium or subject, but nothing is labeled.

You may not realize you’re surrounded by a veritable who’s who of 20th century art. The absence of signs and didactic panels robs you of name recognition, so you might not recognize Frank Stella, Andy Warhol, Pablo Picasso, Salvador Dali, Cy Twombly and Wassily Kandinsky, among others. But here, eliminating expectations is exactly the point.

“You have to walk up and experience it. You’re interacting with the piece,” said Rebecca Schoenthal, interim curator at The Fralin Museum of Art at the University of Virginia and co-curator of the museum’s latest exhibit, “What is a Line?”

“So much art history is rooted in the social history of art,” Schoenthal said, but this show, an unusual one for the Fralin, strips away historical suggestion and asks visitors to share intuitive experiences with each piece—and each other.

“The final exhibition shows work from about 1905 to 2007. That’s a century of work,” she said. It includes sculpture, drawing, photography and collage, a diverse expression of the many ways that different artists at different times have used lines to create compositions.

“During those 100 years, the art world had some of its most profound changes,” Schoenthal said, including new techniques and attitudes toward art making, not to mention two world wars. “The fact that we can look at those 100 years through artists and see how the artist’s relationship to line as a tool has been, regardless of the medium and current vogue in thinking at the time, makes for a really unique show.”

The show’s unusual setup and layout reflects its unique origins. Schoenthal explained that her co-curator Jennifer Farrell, associate curator of modern and contemporary prints and illustrated books at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and former curator of exhibitions and contemporary art at the Fralin, inaugurated the work on the show last fall.

“Jennifer originally went through the permanent collection at the Fralin and selected a large number of works from a wide range of artists, including those from the 20th and 21st century, in conjunction with members of the education department,” she said. Then the museum invited members of the public to collaborate.

Every week, the museum released electronic surveys that pitted various art works head to head. Web voters were shown several pairs of images, along with basic information like title, artist, date, medium and dimensions, then asked to choose their favorite in each pair.

Voters also left comments explaining their choices, which ranged from a desire to see the work in person to rhythm to gut feel. And, as one voter put it, “when in doubt, I voted for the underdog.”

Running tallies of each painting revealed certain runaway winners, like Andy Warhol’s “Martha Graham (Satyric Festival),” and several match-ups that barely claimed a winner. Over the course of six weeks, the curated pool was honed and winnowed and new options were brought into the mix.

Not every winner made it onto the gallery walls, however.

Schoenthal, who came on after the public voting process wrapped up, was tasked with putting together a “complete exhibition,” one that reflected the tastes of the public and aligned with the ethos of the Fralin because, she explained, “some people will never know there was this crowdsourced show.”

A teacher in UVA’s art history department and former curator of Second Street Gallery, Schoenthal focused on evocative juxtapositions. Knowing that some visitors would be voters, but others may not have seen the collection before, she included a range that could inspire or encourage viewers to draw their own connections.

By clustering the art thematically instead of chronologically, she echoed the absence of easy narrative faced by each online voter. And the final show “speaks to art as an enduring endeavor,” she said.

Through the lens of the line, viewers are asked to consider, question and analyze how artists use what Schoenthal calls “probably the most fundamental compositional element that artists are engaged with.”

Works include etched lines, drawn lines, found lines and an entire array of processes. Two Matisse lithographs, painted in two different decades with two different approaches to line, are hung one above the other. Two German expression artists take two very different approaches to woodcuts. A Sol LeWitt screenprint reveals diagonal lines and cross hatchings, an almost scientific breakdown of what a line can do or be. A Kara Walker silhouette meets a Berenice Abbott photograph of light dividing and refracting through a prism. Both, Schoenthal said, reflect “line captured by tool of the artist.”

The co-curator also leveraged one of Farrell’s inspirations, the Paul Klee statement that “a line is a dot that went for a walk.” The walls of “What is a Line?” include quotes from major artists throughout the 20th century “meant to encourage free association when you’re in the space.”

Viewers can share their ideas via a Web survey and iPads available in the gallery space. Those tablets also include thumbnails and information about every single work, including snapshots of the voting results, “so if you must know you can grab one on your way in,” Schoenthal said.

In a way, they seem necessary. “Having those iPads brings it back full circle,” she said, to a process that gives layered life to art: the involvement of the people and, of course, the intervention of the Internet.

“I take broken things and fix them,” explained Gram Slaton. This conjures images of fixer-upper houses or rusted-out bikes, but he’s not a repairman in the traditional sense. In fact, one of the main things that Slaton fixes are non-profit organizations. And as the new executive director of Piedmont Council for the Arts (PCA), he is eager to reimagine and repair the local arts council.

Repairing things comes naturally to Slaton, who grew up in Charlottesville. Like PCA, he recently found himself in need of reinvention. After nine years as the executive director of the Wheeler Opera House in Aspen, Colorado, his gut told him it was time to move on, and he listened. Moving back home in late 2014, Slaton took the helm at PCA in January. Now, when he’s not redefining the future of PCA, you’ll probably find him renovating the kitchen in his childhood home, where he now lives.

He fondly remembers late-night concerts on the Corner at venues such as The Mineshaft and The West Virginian, a music club in the basement of what is still The Virginian. But, he can’t forget Charlottesville’s problems in the 1970s, including rampant racism and drugs. After the latter claimed his brother, Slaton decided to break from his past and move to Ohio to attend Denison University. “In 1977, I changed my name and moved far, far from home,” said Slaton, who adopted his first name from musician Gram Parsons.

Two years after Slaton’s departure, PCA was founded in 1979 by a group of community members and evolved over the ensuing decades. Far away, Slaton grew his expertise as an arts administrator, honing his skills at a variety of non-profits and launching a handful of arts festivals along the way. Understanding the city’s past and returning to Virginia, he was stunned by the transformation of Charlottesville since his youth. “I saw a tidal change,” he said.

Slaton considers the arts to be one of three growth industries here, alongside UVA and entrepreneurship. He’s also discovered that, “there’s been a hunger for PCA to do something.” Topping his to-do list is the task of strengthening the relationship between PCA and local government. He’s keen to fix public funding procedures for arts non-profits, saying that it’s currently, “not serving the arts community well, or the city.” Reworking this funding system would help improve the entire community. “The arts community spends its money where it lives, where it works,” said Slaton.

PCA’s Arts & Economic Prosperity study demonstrated that the local arts sector generates more than $114 million in annual economic activity, accounting for $31.2 million in household income. That’s not too shabby for a city of Charlottesville’s size, and with careful reinvestment the local arts sector can be grown further—but it’s largely up to PCA to take the lead in this effort.

Indeed, this growth was the impetus for PCA’s 2013 Create Charlottesville/Albemarle cultural planning process, but the creation of the plan itself exceeded the tiny non-profit’s capacity and implementation of the plan’s strategies still remains mostly out of reach for the same reason. Slaton sees a surplus of local arts resources. “Everything could fold together so nicely, but we’re not doing it,” he said.

The cultural plan also raised a question that Slaton grapples with: Does Charlottesville need an attention-grabbing arts council, a behind-the-scenes arts council, or, really, any arts council at all? In response, Slaton gives himself two years to prove the worth—and mettle—of PCA. “The clock is ticking,” he joked. For now, he’s focused on the need for the organization’s internal growth, if only to avoid “constantly losing all institutional knowledge” through staff turnover. Indeed, between 2010 and 2014, the organization had 10 individuals cycle through its three part-time, paid staff positions.

The issue of retaining creative talent isn’t limited to PCA, however. In fact, Slaton launched a new PCA initiative, the 2030 Board, to address it. The idea is simple enough: gather 20 to 30 people in their 20s and 30s and mentor them to be ideal board members by the year 2030. Slaton hopes this will help retain young talent in the region. The Charlottesville area already provides young creatives with a comfortable launching spot, but launch they must if they hope to find abundant professional opportunities and affordable housing. With the 2030 Board’s input, he hopes PCA can be more responsive in providing appropriate support and advocacy to this demographic. “I don’t want to see 20- and 30somethings discouraged to the point of giving up,” said Slaton.

To this last point, he speaks from experience. Slaton is also a playwright, who was awarded fellowships and residencies for his playwriting. However, it’s a calling that he largely abandoned in the 1990s, when he realized the difficulty involved in making a living as an artist. He opted to reimagine himself as an arts administrator instead. Now, Charlottesville must wait to see if this same penchant for reinvention can change the future for PCA.

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: May 1, 2015.

City Clay 700 Harris St. Suite 104 “Forms & Texture in BLACK and WHITE,” featuring works by Ted Sutherland, AIA ACHA (emeritus). 5:30-7pm, with an artist talk at 6:30pm.

CitySpace 100 Fifth St. NE. “ArtQuest Program Exhibit,” featuring works by gifted and talented Charlottesville City Schools students grades 5 to 12. 5:30-7:30pm.

C’Ville Arts Cooperative Gallery 118 E. Main St. “Perfect Vessels,” featuring fused glass works by Mary Ellen Larkins. 6-8pm.

Fellini’s #9 200 Market St. “Felt with the Eyes,” featuring acrylic and pen and ink works by Jack Graves III. 5:30-7pm

Light House Studio 121 E. Water Street. “Film Interactive,” featuring family-friendly activities including an animation station and a silent film screening. 5-7pm.

Lynne Goldman Elements 407 E. Main St., Downtown Mall. An exhibit of vitreous enamel on three-dimensional copper representing the pollination process by Charlene Cross. 5:30-7:30pm.

McGuffey Art Center 201 Second St. NW. “Shack City,” featuring works by Bolanle Adeboye and “Choose Your Own Adventure,” featuring works by Polly Breckenridge, in the Sarah B. Smith Gallery; “Out There,” featuring pastel works by Nancy Galloway in the Lower Hall North Gallery; “Staying on the Brink,” featuring sculpture, painting and mixed media works by Nina Burke and a. faith in the Lower Hall South Gallery; “High School Art Show,” featuring work from eight local area high schools in the Upper Hall Galleries. 5:30-7:30pm.

New Dominion Bookshop 404 E. Main St. “Travel’s Unexpected Moments and Other Recent Oils and Pastels,” featuring works by Shamim Sisson. 5:30-7pm.

Old Metropolitan Hall 101 E. Main St. “Secrets of Montpelier,” featuring the work of advanced digital photographers participating in a one-of-a-kind photography course designed by Montpelier in partnership with the UVA School of Continuing and Professional Studies. 5-8pm.

Omni Hotel 212 Ridge McIntire Rd. “Mechanics of Consciousness,” featuring oil paintings by Dylan Korelich. 5-9pm.

Second Street Gallery 115 Second St. SE. “Off the Chain: American Art Unfettered,” featuring oil on canvas works by Amy Sherald. 6-7:30pm, with artist talk at 6:30pm.

Southern Cities Studio 214 W. Water St. “The Five,” featuring works by Bill Atwood, Michael Bednar, George Beller, Warren Boeschenstein and Nina Ozbey. 8am-8pm.

The Loft at Freeman-Victorius 507 W. Main St. “Artful Design,” featuring abstract and surrealist works by Jack Graves III. 5-8pm.\

WVTF & Radio IQ Studio Gallery 216 W. Water St. “New Sincerity,” featuring mixed media works by Victoria Long, presented by New City Arts. 5-7pm.

OTHER EXHIBITS

Albemarle County Courthouse 501 Jefferson St. “Judged Watercolor Show,” featuring works by the Central Virginia Watercolor Guild.

Cavalier Inn 105 N. Emmet St. “Wild Birds,” featuring watercolors by Irene Perry.

Fralin Museum of Art at the University of Virginia 155 Rugby Rd. “The Body in Motion,” “A Portrait of the Artist, 1525-1825,” and “What is a Line?”

Hot Cakes 1137 Emmet St. N. “Plein Air Landscapes,” featuring works by Julia Kindred.

Jefferson School African American Heritage Center 233 Fourth St. NW “Vinegar Hill 1963: Life in the Neighborhood,” featuring photography by Gundars Osvalds.

Kluge-Ruhe Aboriginal Art Collection 400 Worrell Dr. “New Narratives: Papunya Tjupi Prints with Cicada Press,” and “Art and Country.”

Les Yeux du Monde 841 Wolf Trap Rd. “Zaragoza,” featuring triptychs by Russ Warren, with a reception on Friday, May 8, 5:30-7:30pm.

Northside Library 705 W. Rio Rd. “Moments in Time,” featuring plein air paintings of the Virginia countryside by Julia Kindred.

The Garage 250 N. First St. “A Single Jumpy Heart,” featuring mixed media works by Sarah Boyts Yoder, with a reception on Friday, April 10, 5-7pm.

Thomas Jefferson Memorial Church 717 Rugby Rd. An exhibit featuring the melted crayon work of Sara Gondwe.

Every night for the month of April, art aficionados and Charlottesville locals Joseph Avery and Eleanor Muse have a new exhibit in their living room.

“Hans-Ulrich Obrist is a curator, a big guy in the art world, and I remember we read an article where he said the first show he’d ever done was in his kitchen,” said Avery in a recent interview. “He had people come into his apartment and led them into the kitchen, where they’d open up a cabinet that held the work.”

This domestic-turned-aesthetic approach to curatorship inspired Avery, a lawyer, and Muse, a UVA student, to try their hands at a residential-based exhibit. Throughout the month, they’ve welcomed visitors into their private home, hoping to underscore the communal and social aspects of what they’re calling the 30/30 Vision Art Festival.

“We didn’t have a big space, but we were thinking that local artists sort of need a place to show their work,” Avery said. “It seems like there’s a dearth of places in Charlottesville where people can share their ideas, their self-expression and engage with the community.” And, he added, “I liked the concept myself mainly because I wanted to see what everyone was doing.”

After a month of recruiting through Piedmont Council for the Arts, UVA Studio Arts majors and the odd Craigslist ad, Avery and Muse coordinated nearly 30 individual artists, the majority of whom live in or are connected to Charlottesville, to install a new exhibit for each 7pm opening. (They’re still looking for a few more artists, working in any medium or field, including theater and the performing arts.)

“The first night we wanted something race-related, something that would comment on social issues after the Martese Johnson incident,” Avery said. “Our opening exhibit was by a Mexican artist who hung a book called The Collapse of Criminal Justice on a clothesline strung across the room. He also hung photos on the walls of incidents of police brutality, including one of Eric Garner and one of Michael Brown as a way of discussing how we are exposed to these actual incidents, and how or if they affect us.”

The pointed intensity of 30/30 Vision exhibits change as quickly as their creators. “Tomorrow we have Meghan Bryant coming in, and she does animal-type drawings on scratch boards,” Avery said. “On Friday we’ll have a performance artist who is going to do four different characters while painting. And on April 24th, we’ll have Rachel Singel, who’s done a lot of intaglio and prints and has a series of beautiful bindings for books, give a small lecture and share some of her techniques.”

He went on to describe the work of fine artist and University of Mississippi professor Lou Haney, a recent transplant to Charlottes-
ville. Her work combines collage with acrylic painting, a system that literally layers interchangeable sheets of plastic over paintings of whimsical subjects like cake, against backdrops of color-filled canvas. “We went to her studio in Belmont, and it just fits with the exhibit,” Avery said. “She’s just experimenting with everything.”

His palpable delight reveals the driving force behind 30/30 Vision’s diversity: the curiosity of its curators. Their exploratory interest in art creates an environment almost like a book club, if the club leaders were avid readers who inadvertently became writers themselves.

“We do a decent amount of traveling to D.C. and New York to keep up with what’s happening at the galleries,” Avery said. “When I’m viewing art, I can read it passively and get a few things out of it, or I can slow down and actively read it. If you really engage and try to untangle what the artist is saying, it’s like reading an essay.”

The pair kept a notebook in which they wrote down ideas for paintings, though they didn’t make art at the time. “We’d see something at a show, have a thought, and write it down,” Avery said. “But a few years back we said, ‘Let’s start executing.’ We thought it would take a year to get through all our ideas, but now we’ve got a bigger notebook and we’re only a tenth of the way through it.”

Now, he said, they paint, primarily with oils, and sometimes sculpt, typically in support of their painting. “The process is similar again to writing as opposed to reading,” he said. “It’s working through or maybe just working off of these ideas.”

“When you’re making art, you’re constantly making decisions, choosing what you bring in and leave out,” Muse said. “As you do it you start to learn what other artists have done and see the decisions they have made.”

Those convolutions of discovery and exploration are the reason they invite strangers into their living room and found themselves drawn to art in the first place.

“I don’t know how it started really,” Muse said of painting. “I’d come away with an idea and it just seemed like an interesting way to express it. It was a way to engage with an idea that I hadn’t tried before.”

To see the artists in the 30/30 Vision Art Festival, visit 700 Grove Avenue at 7pm any evening in April. To submit your own art for inclusion, inquire at 30.30artsfestival@gmail.com.

“I remember being at my mom’s house when I saw these two silhouettes she had done of my brother and I when we were toddlers,” said Charlottesville-based photographer Rich Tarbell. “Her house is full of quilts and artwork that have rotated over the decades, but those were always there somewhere. They struck me as timeless.”

Tarbell, known for his backstage concert snaps and silhouettes of Charlottesville Lady Arm Wrestlers, opens an exhibition called “Moonlight Silhouettes,” with photography featuring Moonlight Circus aerialists, on April 10 at The Garage.

“I’d been going to CLAW events since day one,” he said. And when performance photographer Billy Hunt switched his focus to videotaping the CLAW documentary, Tarbell became his de facto stand-in and expanded the coverage beyond stage shots. “I got the idea for each event to do a quick portrait of each wrestler, not just an in-action shot of the matches or the crowd,” he said. “I tried to do a backstage in the garage of the Blue Moon Diner, and I was literally trying to carve myself a little 8’x 8′ space, just a tiny area where I could come up with these clever portraits for each wrestler or the ref.”

As he prepared to shoot his fourth set of unique portraits that year, Tarbell was fresh out of ideas. Until he saw the silhouettes.

“The characters themselves make amazing profiles when they’re in costume,” he said. Tarbell produced a full show of them under the pseudonym Olon Pills, hanging them for a month at Blue Moon Diner.

“It really resonated with people more than I thought,” he said. “I thought it was kind of a joke. I was trying to do something that matched the CLAW attitude of fun but thoughtful art, and people really loved them.”

A long-time guitarist, Tarbell began his photography career when he sold an old guitar on eBay and bought a camera. “It started as a thing I did to support my friends, like, ‘Here’s this band I like and you should like too,’ but as I got into it I was given more access to interesting things,” he said.

He described his “romantic rock ‘n’ roll notion” of backstage and tour bus camaraderie.

“I’ve been backstage and set up shots where I knew a scene was coming in terms of the band coming off stage,” he said. “As an audience member you don’t see that when they go backstage they are covered in sweat and exhausted and they take a few minutes to set their brains straight even though they do it 200 days of the year or so. Those moments are when you realize that you’re in their office, and their world is a little different.”

Tarbell said that sense of camaraderie is the common denominator between his creative projects. “It’s a collaborative process with me and my friends,” he said of “Moonlight Silhouettes.”

After the success of his CLAW show, he hatched the idea of large silhouettes and brought the concept to his friends in Moonlight Circus. “They started running with it in terms of performance and hairstyle—you know, the things that make a big difference,” he said.

When shooting the troupe’s Halloween performance live proved difficult due to movement, he pitched the idea of shooting stills in warehouse space at the Ix Art Park. “One of the aerialists is an art teacher, and she embraced the whole concept and the collaboration immediately,” he said. He had the performers’ input on “everything from the poses to the hairstyles to the silks and curtains we used to create the contrast effects.”

After the first session of shots, Tarbell took a few weeks to test printing methods and consult with other artists, and then held a second session.

Ultimately he chose to print several shots on high gloss aluminum and several more with the lenticular printing method, which gives an image an illusion of depth and the ability to change or move as it’s viewed from different angles.

“I just crossed my fingers and hoped,” he said. “I think it went differently than I thought it might, but probably better than I could have imagined.”