Tag: Fine Arts

“Social sculpture is the idea that whenever we’re shaping our own lives to be more beautiful, it’s an intentional act to bring more beauty or well-being into the world,” said Kate Daughdrill, a Detroit-based artist, farmer, and teacher who graduated from UVA.

Daughdrill is one of 20-plus presenters slated to bring social sculpture to Charlottesville’s biannual New City Arts Forum. The 2014 event, titled “Art, Food, and Community,” will be held at The Haven and according to the event website, will “highlight overlapping practices of contemporary art and food systems.” Discussions and performances center on topics like art- and food-based social engagement, land-use art, and food-based sculpture.

“Both food and art bring us to the present, to what we’re seeing, hearing, and experiencing,” Daughdrill said. “The word aesthetic comes from ‘of the senses,’ and so much of food is about the sensual experience of eating and nurturing ourselves. We’re affected, even on a cellular level, when we bring something in to digest it, either for nutrients or aesthetic nourishment.”

When she was a studio art undergraduate at UVA, Daughdrill co-founded The Garage and began to make “living sculptures,” works that utilize the sculptural forms of edible plants. Since moving to Michigan for Cranbook Academy of Art’s MFA program, she also cultivates creative social projects like Detroit SOUP, a community dinner program that awards micro-grants to artists and inspired Charlottesville SOUP and meals-as-arts-incubators around the country. Last summer, she formed a creative CSA that distributed art objects as well as produce from her garden, an experiment mirrored by The Bridge PAI in the fall of 2013.

“For me, it’s the daily acts of caring for myself and other people and doing it with intention and care,” said Daughdrill. “Art has a unique role in claiming what matters, of saying, ‘this is meaningful,’ and bringing the next layer of wonder to those experiences. Whether that’s setting a table or arranging a house—even how I stack the wood I use to heat my home feels like the art of the everyday to me.”

In addition to reaching new community members, Daughdrill works to nourish neighborhood intimacy. In partnership with artist Mira Burack, she developed Edible Hut, a community gathering space in Detroit’s impoverished Osborn neighborhood. The hut, which has an edible, living roof modeled on Jefferson’s rotunda, “claimed that space for something positive versus negative,” Daughdrill said. “The neighborhood wanted a beautiful, safe space for the community to share, and this allowed us to reclaim a public park that had been abandoned and neglected.”

Daughdrill’s own neighborhood gathers around her studio, a renovated house and vacant lot-turned-agricultural operation called Burnside Farm. Once a week, she hosts weekly meals for her community. “Eating food with other people is one of the most natural ways to be together,” she said, and it forges community in the face of universal struggles.

“[Like Detroit,] there is poverty and need in Charlottesville,” Daughdrill said. An event like Charlottesville SOUP at the New City Arts Forum is one way to address it. When participants eat their communal meals, they’ll donate admission fees to a philanthropic arts project selected by community vote.

This is the sort of deliberate, fundamentally creative act that, for Daughdrill, helps elevate and give meaning to daily life. “For all our differences, the similarities are what I come to,” she said. “Human beings want to connect to themselves and each other and plants and something higher than themselves. And growing food and eating it on Sunday nights with my neighbors is one of the most profound experiences I can create.”

When Andy Friedman enrolled in the Rhode Island School of Design, he devoted himself to Venetian oil painting, a skill so intricate that each work takes an average of three years to finish.

“I knew that after college I would have to get a job, and I wanted to know the feeling of complete and utter pride in a work I painted by hand while I still had the time to devote 18 hours a day to doing it,” Friedman said.

As graduation approached, he applied the final coat of varnish to his single work of art—and ruined it. “That is when I discovered country blues [music] and my relationship with a more truthful vision of perfection materialized,” said Friedman.

The career that followed has included musical performance, illustration, cartooning, and writing. A journey that began in New York, crisscrossed the country, and will touch down at Miller’s on March 4, when Friedman reads true stories from his life on the road before Matt Lorenz performs with his throat-singing one-man band, The Suitcase Junket.

Lorenz, who initially invited Friedman to perform songs with him, conceded to let him read unpublished essays instead. “It’s a testament to how artistically adventurous [Lorenz] is,” Friedman said.

In his own life, Friedman shifts art forms for utility’s sake. “The mediums themselves are nothing but tools,” he said, “like you’d choose a paintbrush or pencil. Painting is a tool, photography is a tool, and the English language is a tool for me to use at my discretion. If I need to write a story, I’ll write a story.”

After graduating, Friedman worked at The New Yorker, and ended up in the office of cartoon editor Bob Mancoff. He began selling his own cartoons intermittently, and once his first illustration for the magazine was published, he took a leap of faith.

“The slideshow poet industry was hiring,” he told me over the phone from his home in Brooklyn. We both laughed. “With the prospects of maybe doing more illustration and selling a cartoon here and there, I thought I’d supplement that income by travelling around the country offering a slideshow performance I had developed.”

Slideshow poetry combined live music with visual art projections. “I didn’t know how to play guitar, never sang a note in my life,” he said, but he taught himself the basics, got busy writing tunes, and toured with a self-published book of drawings and Polaroid photos that he sold like an album.

He spent nights in hotel rooms drawing after performance venues closed. As his client list grew to include Rolling Stone, Playboy, and The New York Times, his body began to protest. “I got three hours of sleep, drank a lot of coffee, and I didn’t really know how to play the guitar,” Friedman said. “So every night my fingers would bleed, and I started to feel it in my hands. For a while I knew life without the possibly of drawing, and it scared me into health.”

He stopped touring two years ago, digging into home life in Brooklyn and his own reflections of life on the road. “If I’m not here, then everything that I learned, all the stories go with me. That’s what’s motivating me, the desire to get it down,” Friedman said.

But this work isn’t a novel, he reminded me. It’s a way, like singing or painting, to tell stories from his life. “Any artist can do anything they want to do at any given time,” he said. “The art world that I see is just a celebration of that idea.”

Now in his eighties, America’s greatest living artist, Jasper Johns, is still recognized as the vanguard who ignored convention to create a new, galvanizing style that brilliantly reflected the spirit and mores of its time. Johns’ far-reaching influence can be discerned in Pop Art, minimalism, and conceptual art movements and it continues to resound in contemporary art today.

Though he is best known for his paintings and his bronze Ballantine Ale cans, Johns is also considered a master printmaker with a body of work that shows his total command of the various media within the field of printmaking. “Jasper Johns: Early Prints from the Collections of Jordan D. Schnitzer and His Family Foundation” at UVA’s Fralin museum (through May 19) offers a rare opportunity to view a selection of these graphic works.

A generation behind the Abstract Expressionists, Johns’ work was both a reaction against their tenets and an assimilation of their aesthetic. While rejecting the Abstract Expressionists’ non-
objective ethos, he retained a similar all-over surface and painterly approach. He chose an iconography composed of the familiar—“things the mind already knows,” like flags, maps, letters, and numbers, keeping the subject matter intentionally minimal, so as not to distract from the media and technique. Indeed, the hallmark of Johns’ work is this gravitas of approach, blended with rather mundane subject matter.

From the moment his work first appeared, viewers have been both attracted and puzzled by the enigmatic nature of these serious pieces that take trivialities as their subject matter. “When people saw these works, they knew what they were seeing, but the big question was ‘Why?’” said curator Jennifer Farrell. “Why am I looking at this? And Johns never answers that question.” Farrell suggested his long-term partner [the late, great artist] Robert Rauschenberg provided a clue when he said about his own work, “Painting relates to both art and life, I try to act in that gap between the two.”

Part of the answer also lies in the fact that the post-World War II era, when Johns was coming of age, saw a veritable sea change in both expression and perception. With the rise of advertising, stimulated by the advent of TV, came an enormous increase in visual bombardment. For the first time, images began to subvert ideas. Tapping into this, Johns created a new artistic language.

Throughout his career, Johns was constantly reworking, testing boundaries, and experimenting, and his work resonates with this. According to Farrell, “Johns wanted to play with familiar things and the idea of taking something, doing something to it, doing something else to it—again and again —is central to his art. We can see this specifically in the numbers and letters where he uses a stencil form—a reproducible form.”

“0–9,” 1960-1963, is a significant piece because it’s printed from one stone, so with each new number Johns brings along traces of the previous number(s). Being a series, it dovetails well with his whole inclination towards repetition. He chooses a jaunty, voluptuous font that seems so at odds with the haute art manner in which it’s rendered. To our eyes it looks distinctly of its era, lifted as it was straight from popular culture.

“There’s also a literalness to his work, said Farrell. “Johns doesn’t alter the arrangements of the numbers, the letters, the flag, or the map. The configuration is the same, but they’re different in each print because of the nature of the medium.”

Technically, the series is so complicated with a frieze-like list of numbers on top, all of which had to be executed in reverse, that it’s been theorized that when Johns embarked on it, as a novice printmaker, he didn’t realize what he was getting into. Farrell points out this is a key work that had “repercussions throughout his career. Fifty years later you can see Johns making reference to the same themes. Again, he’s taking something and engaging with it in different media, in different context, and in a different method.”

Farrell notes that the earliest work in the exhibit, an abstract monoprint from 1954, is historically significant because it places Johns’ initial foray into printmaking six years earlier than what is indicated by conventional lore.

I think my favorite work is the ghostly “Two Maps I,” 1966, though I wish it were framed in a less distracting manner. It’s a diptych of the United States, gray ink on a black field. Like his flags, this piece speaks to the spirit of nationalism prevalent in 1950s America. I really like that it’s a monochromatic version of the colorful children’s puzzle and especially how the lyrical image seems to hover above the paper.

“Numbers,” 1967, and “Gray Alphabets,” 1968, present grids of numbers and letters, respectively, which seem to pulse with a sensuousness that one doesn’t generally associate with such dry fodder as integers and letters.

“Decoy II,” 1973, is a complex work both in terms of technique and meaning. Here, Johns has produced a whole array of visual effects: squiggly lines, painterly strokes, block letters, a sculptural leg fragment, a perfect circle and, that old faithful, a Ballantine Ale can. It could be a busy mess, but the composition hangs together elegantly.

Most of the works on display are lithographs, as is fitting, since the medium held an important place in Johns’ oeuvre. But there are others that reveal Johns’ wide-
ranging interest and proficiency in different printmaking techniques and materials. Johns collaborated on the early lithographs and later silk screens with master printmakers Tatyana Grosman and Ken Tyler. And the works bear witness to the cooperative relationship between printmaker and artist who, working together, produced this exceptional body of work.

Tucked away on Fourth Street NE just off the Downtown Mall, Telegraph Gallery still feels a bit like a secret portal to a different world. The hand-painted letters on the storefront windows tug at passersby with the promise of things both unknown and exciting. At once a gallery, bookstore, workspace, and shop, Telegraph showcases the unique strengths and aesthetics of husband-and-wife co-owners David Murray and Kate deNeveu.

Since the store opened in March 2013, its First Fridays receptions have attracted crowds to explore new, limited-edition artist prints, priced so that even the leanest budget can afford to start an art collection. The gallery also hosts free, hands-on Comic Craft Days, as well as author panels and readings. In a town with a strong traditional literary scene, Murray and deNeveu have successfully formed a community hub that works to expand our definition and appreciation of alternative forms of storytelling through comics. For the past few months, they’ve been experimenting with another way to share their passions: Comic Book Club.

Focused on encouraging new readers and informing a community discussion of alternative comics, Comic Book Club is open to all. The books discussed so far have included True Swamp: Choose Your Poison by Jon Lewis and Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth by Chris Ware. The club gatherings have brought out a diverse group of people excited to discuss every detail, from narrative arc and panel layout to general impressions and questions. First-time readers will feel welcome alongside dedicated fans of specific authors.

“So far the response has been great: we’ve made new friends, dug into some good books, and eaten our fair share of cheese,” said Murray. “Getting more interesting books in readers’ hands is one of our favorite parts of this job.”

Intrigued? The third installment of the Comic Book Club will feature Ant Colony by Michael DeForge.

Released in January, Ant Colony is fresh off the press from Montreal-based publisher Drawn and Quarterly. The narrative provides a striking analysis of human nature through an intimate (at times very intimate) look at the inhabitants and interactions of the titular ant colony. DeForge’s aesthetic is one-of-a-kind and his touch is immediately recognizable in each panel. For those unfamiliar with his work, DeForge’s series of small format comics, entitled Lose (Koyama Press), makes a great entry point.

Animal and insect forms feature prominently in much of Deforge’s work and this book is no different. However, bright colors and a goofy drawing style belie the fact that this isn’t a comic book for kids. Originally a series of short-form comic strips called Ant Comics, the long-form book compiles the story in a beautifully designed tome that breathes anew with each turned page. DeForge is skilled at leaving room to inhabit his worlds and this story will certainly stick with the reader long after the last page.

Ant Colony has a dark humor and existential tone that will appeal to many, but certainly not all. In the end, it’s a well-crafted comic narrative for readers who are interested in exploring the depths of humanity in the company of dog-headed spiders and warring ants.

Spin-offs and follow-up stories from the Ant Colony universe seem highly likely, given the artist’s prolific work. This month finds him fresh off a book tour for Ant Colony, as well as an appearance at the Los Angeles Art Book Fair, where he debuted a new comic book with co-author Patrick Kyle.

For now, readers can enjoy DeForge’s invigorating new work with the help of Murray, deNeveu, and new friends with a shared obsession. The next meeting of the Comic Book Club takes place at the gallery on March 6.

Speaking of volumes

In other efforts to re-imagine books and what we do with them, the Virginia Arts of the Book Center (VABC) is hosting an exhibit of limited edition, handmade books this month in Staunton. Created during the 2013 collaborative project, “A Bookmaker’s Dozen,” 27 local artists teamed up to create this series of miniature books. This exhibit features 15 2″x3″ books showcasing a variety of printing styles including letterpress, lithography, etching, and giclée, as well as a variety of hand binding styles ranging from coptic to accordion. The opening reception will be held on February 28 from 5-7pm at Barrister Books in Staunton.

Want to take a bookmaking class of your own? The VABC operates a working studio and print shop in the Ivy Shopping Center that’s open to the public for classes, and past bookmaking projects are also available to view upon request.

Where do you go for your reading pleasure? Tell us in the comments section below.

A trifecta of artists will share their work and discuss the creative process in the second edition of The Makers Series. During a dedicated Q&A session you’ll hear about indie folk heartthrob Sanders Bohlke’s soulful inspiration, learn how animals and houses inspire painter Kaki Dimock’s whimsical landscapes, and gain insight into children’s writer Anne Marie Pace’s true passion.

Friday 2/21. Free, 7pm. Meade Hall at Christ Episcopal Church, High Street and Second Street, NW. 973-1234.

“When people think of the word threesome, they think of one man and two women, and they think of the man getting pleasured by the women,” said Tif Robinette, a self-declared feminist. “But here we have three really strong female artists from the state of Virginia reacting to and tearing apart ideas of the ideal woman.” Robinette is one of three artists, including Susan Jamison and Sharon Shapiro, whose performances, sculptures, drawings, and paintings are part of Second Street Gallery’s February exhibit “Threesome.”

“All of us love that title,” she laughed. “It turns the whole notion of what a threesome is on its head.”

The city’s oldest non-profit contemporary arts space typically showcases two artists in separate spaces each month, but “Threesome” stretches throughout the gallery and intermingles the work of all three artists. “This show is an improvisational conversation between Steve [Taylor, the gallery’s executive director], the artists, and me,” said Tosha Grantham, Second Street’s new curator. Though Grantham’s first curated show will premiere in September, she’s implementing the current season while arranging the next.

“Threesome” is not a collaboration between artists but rather a gathering of like-minded themes. “The exhibit uses three distinct vantage points to explore contemporary femininity in contemporary art,” Grantham said. “How women’s sexuality is placed either in pop culture, in other media such as film, or against a gendered or male gaze.”

The works are full of beauty and tension, a conflict inherent in female sexuality. “They find or create power from what could otherwise be uncomfortable circumstances,” Grantham said, noting that each artist works beyond the “sanitized femininity” popular in our culture. “None of them shy away from challenging subject matter, which is refreshing especially when it comes to woman and power or femininity and control.”

Susan Jamison uses egg tempera painting and sculptural forms to explore an intentionally feminine perspective. Her paintings most often feature a female character appearing alongside animals, a woman with a face replaced by a medical illustration or skin covered in hot pink flowers. Jamison also embellishes found objects like vintage lace, anchors, horse hair, and women’s clothing to provide feminist social commentary.

“In this exhibition, my piece ‘Drowning Dress’ is covered in lead fishing weights and embroidered with the word ‘Farewell’ around the neckline,” she said. “It is meant as an homage to the feminist writer Virginia Woolf who drowned herself in a river by placing heavy rocks in her coat pockets.”

Sharon Shapiro’s paintings and drawings highlight the complications of desire, gender, and sexuality through doubling and transforming female figures. “I take screen shots with my iPhone, manipulate them, and work from those images in my painting,” Shapiro said. She focuses on character-driven films like Blow Up (a 1966 film about a London photographer who may have witnessed a killing) or personal narratives populated by animal-human composites.

“I grew up in a small town in West Virginia, and we used to go to this shoddy public pool called Harmony Acres,” Shapiro said, describing a painting on display in “Threesome.” “Much as the pool deteriorated, the two figures [in the painting] turn from humans into a pattern disrupted by the woman’s lower half turning into a sheep. It leaves the viewer to wonder if the transformation is literal and the man is committing bestiality, or is it just a metaphor for other sorts of transformations that we go through?”

Symbolism abounds in the show, which features Tif Robinette’s practice of using quotidian objects in unexpected ways. Corn, snakes, and other elements allow her to represent and juxtapose ideas like masculinity and femininity, lightness and darkness, the sacred and the profane.

“I’m really interested in turning the coin upside down and thinking of the things we do every day as either equally or more significant than the rituals that we regard as highly spiritual.” Eating and communication are ritualized activities, she said, but we don’t engage in them with the same awareness we do in church. Her performances and works draw attention to the ordinary. “Salt in the cupboard, the yellow gloves you use to wash your dishes, those very small seemingly insignificant moments in your life, I elevate them.”

Robinette’s work includes provocative performances, the sort Charlottesville galleries rarely see. “I like to use eating roses as a metaphor for being women being in relationships and the beauty and romance and destruction of those situations,” she said. “My performanc-
es tend to have quiet sacred moments and base, bestial moments. I feel like eating roses is one of those, very much like an animal, taking a symbol that we hold in high regard, especially around Valentine’s Day, as a symbol of the purity of love and tearing it apart.”

Robinette’s four-hour live performance, “AINT YOUR GODDESS AINT YOUR BEAST,” debuted during “Threesome’s” First Fridays opening. It was captured on video and distilled into a 15-minute loop for broadcast on a mounted television throughout the show’s run.

“Threesome” is sponsored by Women for Art, a group of women who share a passion for contemporary art and often support Second Street events. “As a gallery, we’re known for showing art that might not otherwise be seen here,” Grantham said, and “Threesome” offers a rare look into largely unexhibited work by area artists who exhibit nationally and internationally.

“Threesome” is also an opportunity for audience participation. “People should know that their opinions and observations are valid,” Jamison said. “Perhaps I have painted an animal that you have seen in your yard, and this creates your own story for my painting. Reading visual art can and should be a more open-ended experience than reading words.”

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: February 7, 2014.

BozArt Gallery 211 W Main St. “Sweet Temptations” by Suzanne Nelson. 5-9pm.

The Bridge PAI 209 Monticello Rd. The iConnect program and the aerial photography work of the University of Virginia Scholars’ Lab. 5-7pm.

Cafe Cubano 112 W. Main St. “Gradations of SOUND,” performance photography by Gina Elliott Proulx. 6pm.

CitySpace 100 Fifth St. NE. An exhibit featuring “Bus Lines Community Poetry” in the CitySpace Gallery. Artwork by Evelyn Braintwain in the PCA office. 5:30-7pm.

C’Ville Arts 118 E. Main St. “Out of the Blue” by jeweler and glass fusion artist Diana Branscome. 6-8pm.

Fellini’s #9 200 W. Market St. “Colors of Albemarle” by oil painter Ron Martin. 5:30-7pm.

FIREFISH Gallery 108 Second St. NW. “Pastoral Reflections,” oil paintings by John Tripple. 5:30-7:30pm.

McGuffey Art Center 201 Second St. NW. “Uncovering Dreams,” works in encaustic by Lindsey Oberg and “Living Time,” watercolors by Lee Alter in the Sarah B. Smith Gallery; “Rebound” paintings by J. M. Henry in the Lower Hall Galleries; and “Figure Drawing: Theme and Variation” in the Upper Hall Galleries. 5:30-7:30pm.

Second Street Gallery 115 Second St. SE. “Threesome” by Sharon Shapiro, Susan Jamison, and Tif Robinette. 5-7:30pm.

Warm Springs Gallery 105 Third St. NE. “The Painter’s Table,” paintings by Becky Parrish, Amy Dobbs, Tina Ingraham, and Melanie Parke. 6-8pm.

WriterHouse 508 Dale Ave. “Mining Divine Connection,” paintings by Janet Pearlman. 5:30-7:30pm.

WVTF and Radio IQ Studio Gallery 216 W. Water St. “Across the Table,” paintings by Anna Bryant. 5-7pm.

OTHER EXHIBITS

Angelo 220 E. Main St. “Maps of an Azure Odyssey” by Judy McLeod.

Fralin Museum of Art at the University of Virginia 155 Rugby Rd. “Jasper Johns: Early Prints from the Collections of Jordan D. Schnitzer and his Family Foundation,” “Portraying the Golden Age: Drawings from the Maida and George Abrams Collection,” and “Recent Acquisitions.”

Kluge-Ruhe Aboriginal Art Collection 400 Worrell Dr. “having-been-there” by Nici Cumpston.

Les Yeux du Monde 841 Wolf Trap Rd. “Passages,” new paintings by Ellen Hathaway.

Martin Luther King Jr. Performing Arts Center 1400 Melbourne Rd. “VSA Art Show” featuring works by more than 100 local artists with disabilities.

Over the Moon Bookstore & Artisan Gallery 5798 Three Notch’d Rd., Crozet. Collected works by Janet Pearlman.

Pigment 1229 Harris St. #13. “1+1=11,” mixed media collaborations by Kim Boggs and Jordan Reeves.

Thomas Jefferson Memorial Church 717 Rugby Rd. “Femininity,” drawings by Joan Dark.

It seems like an absurd plan to grow a city’s art scene: take the cultural community, run it through two years of focus groups and surveys, and publish six long-range goals (diversity and inclusion, arts education, cultural destination, creative workers, creative placemaking, and cultural infrastructure). It’s a wonky, almost anti-artistic approach. Doesn’t such an effort simply underscore Charlottesville’s willingness to obsessively reformulate intellectual problems rather than to roll up its sleeves to fix them?

Not according to Sarah Lawson, executive director of Piedmont Council for the Arts (PCA). The non-profit arts council used a variety of grants to pay an amount The Daily Progress estimated at $112,000 to an outside consulting firm to generate the Create Charlottesville/Albemarle: A cultural plan, unveiled during a brief ceremony at The Paramount Theater last month. What Lawson and her predecessor Maggie Guggenheimer saw was a lively arts community living hand to mouth on generous, likely unsustainable donations from a small group of patrons.

“The Charlottesville/Albemarle arts community rests on the backbone of two or three people, and it’s not really sustainable for that reason,” said Lawson. “Increasingly, many of the people who founded the arts community and make it so vibrant either passed away or moved away or, for whatever reason, got uninvolved. It’s a very real life cycle, and we wanted to make sure it didn’t result in killing off organizations that we all know and love.”

In 2011, PCA participated in a study conducted by Americans for the Arts called Arts & Economic Prosperity IV. It revealed that the arts and culture industry in Charlottesville and Albemarle generated $114.4 million in annual economic activity, resulting in $9.2 million in local and state government revenues, 1,921 equivalent full-time jobs, and $31.2 million in household income for local residents.

“The study completely shut up anyone who said the arts don’t matter economically,”  said Live Arts Executive Director Matt Joslyn. “We’re a huge industry with a massive economic impact, and Charlottesville and Albemarle would be fundamentally different places if you took us away. It showed that we’re worthy to be at the table.”

Create Charlottesville/Albemarle takes the Arts & Economic Prosperity study one step further by outlining the lifestyle impact and goals of our cultural scene, not just its influence on the local economy. The process, an investment in long-term alignment between the arts community and policymakers, included input from over 1,000 citizens and community leaders and spanned the better part of two years. The 32-page final document is a vision for the future for arts organizations and a well-formulated plea to local government to formally commit to providing funding and infrastructure to the arts community.

It’s as much an inventory as a plan, designed to empower struggling cultural institutions at a time when some high-profile smaller players are feeling the pressure. Vinegar Hill Theatre closed after 37 years of foreign and independent film screenings, citing competition from multiplex conglomerates and increased interest in streaming media. Random Row Books, the dynamic independent bookstore and performance space, had to close its doors to make way for a hotel. Chroma Projects Art Laboratory, a gallery and studio space on the Downtown Mall, closed just a few weeks ago when a confluence of rising rent costs and lessening tourism rendered the for-profit gallery unsustainable.

“I do think the city could have helped a little more,” said Deborah McLeod, the curator at Chroma. “Helping to promote fine art places or giving more opportunities for free parking to encourage tourism. I feel like they could have helped me more, because I feel like I was giving something important to Charlottesville.”

All three organizations were for-profit and therefore ineligible for non-profit funding, but they also, as Lawson put it, suffered from a lack of governmental response.

“We need to recognize certain resources as cornerstones of the community,” Lawson said. “And help either relocate them or integrate them into the planning process rather than paving over them.”

But not every leader in the local arts community thinks more infrastructure is the answer. Some are simply worried that as the city becomes more expensive, it’s pricing out its creative class and turning towards art tourism instead of creativity for answers.

“I think Charlottesville lost sight of how important it is to maintain a creative base and make damn sure that artists can be a part of the community,” said Greg Kelly, the former executive director of The Bridge Progressive Arts Institute. “LOOK3, the Virginia Film Festival—those large scale productions are great, but the underground DIY thing was slowly being tapped.”

Maintaining a thriving arts scene outside an urban center appears incredibly difficult. It’s a competitive, subjective, and bootstrapping world that thrives on energy and the willingness of artists to live on the margins of the economy. In a way, subsidizing the arts is counterintuitive, even problematic. If the scene can’t survive on its own, the reasoning goes, perhaps it shouldn’t exist at all.

On the other hand, art has never existed without patronage to support it. Those who remember the early days of the art scene in Charlottesville know it was based on cheap rent and benevolent landlords. The independent bookstores and contemporary galleries helped to yield the area’s current quality of life and revitalize its Downtown. Without a vibrant art community, its reputation as a cultural center and artistic haven will evaporate.

“These paintings are so raw; they’re so far from anything I’ve ever done before,” said Lisa Beane about her show “Chapters,” now on view at The Jefferson School African American Cultural Heritage Center through March 30.

Beane is a Los Angeles-based artist. But for many years she lived in Charlottesville, while raising her daughter Leslie Goldman and painting at a level that garnered shows at Les Yeux du Monde and Second Street Gallery.

In 2004, Beane met LeRoi Moore, the saxophonist for the Dave Matthews Band, while walking on the Downtown Mall in a chance coup de foudre encounter. True soul mates, the two were planning to marry in November 2008.

Moore died tragically three months before the wedding from pneumonia contracted as a result of injuries sustained in an ATV accident the previous June. Following his death, Beane was plunged into a tailspin of grief and turmoil as arguments over Moore’s estate and recriminations about her role in his life and death escalated.

To escape the chaos and pain, Beane decamped to Los Angeles where she and Moore had a home and had planned to live for part of the year. There followed five years of survival as she worked through this personal catastrophe, the legacy of which was a PTSD (post traumatic stress disorder) diagnosis.

Last spring, a friend learned that Beane was an artist (she’d virtually stopped painting since Moore’s death) and upon seeing her work, insisted she go to his ranch in Nebraska and paint. Bean said she felt Moore speaking through him, “And so, I said, ‘O.K.’ It was time.” And then, “in a kind of a trance,” she posted a comment about it on Facebook that was seen by Andrea Douglas, executive director of the Jefferson School. When Douglas learned that Beane was back in the game, she immediately offered her a show.

Alone on the 650-acre ranch for six weeks “in the middle of nowhere,” her only companions a Mexican ranch-hand who spoke very little English, cattle and rabbits, Beane was forced to confront what had happened to her. Working through five years in six weeks was “the hardest thing I’ve ever done,” said Beane. “I had to see it all, go through it again, and it came out in the paintings. And they’re intense and vulgar and they’re not just what I went through with Roi. They’re about life, about humanity. About how we treat one another, how we can be so cruel to one another, whether it’s family, or George Zimmerman, or politicians, or Wall Street.”

The theme of loss is front and center, but the message of the show is one of forgiveness and survival. “After Roi passed away and I had to deal with not only losing him, but losing everything else: my dogs, my home, sentimental things like wedding gifts, presents he bought me for my birthday. Things that meant something. I had to figure out where to put all that loss. I had to find my way back to love and forgiveness. I knew if I didn’t do that, I wouldn’t honor Roi.”

And honor him she has with a kick-ass show of paintings that stop you in your tracks with their emotional intensity. Beane’s surfaces are so interesting—so rich. From partially erased blackboard, to burlap, brass nails (used for their association with Christ’s Passion), roof shingles (some of which are incised with images of protective African masks), collage, drawing, scratch marks, stock images of 1940s pitch men, stenciled letters, block numbers, and heavily applied paint. Beane’s not afraid to get messy with drips and frayed edges that add to the overall rawness of the work.

Douglas interprets the paintings this way: “Count back the years; this was 2008. Looking back, we begin to understand what the banking community was doing, we begin to understand mortgage failures, and we begin to understand the resulting economic decline.” She said, “We can read references to this period in all of the work; we see the fat cats and greed and the commercialization of our lives. All that stuff’s in all of this.”

“I talk a lot about Lisa’s basic language of art making,” Douglas continued. “You have to read her paintings. Certain elements are symbolic. There are things that you don’t notice readily like the sheep that repeat over and over and over, some with a bull’s eye on them, that should be read in relationship to the other menacing elements in the work.”

“What comes through here is people’s innocence in the face of danger, danger that’s not understood and that’s at times unexplainable,”said Douglas.

With pretty colors, jolly figures, and some sassy turns of phrase, Beane both masks and draws attention to her underlying message. There’s bravery and honesty in these works tempered with a childlike iconography that has certain recurring symbols.

Her paintings are populated with familiar figures from pop culture, for example Trayvon Martin becomes Daffy Duck helpfully (and poignantly) trying out different walks because, as described by Zimmerman, Martin was “walking unnaturally slow with a meandering gait.”

One can’t help but wonder where is the threat in that? Above all, Beane uses humor, whether twisted, ironic, or just plain joyful, it’s the thread that binds her work. It’s her way of dealing with the things that are too hard to talk about or really show.

And then there’s the love. Love is the basso continuo pulsing through the work whether it’s the actual word or the Xs and Os that dance across the paintings’ surfaces with abandon. In “Pigs” they have become an ocean that threatens to drown the avaricious swine in love. It says boatloads about who Lisa Beane is.

As Douglas said, “You feel she’s trying to will the love no matter what; she’s trying to get to the better place.” This is very true, but she is also intent on taking us with her.

Get inspired by the work of over 100 artists promoting creative power in people with disabilities at the VSA Charlottesville/Albemarle 14th Annual Art Show. Artists including Chris Wharam, Romney Brand, Rosemary Ballister, John T. Trippel, Margaret Lee, Anne Denit, Justin Connor, and William Greenough will display and discuss the development of their artistic vision. Pieces from local schools, organizations, and group projects will share the spotlight with live accompaniment by VSA musicians. As part of a national alliance for the arts, the local VSA has championed its mission for an inclusive arts community and the therapeutic power of creativity since 2000.

Friday 1/10. Free, 6pm. Martin Luther King Jr. Performing Arts Center, 1400 Melbourne Rd. 979-9532.