Tag: Fine Arts

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: April 4, 2014

BON 100 W. South St. Acrylic paintings by Chicho Lorenzo. 5-7pm.

BozArt 211 W. Main St. “New Beginnings” exhibit featuring works by the Central Virginia Watercolor Guild. 5-9pm.

The Bridge PAI 209 Monticello Rd. “Habitat City” on display for the public. 6-8pm.

CitySpace 100 Fifth St. NE. “Create2,” a group exhibit and artwork by Katie McKinley in the PCA office. 5:30-7pm.

C’Ville Arts 118 E. Main Street. “Making Time” by clock maker Allan Young. 6-8pm.

Fellini’s #9 200 W. Market St. Photography, oil and watercolor paintings, pencil drawings and mixed media by the staff of Fellini’s. 5:30-7pm.

FIREFISH Gallery 108 Second St. NW. “Eyes on the Infinite,” paintings by Cristina Rutkowski. 5:30-8pm.

McGuffey Art Center 201 Second St. NW. “From Heaven to Earth,” sculptures and mosaics by Ninni Baeckstrom in the Sarah B. Smith Gallery; “Art Meets Ecology” in Lower Hall North; illustrations by Kate Samworth and Bob Anderson in Lower Hall South; an exhibition of new sculpture and drawings by Fred Crist and oil paintings on canvas and paper by Renee Balfour in the Upper Hall Galleries. 5:30-7:30pm.

Mudhouse 213 W. Main St.  “Leadline,” steel sculptures by Lily Erb. 6-8pm.

New Dominion Bookshop 404 E. Main St. “New Creations” by Lindsey Oberg. 5:30-7:30.

Second Street Gallery 115 Second Street SE. Various artists contribute their work for an ticketed benefit auction on April 12. 5:30-7:30.

Telegraph 110 Fourth St. NE. “Epic Encounters” featuring prints by various artists. 5-10pm.

Warm Springs Gallery 105 Third St. NE. “Rhythm and Motion” by Joseph Holston. 6-8pm.

WriterHouse 508 Dale Ave. “We Are Waiting In A Forest,” drawings by Warren Craghead. 5:30-7:30pm.

WVTF and Radio IQ Studio Gallery 216 W. Water St. “Landscape of Myth II,” paintings by Michael Heivly. 5-7pm.

OTHER EXHIBITS

Albemarle County Office Building 401 McIntire Road. “VSA Art Show” featuring works by more than one hundred local artists with disabilities.

Angelo 220 E. Main St. “New Work: Marsh and Ocean,” paintings by Robin Braun.

“Creperie Gallery” at The Flat 111 Water St. E. Recent paintings by Randy Smith.

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 “Joseph Cornell and Surrealism.”

The Garage 250 First St. N. “Objects in mirror,” an exhibit by John Early with a reception on Friday, April 11, 5-8pm.

Java Java 421 E Main St. Watercolors and acrylics by Lisa Bennet and Kari Caplin with a reception on Sunday, April 6, 2-4pm.

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

Les Yeux du Monde 841 Wolf Trap Road. “Still Life and Other Subjects,” paintings by Trisha Orr.

Piedmont Virginia Community College 501 College Dr. “7th Annual Chocolate Chowdown” featuring a variety of art student works and chocolates for visitors with a reception on Friday, April 18, 5-7pm.

Pigment 1229 Harris St. #13. “Bloomers” acrylic on wood paintings by Bolanle Adeboye.

Spring Street Boutique 107 W. Main St. “Artists and Elephants,” featuring oil paintings by Lindsley Matthews, acrylic paintings by Beth Hamerschlag, and photographs by Erwin Baumfaulk.

Thomas Jefferson Memorial Church 717 Rugby Rd. “Paintings’ Skeletons” by Mordiqai McQuade with a reception on Sunday, April 6, at noon.

A rich and deeply satisfying show, “Joseph Cornell and Surrealism” at the Fralin Museum explores Cornell’s work in the context of the Surrealist movement of the 1930s and ’40s. Prior to seeing it, I had the common, yet incorrect impression, that Cornell was a hermit-like creature akin to Henry Darger who created his work in a self-imposed vacuum.

While it’s true Cornell lived most of his life in the modest home he shared with his mother and invalid brother in Queens, rarely leaving the city and never venturing beyond New England, Cornell was from a fine old New York family. Before his father died, which significantly altered the family fortunes, Cornell had enjoyed an idyllic childhood in Nyack, New York and attended Phillips Academy. Though he was painfully shy, he was an inveterate gallery goer and engaged with other artists in the Surrealist circle (André Breton, Max Ernst, and Marcel Duchamp, among others) who had made New York their home in the years leading up to the second World War.

Cornell worked with both collage and assemblage. In the former, two-dimensional materials are glued to a flat surface. Cornell’s assemblages include curios like the charming Bel Écho Gruyère, a round cheese container that holds the noisemaker from a moo box disguised as a wrapped wedge of cheese. When the box is turned upside down, it bleats. He is most famous for his shadow boxes featuring found objects in various arrangements under glass. These works evoke a cabinet of curiosities, or a shop window and also suggest specimens offered up for examination.

Given his personal history it’s no wonder Cornell was obsessed with childhood, the time when things had been so rosy for him. Nature, science, and fantasy also come into play, and the color blue. Mysterious and otherworldly, it adds a sense of romance and nostalgia. Many of his boxes have blue glass and his film, Rose Hobart, was projected through a blue lens.

“Hölderlin Object” is a rhapsodic homage to the Romantic poet, Friedrich Hölderlin using this hue. Here, the blue glass “imbues it with a sense of what the Germans would call Sehnsucht, a kind of longing,” said Fralin director Bruce Boucher. Cornell’s boxes have always reminded me a bit of reliquaries and this seems particularly the case with the oak leaf, a symbol of majesty, strength, and endurance, and the sumptuously bound object that may or may not be a volume of Hölderlin’s work, made precious by its containment within an elegant, inlaid wood box.

My favorite boxes are “Untitled (Game),” whose austere beauty seems to harken back to early American games and the two Dovecotes that presage Donald Judd. One can clearly see Cornell’s influence rippling through contemporary art. Unfortunately, for every one like these exemplaries, there are a dozen Cornell boxes that have inspired legions of soulless copycat assemblages and even a work like Edward Kienholz’s dreary (and creepy) “The Wait.”

While they’re not my favorite, there’s something so poignant about the boxes referencing French hotels. I imagine Cornell, too paralyzed by various personal issues to travel, toiling away in his basement workroom all the while thinking about the France he dearly loved but would never see while constructing “Grande Hôtel de la Boule d’Or” and “Hôtel de L’Étoile.”

Cornell’s filmmaking is a revelation. The lush and enigmatic Rose Hobart is shown together with Duchamp’s Anémic Cinéma and Man Ray’s L’Étoile de Mer recreating a 1936 screening of the same three at the Levy Gallery. Cornell’s is a montage created from the 1931 film East of Borneo and is named for the female lead, the long forgotten Hobart, who must have been one of those actresses Cornell was known to worship from afar.

In “Monsieur Phot,” a film scenario collage in black and red paper with stereoscope photographs, one is struck by Cornell’s innate eye for design. And it’s not surprising that he made extra cash designing covers and feature layouts for Harper’s Bazaar, View, Dance Index, and other magazines.

One of the great delights of the show is the small gems by prominent Surrealists on display. There are two gorgeous and wonderfully restrained Dalis, “Solitude” and “Paranoiac-Astral Image,” a splendid Max Ernst, “Red Sun and Forest,” and Duchamp’s enchanting and inspired miniature collection of his most famous works, “From or by Marcel Duchamp or Rose Sélavy (Box in a Valise)” on which Cornell collaborated as the box fabricator.

Despite the obvious cross-pollination going on between Cornell and the Surrealists, he made a point of separating himself from them, famously saying that they practiced black magic, while he practiced white magic. Supposedly their erotic bent was a turn-off for the reticent Cornell. But more to the point, his art is really a Surrealist-Dada hybrid. He cherry-picked what he wanted from each movement, adding his own unique slant to the mix. While I am not wild about the fussy, Victoriana-tinged pieces that have been copied ad nauseum, others are so striking and moving it’s hard not to fall under their spell. Cornell brilliantly combined the naïve with the sophisticated, offering fleeting glimpses of meaning that only add to the work’s allure.

“Joseph Cornell and Surrealism” is a collaboration between the Fralin, which owns six Cornell boxes and 14 collages, the majority of which were donated by the Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation, and the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Lyon where it was exhibited during the fall/winter.

If you’re tired of grey skies and slush, you might want to visit Les Yeux du Monde before the end of March. “When you walk in the gallery, you see a lot of color,” said Lyn Bolen Warren, the curator of the space’s current exhibit, Visions of Spring. “You see these big painted urns reaching upward, a collage of a tree that is almost life-size. Some pieces are smaller, quieter and more meditative, but the colors are very optimistic. They all have that same hopeful feel.”

Visions of Spring, a six-artist show that runs through March 30, portrays landscapes and life sources, lakes and fields and flowers and fruits that recall natural renewal and preservation. “Some artists are very specific,” Warren said. “They grew up on farms and are watching the world turn into parking lots, so this is how they try to preserve what they remember.”

While each artist brings distinct intentions and styles to the show, Warren, who has her Ph.D. in art history, selected both gallery newcomers and regulars for their awareness of art in its historical context. “Priscilla’s paintings are like Monet’s,” she said. “Ann Lyne has her own really expressionistic stylist way of painting, with lots of gesture and movement, that references the greats from Degas to Matisse, Picasso and Diebenkorn. Lou Jordan’s latest paintings are reminiscent of Milton Avery in their color and subject matter. John McCarthy, who died in 2008, wrote about studying Matisse and his colors. He was interested in doing the things the early modern masters did, and he did a great job learning their lessons.”

Unlike the work by the masters, however, many pieces in Visions “can be purchased for less than the cost of having a poster framed,” Warren said. And they preserve the energy of blue skies and warm breezes, the resonant gratitude of artists who dwell in a confluence of memory and present moment.

Contributing artist Elizabeth Bradford called her work a meditation, “the meeting of a real place, my spiritual reaction to it, and the visual vocabulary I use for expressing that reaction. Sometimes that meditation is about stillness, and sometimes it is about overwhelming activity, both of which exist side by side in the natural world.”

“Spring by the Lake was literally painted when the very first natural wildflowers peeked up through the ground,” said contributor Priscilla Whitlock. “Imagine standing in the middle of a field with clovers, blue-eyed grasses, buttercups, ferns, and colored weeds intermingling at your feet. The brush work echoes the rhythm of the growth on the ground.”

Lou Jordan uses oil paints to likewise savor and spend time with his subjects. “When I spent time in Rome recently, I looked out our window and saw herb beds and an orchard,” he said. “Lemon trees were wrapped in white to protect them from cool weather as the lemons ripened. The beds were turned over for new plants, and early lettuce and herbs were visible in some. I painted this many times, and I walked through it and remembered it.”

“I grew up on a farm in Kentucky with a naturalist painter grandmother who took her grandchildren on long nature walks,” said Cary Brown, a contributor whose paintings pay homage to springtime birds in danger of extinction. “For instance, the Whippoorwill has almost completely disappeared because of compromised farmland and pesticides,” she said. “This was a bird many of us knew in our childhoods, a sound we went to sleep hearing.”

John McCarthy’s wife, Judy, sees gratitude in her late husband’s work, a translation of the joy we all feel when springtime finally arrives. “Winters were so cold and confining to him,” she wrote, “and this was the time of year he would venture out and take photos of new buds in the fading light. The colors were so glorious after the dark days of winter. He would have epiphany moments that were then transformed into works of art, and we would both see the world with new eyes.”

Les Yeux du Monde will host an artists’ luncheon on Wednesday, March 26.

Mary Buford Hitz was in her late 20s when Hurricane Camille’s devastating floods hit Nelson County on the night of August 19 1969, killing 153 people in a few hours and forever changing the mountain landscape.

Hitz, a Richmond native who now lives in Charlottesville, was staying on family property in Afton that late summer week. Five days after the skies cleared, she and her brother drove 10 miles south on the Blue Ridge Parkway to Reed’s Gap to survey the damage.

“The creek was back into its little confines, but 30′ from it, there would be a shed stuck in a tree, dead cows, farm equipment that just ended up there.”

She’s carried those sights and the stories of death and survival that emerged in the wake of the storm with her all her life. Last year, they became the framework for her first novel, Riding to Camille, self-published through Authorspress in Charlottesville.

“You never have the same sense of security that that kind of thing can’t happen once you’ve witnessed it happen,” she said of those days in the Blue Ridge. “It’s proof of the forces of nature that can strike with total randomness.”

Hitz has long been a writer, but never of fiction. When she and her husband, former CIA Inspector General Frederick Hitz, were living in Northern Virginia in the ’70s, she began freelancing for the Washington Post and later penned stories for the Richmond Times Dispatch and area magazines. In 2000, the University of Virginia Press published her biography of her mother, Elisabeth Scott Bocock, a “flawed but feisty” woman who pioneered historic preservation efforts in Richmond.

She wrote from life, from experience, from memory, so penning novels never occurred to her. “I don’t go around with plots fomenting in my brain,” she said. But the year her book on her mother was published, she was handed some characters who begged to be put on a page.

They were strangers, thrown together on a horsepacking trip through New Zealand’s Southern Alps. The trip was write-home-worthy in itself—Hitz tripped while leading a horse down a remote mountainside and broke her leg, requiring a rescue initiated with a call from a 40′ antenna erected in a sheep hut. But it was the people who captivated her: A gruff male outfitter estranged from his distant, cold wife; a young Swiss woman who seemed to have seized his attention; a collection of smart young travelers who banded together in the face of adversity.

She found herself imagining their backstories and the events that led to that trip full of tension and trouble. It was a natural step to set the unfolding of their imagined personal calamities against the backdrop of Camille, a disaster in a time and place so perfectly burned into her own memory.

“I didn’t really invent the story,” Hitz said. “The characters gave me the story.”

They came to life through a long writing process that led her to a residency at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts in Amherst, where she hunkered down for 11 days, getting herself “in a mood of catastrophe”—something she found was necessary before she could screw up the fortitude to write vividly about violent ends.

The result is the story of an unsuccessful marriage rocked by a sudden, passionate tryst just as the historic storm tears apart a group of horseback-riding tourists on a mountain outing. Woven in is Hitz’s own passion for horses, for histories, and for a landscape that, while achingly beautiful, can be a setting for destruction and death. Because as fascinating as she found the novelist’s task of filling in the blanks, what moves her most is still the true story underneath the plot.

“I wanted to make someone who reads it, who had no contact with Camille at all, understand that everything that happened to individuals in the book—the fictional characters—actually happened to somebody,” she said.

Each March, visiting and local literati of all ages and reading preferences fill Charlottesville for the annual Virginia Festival of the Book. History buffs and romance readers mingle with self-published writers and award-winning authors including John Grisham, Lois Lowry, and John Lewis.

Attendees have lots of choices to make during the five-day festival (March 19-23). Elaborate transportation routes are planned to get from one venue to the next and it’s a struggle to find a window to eat between author panels. Inevitably, there are sessions that slip through the cracks or hold a conflicting time slot. There are also the can’t-miss moments.

Sometimes obvious, sometimes buried deep in the schedule, these are the hidden gems sought by festival goers. The 2014 panels offer two such opportunities with authors who are especially notable for being offbeat and off the beaten path.

You know Chip Kidd. Perhaps not by name, but if you’ve ever picked up a copy of Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park, David Sedaris’ Naked, or Haruki Murakami’s IQ84, then you’ve held his work in your hands. You can get to know Kidd a bit better through a special StoryFest presentation on his recent book, Go: A Kidd’s Guide to Graphic Design.

As a graphic designer known for his book covers, Kidd is quirky and engaging. A focus on typography and visual puns imbues his designs with a distinct personality that is easily identifiable on coffee tables, bookstore displays, and library shelves around the world. Words can’t do justice to the designs, but a stunning amount of his work is collected in Chip Kidd: Book One: Work: 1986-2006. Go take a look; I’ll be holding your place here when you get back.

Infinitely versatile, Kidd is also a writer. Much like his book covers, Kidd’s two novels (The Cheese Monkeys and The Learners) are witty and colorful explorations of graphic design. Autobiographical in parts, with main characters who are practicing graphic designers, the novels are accessible and fun to read.

Taking a break from fiction, Kidd’s recent authorial stint led to the publication of a graphic design guide for children. Go: A Kidd’s Guide to Graphic Design features easy -to-understand explanations of the design process, samples from some of the modern design masters, and hands-on projects to try. The book’s Tumblr (gothebook.tumblr.com) even has a way to submit designs (your own or your child’s; no one has to know) created during these projects. This book—and really all of Kidd’s work—is meant to draw attention to the art form of graphic design and bring awareness to the design that goes into every aspect of our daily lives. Whether it’s a book cover, a gum wrapper, or a printed festival schedule, you’ll never look at the world the same after an encounter with Chip Kidd.

“Chip Kidd and Go: A Kidd’s Guide to Graphic Design” will be held on March 22 at 4pm in the Monroe Room at the Omni Hotel. The event is free and open to the public.

Off the beaten path

There are guidebooks to help you find the best jazz club in New Orleans or the most authentic pizza in Naples, and then there are books for travelers seeking the furthest corners of the world. Bradt travel guides are the latter, meant for adventurers—and armchair adventurers—but certainly not for your average ski bunny or beach bum planning an upcoming vacation. For example, new releases include guides to Borneo, Sudan, Jordan, and Zimbabwe.

In an ideal world, my bag would have been packed before I even finished writing that sentence, and I’d be on a plane to Harare by now. But that would mean missing Hilary Bradt’s Festival of the Book presentation, where she’ll share tales of her own travel adventures as well as her similarly daring efforts in forming Bradt Travel Guides Ltd.

Celebrating its 40th anniversary this year, the publishing company prints travel memoirs as well as adventure guides, including the founder’s breathtaking story of crossing Ireland on horseback. The theme that runs through all Bradt books is that of sustainable travel. For example, a popular series is on slow travel (similar to the slow food movement). All of the titles, though, are packed from cover to cover with helpful information, informed tips, and a uniquely engaging degree of the individual writer’s personality. The publisher also offers a Bradtpackers newsletter for readers interested in having these tantalizing travel tales delivered directly to their inbox.

Though Bradt’s wanderlust was born out of a deep love for Laurence Olivier and a theater mishap, her first travel guide was written while floating down the Amazon River. She seemingly hasn’t stopped adventuring, writing, leading tours, and publishing since. Thus far, she’s written 14 books and helped create an international community of adventurers who share her curiosity. Bradt will be sharing in person at “Wild Adventures and Extreme Publishing with Hilary Bradt,” moderated by Jeanne Siler on March 21 at 10am at a free panel in the City Council Chambers.

Share your favorite authors with us in the comments section below.

When FIREFISH Gallery co-curators Araxe Hajian and Sigrid Eilertson brainstormed concepts for their next collaborative project, they decided to flip the script. Rather than host a visual art show that invited verbal interpretation, they decided to ask visual artists to interpret Hajian’s short story “This is How You Open a Pomegranate.”

“I didn’t see this as an illustration of a story,” Hajian said. “I wanted to see how someone else would tell this story. We did it backward, not writing responses to art, but art as response to writing.”

Inspired in part by their new memberships with the Virginia Arts of the Book Center, Hajian and Eilertson chose 10 diverse local artists, including Eileen Butler, Chicho Lorenzo, Ken Nagakui, Julia Travers, Kate Hunter, Rose Brown, Suzanne Nelson, Frank Riccio, and Claudia Walpole to create new works that interpret the story.

“It’s a kaleidoscopic story, not plot driven, much more of an inner monologue,” said Hajian, who is Armenian-American. “A few artists I knew said ‘It’s so visual, I want to draw it.’”

At face value, “This is How You Open a Pomegranate” is the recollection of an American woman traveling with relief efforts to an Armenian village leveled by an earthquake. (Though the story is fiction, it takes place in Spitak, a real city devastated by a 1988 earthquake.) When the narrator finds a baby alive in the rubble, she forms an unexpected bond with the child and must decide whether to stay or leave.

In pottery, textiles, paintings, collage, multimedia, mosaics, and letterpress prints and art books, artists’ responses ranged from food imagery to scenes of objects built or broken. “They reminded me how we focus on what themes resonate emotionally, these ideas of being uprooted, of attachment and detachment, of loss and the concept of home,” said Hajian.

All the works are for sale to benefit the Armenia Tree Project, which plants trees in impoverished and deforested zones like Spitak. Though the gallery often hosts collaborative shows to benefit non-profits, “this is the first time we’ve interpreted an object of literature,” Eilertson said.

As a result of artistic interpretation, the facts of the story shifted, and the exhibit reads like a game of visual telephone. For example, one artist believed the infant was a boy, despite Hajian’s description of a baby girl.

Hajian herself interpreted the story three times, once through writing, once through textiles, and again in the compilation of a hand-bound, limited edition book cataloging the project. She saw firsthand how fiction suggests a story without committing to it, how language, like art, is a lens to the truth, not the truth itself.

“Even in real life, we don’t know how much we’re embellishing in our heads,” she said. “When I try to fact check my memory, I’m shocked by how much it morphs. Art morphs too.”

Eilertson, who also contributed to the show, said she painted an Armenian goddess that wound up looking Brazilian.

“But it’s O.K. It’s all art therapy. It turns into something you don’t intend it to be,” she said.

Art writers use words to interpret meaning, to tease out themes like multicolored threads. If you’re reading this, you’re interpreting, too, contributing to the weave. And when you look back, meta-magic will happen. You’ll remember a story about this story, a fiction about artists narrating fiction about what may or may not be a pomegranate.

When the truth dissolves in extrapolation like this, we all become art-makers. As Eilertson said, “I think that’s just what happens in art. Things become bigger than themselves.”

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.

Angelo 220 E. Main St. “New Work: Marsh and Ocean,” paintings by Robin Braun. 5-7:30pm.

Bozart 211 W. Main St. Selected works by Julia Lesnichy. 5:30-7pm.

The Bridge PAI 209 Monticello Rd. A preview of the “Habitat City” on display for the public. 5-8pm.

CitySpace 100 Fifth St. NE. “Youth Art Month,” featuring artwork by students from Albemarle County Public Schools in the CitySpace Gallery. Artwork by Warren Craghead in the PCA office. 5:30-7pm.

C’Ville Arts 118 E. Main Street. “Adventures in Felting” by Karen Shapcott. 6-8pm.

Fellini’s #9 200 W. Market St. “da Vinci Meets Warhol” by Jack Graves III. 5:30-7pm.

FIREFISH Gallery 108 Second St. NW. “This is How You Open a Pomegranate,” a collaborative exhibit. 5:30-8pm.

The Garage 250 First St. N. “Scenes from Lake Elster,” photographs by William Connally. 5:30-7:30pm.

Jefferson-Madison Regional Library 201 East Market St. “Landscape as Character,” paintings by Tom Tartaglino. 5-7pm.

McGuffey Art Center 201 Second St. NW. “Planets & Plants,” featuring ceramic wall reliefs by Scott Supraner in the Sarah B. Smith Gallery; “Paper: On, Of,” a group exhibit of works on paper in the Lower Hall Galleries; and “Charlottesville In 2 Dimensions: Bridges” in the Upper Hall Galleries. 5:30-7:30pm.

Mudhouse 213 W. Main St. “Spring Flowers,” oil on canvas works by Joanna TYKA. 6-8pm.

Patina Antiques 1112 E. High St. 5-7pm.  Oil paintings by Page Peyton.

Second Street Gallery 115 Second St. SE. “Expecting Reality,” a photography exhibit organized by guest curator Jon-Phillip Sheridan. 5-7:30pm.

Telegraph 110 Fourth St. NE. “Plastic Memories” featuring prints by Brandon Baker, Caldwell Tanner, Lottie Pencheon, and Penny Candy Studios. 5-10pm.

Warm Springs Gallery 105 Third St. NE. “Artista and Elephants,” featuring oil paintings by Lindsley Matthews, acrylic paintings by Beth Hamerschlag, and photographs by Erwin Baumfaulk. 6-8pm.

WriterHouse 508 Dale Ave. “Tilted,” paintings and drawings by Chris Butler. 5:30-7:30pm.

WVTF and Radio IQ Studio Gallery 216 W. Water St. “Feast,” an exhibit of food-related artwork as part of the New City Arts Forum. 5-7pm.

OTHER EXHIBITS

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 Road. “Visions of Spring” featuring Elizabeth Bradford, Cary Brown, Lou Jordan, Ann Lyne, John McCarthy, Priscilla Whitlock.

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

Pigment 1229 Harris St. #13. “Wolf Songs: and other tales from the desert,” featuring mixed media work by Lauren Stangil.

Piedmont Virginia Community College 501 College Dr. “Of Cabbages and Kings,” oil paintings by Cynthia Burke.

Thomas Jefferson Memorial Church 717 Rugby Rd. “World in Focus” by Jennifer Jamison.

“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.