Tag: Fine Arts

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.

Local artist Victoria Long has curated and participated in art shows all over the world since graduating from UVA in 2006. Long returned to Charlottesville in 2011, and while she’s actively made and shown work since then, this month’s “Surprise” marks the first gallery show she’s assembled here in many years.

“Surprise” opened on January 3 at The Bridge PAI and features work by Long and fellow local artist Julia Sharpe, as well as erstwhile Charlottesville residents Patrick Costello and Roger Williams, Richmond’s Travis Robertson, New York artists Mike Perry and Lief Low-Beer, and Chicagoan Ellen Nielsen.

Each artist is exhibiting a three-dimensional sculptural object, and a corresponding art print in an edition of 50. The prints won’t be on sale at the gallery—instead, a group of bicyclist volunteers from Community Bikes will travel through the city on January 17-19 handing out sets of the prints to unsuspecting passers-by.

The event is similar to “Bike and Bake,” a Valentine’s Day event organized by Community Bikes members for several years (in which Costello has been heavily involved), but the idea is unusual for a gallery-based art show.

According to Long, “The idea for ‘Surprise’ was inspired by projects that I had heard about, taking place in other locations such as Portland, [Oregon], Croatia, or Berlin, where there were similar bicycle-based distribution of prints happening, and the idea behind those projects was to take art out of the gallery and into the streets.”

She emphasized that the goal of this distribution method is to be unpredictable.

“We want it to reach a variety of communities throughout the city,” said Long. “For example we don’t want to just focus on, say, the University or the Downtown Mall area. The hope, of all us behind ‘Surprise,’ is that handing out, distributing the prints in this way will create an unexpected interruption in daily life that leads to an unexpected aesthetic experience for the recipient.”

Inspired by the Paris Uprising of 1968 in which artists made screen prints for political protest, Long said that, “While ‘Surprise’ isn’t political, in an overt sense, I think that the act of taking art out of a commercial context, and bringing it to the streets, is in some way a political gesture.”

“Another inspiration is the work of the Bread and Puppet Theater in Vermont,” said Long. Costello apprenticed there in 2009. “Part of their manifesto is ‘cheap art,’” Long explained. “Art that everyone can have, making prints simply, using woodblock technique.”

As for the work itself, Long’s taste as a curator is evident. She favors colorful, simple, and accessible art, that is also conceptually thoughtful and well-crafted.

“Mike Perry is an artist and graphic designer out of Brooklyn,” said Long. “He plays a lot with color and flat, repeated shapes. This assemblage is a series of wooden shingles that are painted in a variety of colors.”

Robertson’s work also features flat, screenprinted woodcuts in a friendly, loose, cartoonish style.

Nielsen’s piece configures a giant pile of colorful yarn, entitled “Mammoth.” According to the artist, “‘Mammoth’ was about making a cute and benign craft object into something grotesque and monumental.”

Long’s piece is also made of yarn, wrapped around her trademark sculptural mountain shapes. “It’s a way of exploring the intersection of craft and fine art,” Long said. “Picking up the thread dropped by feminist artists in the 1970s.”

Costello’s sculpture is a phallic pedestal made out of plastic flowers. “I made it from flowers that I got out of the trash cans at Holly Memorial Gardens,” he said. “They have all those fake flowers on all the graves. I was really interested in how people use flowers to become this more permanent marker of someone who’s passed away; and then those flowers too, have a kind of life, so I was interested in taking them and bringing them back and repurposing them and giving them another life.”

“The work kind of draws inspiration from a number of things, it’s not just about the flowers,” said Costello.

Low-Beer’s work, according to Costello, is “playful, and about form, but it’s also really rigorous. It’s the best work, I love his work.”

As I interviewed the artists, Williams was drilling a hole in a marbled book cover that he had bound, in preparation for the show. He explained, “I’m studying book conservation in school right now [at West Dean College in West Sussex, UK], and so I’m always thinking of these codex objects and their narrative, and their protection.”

Sharpe, one of the best artists currently working in Charlottesville, works in wax and paper, layering thick encaustic wax and ink illustration. Her dark themes and muted color palette may seem like a strange fit for the otherwise colorful show, but the attention to texture and detail make her work at home among her fellow contributors.

Long hopes that the unusual method of distribution via bicycle will help this artwork reach “people who might not feel comfortable walking into an art gallery, or who might not find themselves at The Bridge.”

“I think that’s important,” said Long. “Because I’d like to think that everyone can enjoy something unexpected.”

The “Surprise” sculptures will be on display at The Bridge PAI’s gallery space through January 31, and maps of the distribution routes will be made available at the gallery and through the show’s website at surpriseshow.tumblr.com.

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. “Maps of an Azure Odyssey” by Judy McLeod. 5-7:30pm.

BON 100 W South St. First Fridays After Party with music by Money Cannot Be Eaten and Ears to the Ground Family. 8:30pm.

BozART Gallery 211 West Main Street. “Piedmont Pastelists” featuring work by pastel artists from Central Virginia. 6pm.

The Bridge PAI 209 Monticello Rd. “SURPRISE,” an exhibit of sculptures and corresponding prints by various artists. 5-9pm.

Chroma Projects 418 E. Main St. “Molt,” the final show for Chroma Projects at its gallery space, in the Front and Passage Galleries with “Song of the Cicadas,” a film by Richard Knox Robinson, in the Black Box Gallery. 5:30-7:30pm.

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

The Garage 250 First St. N. “Being in Love,” new paintings by J. Joy Meyer. 5:30-7:30pm.

Les Fabriques 206 E. Water St. “Landscapes and Botanicals in Fabrics and Thread” by Janice Walker. 5-9pm.

McGuffey Art Center 201 Second St. NW. “Abstract Visions” by Margaret Embree in the Sarah B. Smith Gallery; New Members’ Show in Lower and Upper Hall Galleries. 5:30-7:30pm.

New Dominion Book Shop 404 East Main St. New works by watercolor artist Blake Hurt. 5:30 to 7:30.

Second Street Gallery 115 Second St. SE. “When You Were Here Before” by Julian Forrest in the Main Gallery and “Still Waters Run Deep” by Genesis Chapman in the Dove Gallery. 5-7:30pm.

WriterHouse 508 Dale Ave. “Images From Within” by Lee Alter and her students. 5:30-7:30pm.

WVTF and Radio IQ Studio Gallery 216 W. Water St. “Big Big Surprise,” collage and drawings by Mara Sprafkin. 5-7pm.

OTHER EXHIBITS

Boutique Boutique 411 E. Main St. “The Art of Private Devotion: Mexican Folk Retablos.”

CitySpace 100 Fifth St. NE. An exhibit about “Create Charlottesville: A Cultural Plan for Charlottesville/Albemarle.”

Fralin Museum of Art at the University of Virginia 155 Rugby Rd. A retrospective of paintings by Émilie Charmy.

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

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. “Painted Violins: A Benefit for the CHS Orchestra” featuring work by fifteen artists.

Telegraph 110 4th St NE. “Face Value,” an exhibit of portraits by various artists.

Warm Springs Gallery 105 Third St. NE. “Small Works for the Holidays,” a group show.