Tag: Fine Arts

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.

Feel free to slurp, I’m a big fan of slurping,” said Alp Ilsin of Budala Pottery in Belmont. So I slurp. Loudly.

We drink a lot of tea out of exquisitely crafted pottery—tea cups or mugs, some with handles, some without. We drink so much tea I have to sheepishly excuse myself a few times during the interview before my bladder explodes.

Ilsin pours more tea from his one-of-a-kind teapot into one of his signature teacups, and it occurs to me that he gets to eat and drink out of beautiful, hand-crafted pottery on a daily basis.

“There’s no way I can drink out of a regular mug now, right? It’s such a repulsive experience for me, I would rather just not have anything,” he said, laughing. “I don’t know how people necessarily do it. But at the same time, I didn’t think about it until I got into it.”

Ilsin is part of a new generation of local ceramic artists drawn to a scene that began in the mid-’70s. After decades of being consigned to craft markets, pottery is catching on again, in part because it’s an age-old practice that intersects with our everyday lives. You can call it a craft or an art, a skill or a medium. The potters I interviewed for this story learn from and teach one another. Their work is turned into vessels their friends eat and drink from. They compose forms from spit, clay, water, and fire.

“Pottery is a lifestyle as much as it is anything else. You’re not going to get rich doing that but it can be very satisfying,” Tom Clarkson said. “And I like the tradition of the village potter, you know, making pots for people as favors, for friends to use.”

Clarkson, who is well-known as a kind of father-of-pottery in town, opened his studio in 1978 and then began teaching ceramics at Piedmont Virginia Community College. His pottery proteges include Ilsin and Suzanne Crane of Mud Dauber Pottery in Earlysville, among others.

Along with Nelson County pottery guru Kevin Crowe of Tye River Pottery and potter Nan Rothwell of Nan Rothwell Pottery in Faber, Clarkson has been here since the inception of the present day potter community in Charlottesville and the surrounding areas, back when such a community was non-existent. As I dug for the roots of the pottery scene, nearly everyone I spoke to asked me if I had spoken to Crowe yet. If Clarkson is the teaching father of the community and Rothwell its mother, then Crowe is the high priest. He arrived in Nelson County in 1976 at a time when people wanted to get back to the earth, back to living off the land and self-sustaining.

“I wasn’t very interested in being self-sufficient,” Crowe said. “I was interested in making pots, and the only way I could afford to do that was to buy a piece of land really cheap and build my own house and studio, and I didn’t know how to do either one of those, but when you’re young, you have got this beautiful nexus of complete ignorance and overconfidence.”

So he built a house. And a studio. It took four years, during two of which he lived in a tent on the property and went three-and-a-half without electricity. And this was the guy who was not very interested in communing with the earth.

“I think that regardless of who we are, where we are, every artist is looking for their voice, and you already have it,” Crowe said. “You need a certain amount of time in solitude to hear that voice and work with it, and that’s another challenge in the digital age, because we’re so available that it’s difficult to create a space in which you’re uninterrupted and can actually be comfortable being alone with yourself.”

Back to the land

When I went to visit him at his home, Crowe’s beautiful earthy mugs, plates, and bowls lined his kitchen shelves.

“I like the idea of making objects that will support the ritual of sharing a meal together,” said Crowe. “And in that conversation about the relationship we have with each other, about what’s on the plate, all those things are a byproduct of actually slowing down to be attentive to the experiences that we’re having at the moment, almost like civil disobedience in this vast age.”

The potters’ everyday use of their own work makes it clear that pottery is different from many other art forms. Over the past four decades, Crowe’s property in Nelson County has certainly given him solitude and the space to create, but it has also given him a site for his kiln.

Firing the kiln only happens twice a year, but when it does, it is a momentous occasion. Most potters fire a few hundred pieces at a time, but Crowe’s wood-fired kiln holds a couple thousand pieces of pottery which take 10 days to load. The firing itself can last eight days, but the real fun begins when the crew shows up around the fourth day.

“For us, stacking the kiln is just as important as throwing the pots,” Crowe said. “When we throw them and they’re ready to go in the kiln, they’re only barely half done. Everything is contingent on the stacking and the firing. And in my case, it’s really contingent on having a really good crew.”

Crowe’s crew ranges in age from 18 to 73, and now after his 25th firing, about 60 percent of the crew come from the Charlottesville area. The process requires eight people, two at a time working six-hour shifts. The firing is meticulously planned so that each pot interacts with the flame, but at the same time, because each piece of burning wood is different, so will each pot be unique and impossible to duplicate.

“You have to surrender to something larger than yourself when you’re firing a wood kiln,” Crowe said. “You’re firing everybody else’s pots and not just yours. There’s an element of surrender, there’s an element of magic and surprise, but all that is also based on careful planning, careful stacking, and understanding what a combustion cycle is.”

Here the world slows down to tending to the kiln and spending six hours with one other person while the rest of the world sleeps. The world created by Kevin Crowe and his crew during that week of firing is about delicious vegetarian food, laughter, renewing relationships, and making pots.

“What unites everybody is the pots, the firing. So you have younger potters starting out on their aesthetic journeys talking to people who have been down that road a long time, and I think it’s really great for the younger potters to see we older potters still as excited as they are about the possibilities,” Crowe said. “That that creative process matures and it gets richer but it doesn’t really wane much. That desire to go back and get it right will keep you coming back to the kiln time after time.”

Potters value this ethos of sharing between generations in a way that perhaps other types of visual artists do not.

“I have friends who are painters who say, ‘Painters don’t get together and share recipes or talk about places to sell,’ and I think the overwhelming ethic among potters is ‘get it right and pass it on,’” said Crowe. “Because everything that I do is the result of having received information and techniques from the old ones that are long gone, and passing that on to the next generation is my responsibility.”

Rather than hoard their personal recipes for success, potters of that founding generation in Charlottesville truly want to spread their knowledge around.

On a weeknight in late November, local filmmaker Brian Wimer gathered a large group together at the Al-Hamraa restaurant in the Ix Building to share his vision for the future of the space.

The Ix is a large complex south of Downtown which has housed dozens of business and art projects since the original Frank Ix and Sons fabric factory closed in 1999.

Wimer, along with arts patrons Beatrix Ost and Ludwig Kuttner (who is one of the owners of the building) and sculptor Christan Breeden, hope to transform a large part of the space into an art park.

While the idea of a publicly accessible, privately funded art park is a laudable one, I had a great many reservations about the idea. Foremost is the concern about how the project might affect the surrounding community. All around the country, art initiatives have been used as the vanguard of gentrification in impoverished neighborhoods, appealing to higher-income transplants and driving up property values while driving out long-time residents.

Intentionally or otherwise, could the same thing happen in Charlottesville? Wimer’s presentation repeatedly cited projects like the Burning Man festival in Nevada and the High Line in Manhattan, but both of those projects cater only to the interests of the wealthy. What about people who don’t have as much time and money to devote to the arts, like many living in the nearby neighborhoods?

It’s clear that Wimer has his heart in the right place—at the meeting, he repeatedly cited the need for a space that was not based on commerce, noting that “the Downtown Mall works very well, but if you’re not paying, then you’re not necessarily always welcome. And you don’t necessarily always have a place to sit down.” The attendants of the meeting were almost entirely people of privilege—the group was racially diverse, but almost all of the attendees had a college education or higher, and were all already heavily involved in Charlottesville’s arts community.

A month after the meeting, I sat down with Wimer to discuss those concerns, as well as his broader vision for the project, and what form things had taken in the interim.

Wimer, tall, bearded, and wild-haired, comes off as a cross between a motivational speaker, a cheerleader for the arts, and a madman. But beneath his talkative, enthusiastic demeanor lies many insights about how the arts can break barriers and build communities, and he cites numerous examples from his extensive travels around the world.

“Each of us have different notions of what the place that we want to live in is gonna look like, feel like, act like,” said Wimer. “It’s our dream place—some of us have to move away to find that. But a lot of us have ties here, and say, ‘When is that place gonna happen, the place that everyone’s been talking about?’”

Kuttner is donating a majority of the vacant property on the Ix site to the project, which now has a steering committee of five members. But despite the free rent, the project will still have many expenses. “Our funding expectations are still somewhat nebulous,” Wimer said. “It could be anything from $40,000 to $40 million, depending upon the scope of what we intend to happen.”

Wimer hopes the project will be in alignment with other current plans for the city such as the Create Charlottesville arts study, the Strategic Investment Area development plan, the proposed re-design of the Avon Street Bridge, and the talk of “daylighting” the Pollock’s branch underground stream.

“We’ll want to give an honorarium to the artists who are involved,” Wimer said. “We’re going to need money for the resources to build. All of it’s going to cost something. But we’re trying to see what’s that balance, because I don’t want it to be that you can only have art and culture if you have $40 million.”

He also hopes to involve local schools, ranging from the public schools to PVCC to UVA to private high schools. “Really, all it takes is the combined will of enough people,” he said.

At the same time, he also hopes to find local artists whose creative vision can guide the project, give it coherence, and creative credibility. “We didn’t want to create something that was designed by committee,” he said. “Because I think that the role of artists is to provide vision. Artists provide a vision that is outside our scope of knowledge right now.”

Wimer said one potential idea involves bringing in picnic tables and asking the community to help paint them, with the hopes that a new lunch spot will make the space inviting.

“If we surveyed the immediate residents of the surrounding property, the first thing on the list would probably not be, ‘what we need is an art park,’” said Wimer. “So we have to kind of start from saying, ‘we’re creating something that is not on Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs.’”

Wimer also plans to hold regular events to keep the space active and busy, rather than vacant and “sketchy.”

“Hopefully, with respect and ownership, the community will self-police this space, to a certain extent,” he said.

Wimer said his collaborators have also cited concerns about local homeless occupying the building, but he sees that as just another opportunity for community outreach. “God forbid, there might be some homeless people who have some incredible skills!” he said. “And it isn’t like, ‘let’s put them to work,’ but let’s allow them to utilize their skills in a community-building effort.”

Wimer is candid about how he fits into the equation. “I come from a privileged place, and I have a lot of opportunities, and I believe that I can do anything,” he said. “But I’m a privileged white guy in America. I can believe it, because I’ve already got several steps ahead.”

Seeing the project through holds personal value for Wimer. “We can live in a world of fear, and just build a wall around yourself and protect that, but that’s not a community that I want to live in, and I don’t think that’s a community that’s healthy.”

Share your suggestions for the Ix building in the comments section below.

Gift-giving season inspires the creativity in all of us, though Pinterest DIY fails are a painful reality for most. Discover talented local crafters at the C’ville Holiday Craftacular, a two-day show featuring handmade gift items by regional artisans. Unique items from hand-woven chainmail and forged jewelry to homegrown herbal beauty products and handbags, as well as children’s clothes and toys will be for sale. A portion of all proceeds will benefit Piedmont Council for the Arts so you can support local small business and engage the creative arts—no Mod Podge or paintbrushes required.

Friday 12/13 & Saturday 12/14. Free, Friday 10am and Saturday 9am. CitySpace, 100 Fifth St., NE. 971-2787.

The “Dean Dass: New Paintings and Works on Paper” exhibition on view at Les Yeux du Monde offers the double pleasure of Dass’ luscious landscapes paired with his more mystical media-rich works on paper.

A professor of printmaking at UVA, Dass took up landscape painting in 1994 while on sabbatical in New Hampshire. He was drawn to the austerity of the “lonely” northern landscape, an affinity that continues to this day in his paintings of Virginia, Ireland, and Lapland.

Dass seems drawn to transitions of seasons and times of day and he’s very good at conveying them. He paints places (beaches, marshes, riverbanks) where color is naturally restrained. Umbers, grays, lavenders, and olives are his hues of choice, and yet Dass is not shy when it comes to water and light. His blue is dazzling and dead-on in “Mechums River.” And so too are his reflections on a wintery pond, and the peachy glow of the rising sun lining the horizon of “Allendale Pond.”

The paintings are abstract compositions of brushstrokes, which coalesce into a recognizable scene at a distance. “Caherciveen” is a blurry, nearly non-objective work that somehow resolves itself into a seascape that could only be Ireland. “Lake Michigan” is basically an abstract study of gray lines, and in “Blue Hole” Dass blocks out snow and rocks using a dynamic pattern of jagged splotches of pigment in white and russet.

Dass is a master of atmospheric effects, which add mood and veracity. “Stream Above the Upper Moormans” captures one of those moments that is both crystalline and hazy, with sunlight filtering through misty air above the river.

These are contemplative works evoking stillness, quietude, and a reverence for nature that recalls 19th century notions of the sublime. But unlike 19th century artists who focused on majestic scenery, Dass chooses ordinary scenes of nature available to any of us if we wander into the woods, pass by a marsh, or stroll on a beach.

His lyrical approach draws attention to the beauty and numinous quality dwelling in serene, often overlooked, corners. Looking at these works, one understands there is more going on here than just a beautifully painted landscape. I think of Emerson and Thoreau and am reminded of the great art historian Barbara Novack’s thesis concerning the deep spiritual significance of the land for 19th century Americans and how, in essence, without a religious art tradition in America, landscape filled that role with contemporary artists acting as interpreters of and conduits to the divine.

At the same time that he was producing these potent odes to nature, Dass was also working in a more stylized direction with his “Clouds” series. Begun in February 2007 when he was in Finland on the bleak Russian border, these works on paper harken back to his earlier prints. Indeed, Dass said, “They are what have happened to the prints. They’re a continuation of something I’ve done ever since the ’80s.”

Using kaolin (white porcelain clay), marble dust, and titanium white pigments, he applies what he describes as a “heavy mineral slurry” between layers of the delicate Japanese papers to build up the surface and add texture. He also uses inks to add diffused color—the “memory of a color”—flowing in different, unexpected ways “much like sediment flowing in a stream,” and creating the curious radiating cloud shapes. Dass thinks of them as creature-like and has said they are about love spreading in all directions.

While you or I might see two distinct bodies of work with different styles, media and technique in his clouds and landscapes, Dass acknowledges this dichotomy, but maintains that the two are closely tied. “It’s always been the question that everyone asks, that I ask myself, even,” said Dass. “What am I doing, what are these two things going on? But formally they’re coming together more, though that’s not something I focus on.”

From Dass’ perspective the two subjects are natural choices. “The clouds take place in the heavens and the landscapes are on earth that’s really how I think about it,” he said. “The two kinds of painting—clouds and landscapes—keep outflanking any definition of what I think they are or are doing. I think they are slippery categories.”

Despite the stylistic and technical differences of the work, gallery director Lyn Warren noted a link: “Even though Dean works in so many different media, from oil to prints, sculpture, and books, they all have something similar. I think it’s the quality of light, something evanescent maybe. I find it interesting how he almost wants to reverse certain properties: his clouds are earthy, made with minerals. They have more weight, symbolically, visually and physically than the paintings. Yes, they’re on paper, but they’re put on panel so that makes them heavier. The paintings end up looking more ethereal than the clouds do.”

On a chilly Friday in late November, Ross McDermott of the Charlottesville Mural Project gathered a large group on the railroad crossing at First Street to dedicate the organization’s newest mural, designed by local artist Kaki Dimock.

The mural’s theme is the Rivanna River, a subject originally proposed by Rose Brown of the organization StreamWatch, who contacted the Mural Project with the idea.

“We knew we had to find an artist that would do a good job of representing the life that might be represented in the Rivanna, if you could go underwater and look at it,” McDermott said, “and I immediately thought of Kaki Dimock—she’s the perfect artist. She usually involves the animal kingdom, and often underwater scenes as well.” Development on the project took two years, and was sponsored by StreamWatch, the Rivanna Conservation Society, and the Rivanna River Basin Commission. “Public art really takes the whole community to make it happen,” McDermott said. “This mural was funded by a Kickstarter campaign, that raised $11,000—we were only going for $8,000, but we raised 11. And we had over 150 people from the community give money to support this mural. So this really is a group effort from our community.”

Facing the train tracks on the back of a Pilates classroom may not seem like the ideal spot for a large public mural, but the First Street crossing, located two blocks south of the mall between ACAC and South Street does get a lot of heavy foot traffic—after the dedication, I spotted three different acquaintances who happened to be passing by. Its location, and sufficient distance from the Historic Downtown zone, frees it from needing the approval of the Board of Architectural Review, who have clashed with McDermott over specifics in the design of past murals. Matt Pamer’s 2012 design for “Kingdom Animalia,” at West Main Street and Sixth Street, underwent multiple revisions before approval. Dimock’s is the fifth public mural for McDermott’s project, and seventh overall, if you include the two recent murals at Buford Middle School and St. Anne’s Belfield.

Dimock is indeed a great choice of artist for the subject. She’s well-known in the local art community, often working in ink and watercolor, and her work is more masterful than it might appear at first glance. Rather than perspectival representation, Dimock extrapolates from a child’s style of drawing landscapes. A pseudo-cutaway with a river basin at the bottom and the elements drawn in proportion to their significance rather than their visual size are executed with attention to detail and a composition that recalls pre-Renaissance European religious and iconographic painting. “The animal world is drawn in huge, out-of-perspective format,” Dimock said, “because I think that’s how important the animal world is.”

The central design element of the mural depicts the shad species of fish, which recently returned to the Rivanna after the Woolen Mills Dam was removed in 2007. “Shad are a bellweather species,” Dimock said. “They only live in waters that are really clean, well-oxygenated, the right chilly temperature, moving at the right speed. So it’s an important indicator of our success in restoring any given river, whether the shad want to come back and live there. In this image, the shad are back and the other fish are welcoming them there. You’ll also see that there’s a giant squirrel celebrating above Monticello, there’s a squirrel driving a tractor, there’s a frog eating a donut. The design really evolved over these incredible conversations with people who know about the river, and know about the species that live in the river, and then we took great creative liberties with that.”

Like so many other local art projects, the mural also received assistance from developer Gabe Silverman, who passed away last month. “[Gabe] was a longtime supporter of the mural project,” McDermott said. “He donated a free space for us to paint this mural, off-site, because we couldn’t paint it right next to the railroad tracks. We’re very grateful to him and his support for the arts in Charlottesville.”

Because the location is so close to the train tracks, it took a bit of convincing. “We had to work closely with Buckingham Branch Railroad, who at first didn’t like our presence on the tracks,” McDermott said. “But we worked with them, and we’re thankful for their cooperation.”

The project was also covered by an insurance policy under the city’s Neighborhood Development Services thanks to Jim Tolbert. Blue Ridge Builders Supply donated Benjamin Moore paints at a discounted price. “It was painted on a cloth called parachute cloth, and then basically glued to the wall in one day,” McDermott said. “There’s four long panels, and we sliced it up and pieced it back together, with the help of some good installers.” The initial installation date had to be postponed because the weather on the initial date made it too cold to apply the glue.

On November 22 McDermott and Dimock led a dedication ceremony for the mural, along with several representatives and sponsors of the project including Robbi Savage of the volunteer group the Rivanna Conservation Society, Marvin Moss of the state organization the Rivanna River Basin Commission, and David Hannah of StreamWatch, all of whom spoke at the dedication. In addition to many of McDermott and Dimock’s friends and supporters from the arts community, there was a surprise appearance by a class from the nearby Village School, whose students brought handmade signs bearing pro-environmentalist messages about water conservation.

See more by the Charlottesville Mural Project.