Tag: Fine Arts

“Perhaps we aren’t being controversial enough,” Steve Taylor, the director of Second Street Gallery, joked during a recent interview after explaining that no one had walked out of a show in a huff recently.

Beneath the joke lay the inherent tension in Taylor’s job: Second Street’s mission for the past 40 years has been to bring contemporary art to the people at no cost. The task involves keeping a nonprofit board engaged and motivated, raising an operating budget, selecting exhibitions that appeal to the general public in a small Virginia city, and attracting the work of cutting edge artists from around the world without a huge budget and major art market as bait.

“We show work that you wouldn’t otherwise see,” Taylor explained. “Part of our job is not just to open eyes but to open minds. . . If somebody says, ‘I hate contemporary art,’ I’ll say, ‘Well what kind of art do you like and why?’ I’m not going to try to convince them to like something they don’t like . . . You can’t convince people to like things, but you can open their minds to the idea behind it.”

Second Street was founded as Central Virginia’s first artist-run alternative art space on February 11, 1973 by a group of artists and academics searching for a place to show their work where survival did not depend on making sales. The gallery, one of the longest surviving nonprofit organizations in the nation focused solely on the art and ideas of the time, has held 10 to 15 shows per year for the past four decades, approximately 500 exhibitions of painting, photography, and installations in total.

While the organization’s mission has remained remarkably stable over that period, the times they have a-changed. The gallery has moved three times, before finding a permanent home in 2003 at 115 Second St. where they now share a building created specifically for the gallery, and for fellow arts nonprofits Light House and Live Arts. Downtown has gone from a little-used sleepy corner of the city to its thriving cultural center. And the fashion sense of Second Street’s board of directors has, well, um, altered.

“When we look at the photograph of the founders of Second Street Gallery in 1973, it’s like they are dressed in period costume, and have just come from a Jefferson Airplane concert. Perhaps they have,” said Dean Dass, a local artist and an honorary board member at Second Street. “It is also like they have just come from a Vietnam War protest. Perhaps they have. The founding of Second Street Gallery in 1973 has to be seen as part of a worldwide movement of the creation of cooperatives and alternative spaces.”

As a UVA third year who has interned at another Downtown gallery, Chroma Projects, for the past three years, I have been actively involved in the Charlottesville art world since I arrived from Dallas. I found First Fridays during my first months of school and by last summer I had announced my intention to become an art curator, much to my parents’ chagrin. Whenever I want to feel close to the big city art scene I left behind, or when someone asks me about the local art scene, I usually direct them to Second Street, because it democratizes art. It knocks art off of its metaphoric, elevated pedestal, bringing world class exhibitions into an approachable, intimate space.

The gallery is a place where people can interact, view, question, and experience the art and ideas of our moment without the pressure to buy something and without looking over your shoulder at an NYU grad student with French eyeglass frames. It isn’t even 10′ from a bus stop on Water Street.

A local artist in his own right (painter and photographer), a member of McGuffey Art Center, and a past board member of Second Street, Taylor knows the mission of his gallery is to instigate a conversation, not to make money. And, in some ways, he feels the best way to gauge his performance is to look at the faces of the people who see his exhibitions. Nonplussed? No good. Wide-eyed? Right on.

“Well I love a show with technical bravado and ones that catch you off guard and make you think. I think that’s what we do. Hopefully we are a bit of a visual feast when we can be. But, when we can be visual for the soul, that is when we do our best work,” he said.

Take the Daniel Canogar show “Reboot,” which exhibited in March of 2012. Second Street volunteers had to clean up after the gallery’s annual family day, which saw 350 people in the space; take down a previous exhibition; and transform the place into a light-proof box to showcase the Spanish artist’s magical installations of light projected over ghostly forms created from 70 pounds of multicolored computer wires, purchased and scrounged locally.

The results were worth the 460 hours of volunteer time logged during the monumental six-day effort, since visitation doubled from a monthly average of 600 to close to 1,200 people. It also attracted strong financial support from the Charlottesville Area Community Foundation and a host of individual donors.

Children and adults viewed the Canogar show on various intellectual levels. “It was like a magic garden for them talking about fairies and fireflies. And later, we had a group of older men talking about chaos theory and brain synapses,” Taylor said.

Not every show is a smash hit, though, and some are openly disliked.

“We don’t shy away from that. Not everyone is going to love every show. I don’t love every show. Some shows are more easy to access,” Taylor said.

Anne Slaughter, an early board member at Second Street and a founding member of the McGuffey Art Center, attended the gallery’s opening night, a proper vantage point from which to evaluate the success of an idea she watched evolve into a pillar of the arts community she loves.

“It has survived some very lean times financially. A lot of galleries close. But it has maintained its quality. It has always maintained its national character,” she said. “It’s quite an accomplishment.”

Dream category

If you thought the Oscars were out of reach, think again. The Virginia Film Festival is offering a chance to get in the running for your own Oscar prize. The glitz, the glam, and an abundance of Hollywood-inspired dishes crafted by Glass Haus Kitchen come out at this year’s fourth annual Oscar Experience: Charlottesville. The night features raffle prizes, a silent auction, and of course the star-studded competition in high-def. So be sure to don your best celebrity look, because the paparazzi are ruthless on that red carpet.

Sunday 2/24 $45, 7pm. The Paramount Theater, 215 E. Main St., Downtown Mall. 979-1333.

The butterfly of “Becoming the Butterfly,” The Fralin Museum’s current exhibition of etchings and lithographs by James Abbott McNeill Whistler refers to the stylized butterfly that Whistler used to sign his work and the exhibition. Curated by Emilie Johnson, the show provides a succinct yet effective window into Whistler’s evolution as an artist. This is the first of two shows at the museum focusing on the American 19th century master’s prints (through April 28). The second (opening April 30), will feature portraits.

Born in Lowell, Massachusetts in 1834, Whistler began studying art when he was 9 in St. Petersburg, Russia, where his father, an eminent civil engineer, was employed by the Moscow-St. Petersburg Railway. Following the death of his father when Whistler was 15, the family returned to America.

While attending his father’s alma mater, West Point, Whistler was an indifferent student in all but drawing and did so badly in chemistry, that he was eventually dismissed. Thereafter, he worked for the United States Coast and Geodetic Survey in the drawing department, where he learned etching.

In 1855, Whistler went to Paris to study with Charles-Gabriel Gleyre. He became friends with Gustave Courbet, Manet, and Degas, and was exposed to Japanese art as it was just coming onto the radar screens of Western artists. This particular aesthetic, with its conservative palette, flattened space, and overall restraint, would prove to have a profound influence on his later work. In 1859, Whistler moved to England where he remained, for the most part, until his death in 1903.

Eight Whistler etchings are exhibited at The Fralin, together with three by artists who influenced him: Rembrandt, Charles Meryon, and Seymour Haden. His prints from 1858-59 are models of precise, unsentimental reportage.

The woman seated in the field, a parasol half shading her face from “En Plein Soleil” (1858), reveals the influence of his realist friend, Courbet. It also provides a wonderful example of Whistler’s dexterity of line: the tightly controlled hatches that describe the woman give way to free strokes rendering her surroundings.

In his pastoral “Landscape with Horses” of 1859, one can spot on the image’s edge a worker installing telegraph cable—a potent aside referencing the birth of modern technology. It’s easy to imagine Oliver Twist or Gaffer Hexam wandering around the landscape featured in “Thames Police” (1859), a detailed view of London’s riverbank before Victorian urban renewal transformed it.

Over time, Whistler became interested in conveying mood rather than direct narrative, using variations of tone to accomplish this. The title of his most famous painting, colloquially known as “Whistler’s Mother,” is actually “Arrangement in Grey and Black No. 1” (1871). This new direction is apparent in his painterly lithotints from the 1870s. Here, the use of tusche (an oily black liquid) washes applied directly onto the lithographic stone enabled him to modulate tonal effects with sumptuous results as in the quintessentially Whistler “Nocturne” of 1878, an evocative scene of boatmen in punt-like craft, shimmering river and far shore with reflections, steam, light, shadow, and haze adding atmosphere and tranquil beauty to the composition. Whistler cleverly used blue paper, markedly enhancing the work’s crepuscular effect.

A brilliant artist, Whistler was also a larger than life figure, variously described as arrogant and abrasive. The famous 1885 William Merritt Chase portrait of him seems to capture his confrontational insouciance perfectly with his provocative pose, wild hair and imperious gaze. As his monocle and cane attest, he was flamboyant in both dress and personality. His relationships with critics were notoriously acrimonious.

In 1877, John Ruskin’s essay “Truth to Nature” famously attacked Whistler’s “Nocturne in Black and Gold: The Falling Rocket,” saying he had flung “a pot of paint in the public’s face.” Whistler, whose personal credo was “art for art’s sake,” would have none of that and so sued Ruskin for libel. Though Whistler triumphed, it was a Pyrrhic victory: awarded a farthing’s damages, he was financially ruined by court costs and the scandal-related decline in sales. He spent the following year in Venice, working on a commission for the Fine Arts Society. The resulting 12 etchings helped repair his image and he eventually regained his financial footing and reputation.

Though he may come across as difficult, Whistler’s only real fault was he knew his own worth and would brook no criticism from detractors who didn’t understand him. While Whistler was building the very foundation of the modern movement, the critics who bedeviled him were bogged down in the Victorian miasma of their own narrow view.

It’s the age-old story of the genius way ahead of his time. Whistler was a vanguard out there on the frontier of art with an approach so revolutionary as to be incomprehensible to most contemporaries. In his words: “Art should be independent of all claptrap—should stand alone, and appeal to the artistic sense of eye and ear, without confounding this with emotions entirely foreign to it, as devotion, pity, love, patriotism, and the like. All these have no kind of concern with it, and that is why I insist on calling my works ‘arrangements’ and ‘harmonies.’”

This weekend, UVA’s French department will show a selection of recent French films at various locations around town. The festival is aimed at both casual filmgoers and academics, and the organizers hope to draw French-speaking and subtitle-reading viewers. Speakers from the University will present the films and offer their own perspectives on the screenings and their subjects.

The series is an outgrowth of a program from past years, which was sponsored by the French-American Cultural Exchange (FACE). “It was an annual event for five years, funded by FACE, with the provision that they wouldn’t provide any funding for three years after that,” explained Hannah Holtzman, one of the series’ organizers. “The idea was that we would go out into the community and get involved and build these other relationships so that it could be self-sustaining. So it’s really forced us to do that, which has been great. All the locations around town have been really gracious. Milli Joe is donating Belgian waffles. We also have a bunch of undergraduate volunteers, students from one of the undergraduate film courses, who made a little promo video. It’s been fun to see who’s interested. People have been getting involved in whatever way they want to get involved.”

“We began by working from a list of 50 or so films, provided by FACE, and narrowing it down from there,” Holtzman added. “The films are all recent. The oldest one is from 2009. We wanted a variety. There’s two documentaries, a couple of comedies, and a historical drama.” The list includes Ismaél Ferroukhi’s Free Men, Philippe Le Guay’s The Women on the 6th Floor, Werner Herzog’s Cave of Forgotten Dreams, Henri-George Clouzot’s Inferno, and Mona Achache’s The Hedgehog. All the screenings are free and open to the public, and each will have English subtitles.

“Free Men is interesting, because it’s a World War II movie, but it’s got a different twist to it,” said Liz Groff, another of the festival’s organizers. “It’s about Jewish-Arab relations in Paris at the time of the occupation, so we have someone coming from the Middle Eastern studies department to talk about it.”

“The Women on the 6th Floor is cute, it’s a fun comedy,” Groff said. “It takes place in the ’50s, after the Spanish Revolution. It’s about Spanish and Portuguese maids. One of the speakers who’s going to come had written about this era in France, about the immigration of Spanish and Portuguese workers as maids. They had their own community, and [the film depicts] the contrast between the sixth floor where the maids live, and the aristocrats in the rest of the building. The guy who lives downstairs gets involved with one of them. He’s bridging the gap between the classes.”

Inferno is an interesting case. Though the film is from 2009, it is the result and remains of an uncompleted film from 1963, originally directed by Henri-Georges Clouzot, the acclaimed director known for classic thrillers like The Wages of Fear and Diabolique. “It was actually so hot in Paris that year that they had to stop filming, and then Clouzot died,” Groff said. So it’s a documentary about the making of that film, and Clouzot’s footage is in there as well.”
“That’s one that’s not available yet,” Holtzman said. “I’m excited to have the chance to see it. Some of the other ones are streaming on Netflix and things like that.”

The Cave of Forgotten Dreams is another documentary, one with even older roots. The 2010 film by prolific and provocative German director Werner Herzog, was originally filmed in 3D and depicts a series of 34,000-year-old cave paintings, which are the earliest instances of manmade art (by a significant margin). Herzog’s film also details the process of gaining access to the cave, which is tightly restricted by the French government due to fears about preservation. Only a few dozen people have ever been inside it. The film is a fascinating and valuable document, enlivened by Herzog’s trademark wry commentary and occasional wild conjecture.

One of the most appealing aspects of the festival is the attempt to invite members of the wider community in addition to academics. Often, film and arts events are open to the public, but aren’t widely promoted outside of Grounds, or even outside of a specific department.

“The French department is large for a French department, but it’s small in the context of the University,” Holtzman said. “So one of the goals [of the festival] is to make connections within the University, with people from other departments who have similar interests. But it’s also an effort to bridge the gap between the University and the community a little bit.”

“So many people in Charlottesville are interested in French, are interested in film, or are Francophiles,” Groff said. “We wanted everyone to come. There’s a lot of these little things that go on, little film groups at the University, but nobody else ever hears about it. But everybody loves film, so we wanted to get everyone who loves film together.”

UVA’s French film festival runs from February 21-24, at City Council Chambers, the Nau Auditorium, and the Jefferson-
Madison Regional Library. A full schedule can be found at pages.shanti.virginia.edu/UVA_French_Film_Festival.

What is the best foreign film you’ve seen recently? Tell us about it at c-ville.com/arts.

Mother necessity

Great art is a representation of what really drives human beings. So what bigger motivator for human endeavors than sex? To further examine this quality of human nature, FIREFISH Gallery presents “SIN: An Exploration of Eroticism Through Art.” The show aims not only to arouse the senses, but also to interpret and celebrate human sexuality in the physical form through sculpture, paintings, drawings, and photography, examining sexuality as not only an indulgence but a necessity.

Through 3/6 Free, FIREFISH Gallery, 108 Second St. NW. 984-1777.

Mate call

In an exploration of love’s famed hardiness, the Kluge-Ruhe Aboriginal Art Collection is hosting a Valentine’s Day Tour of Aboriginal expressions of love and romance. Exhibits include possum fur skirts, a wooden seagull head with feathered strings, a love story about seven sisters and the man who pursues them becoming stars in the night sky—all rich examples of the desire to share our life with another.

Thursday 2/14 $10, 4:30pm. Kluge-Ruhe Aboriginal Art Collection, 400 Worrell Dr. 244-0234.

An enthusiastic crowd attended Bradley Stevens’s talk “In Search of Perfect Proportions: the Golden Section and Geometry in Art” at the Warm Springs Gallery on Sunday afternoon. Stevens’s show there features his series of paintings focusing on museum galleries. In these works, rooms open up to other rooms giving the sense of receding space and affording glimpses of works of art in the distance. Stevens straddles two worlds with these works: the static one of the artwork he reproduces and the more active one of the contemporary museum visitors who populate his exhibition spaces. His rendering of them reveals a finely tuned eye for those details that breathe life into a figure.

Stevens works in oil because of its slow drying time, which allows him to manipulate it, softening it and blending it. He uses color, in concert with the arrangement of shapes, to balance the composition. His scenes are not exact; he will reposition paintings or change the color of the walls because, in the end, it’s about the integrity of the finished work, not the reality of the subject.

With their photographic realism, the paintings showcase Stevens’s technical skill and his adulation for art history. His biography states that he “spent five years copying over three hundred Old Master paintings at the National Gallery of Art.” He’s very good at reproducing famous artworks and this museum series affords him ample opportunity to do so. Like a Rap artist sampling music, Stevens plays with perspective and size presenting an entirely new version of the initial artwork. This not only produces a renewed appreciation for the piece, but it also allows the buyer of the Stevens work to, in a way, possess the masterpiece depicted. It’s an acceptable copy of the original because it’s been transformed by another artist and is now an entirely new artwork.

As might be expected from the title of his talk, Stevens is very keen on the golden section and geometry, they’re the guiding principle for organizing his compositions. “Literally it’s how you divide a distance or a space into the most asymmetrical balance or the most dynamic symmetry, the most perfect proportion.”

Working at an easel and using string as a compass, Stevens demonstrated how to determine a golden section through basic geometry. The golden section is used to describe perfect proportioning within an artwork (the ratio of small elements to larger elements is the same as the ratio of larger elements to the whole, basically). This corresponds to the Fibonacci Sequence and the mathematical pattern that is endlessly occurring in nature from bacteria to spiral galaxies. It’s so ubiquitous and fundamental it stands to reason that we are hardwired to intuitively respond to the pattern.

But I wonder… while I’m certainly impressed with Stevens’s skill, if not his lackluster and somewhat dumbed-down presentation, I find his paintings’ perfection cloying. Beyond a clever idea, which I’m sure has many admirers, there’s nothing here that captures my fancy.

First Friday 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.

Thomas Wolfe says you can’t go home again. Leah Naomi Green and Josh Garrett-Davis seem to disagree. After swapping his South Dakota home for New York’s cityscape, Garrett-Davis found himself drawn back through his recent novel, Ghost Dances: Proving Up on the Great Plains. Green never attempted to leave home behind, yet her upbringing in Virginia deeply influences her poetry in The Ones We Have. Place weaves its way into everyday experiences and life’s bigger picture for the two writers at PLACE BASED, where home adds depth and meaning to the trivial things in life.

Friday 10/19 Free, 6pm. The Bridge Progressive Arts Initiative, 209 Monticello Rd. 984-5669.

www.thebridgepai.com

Three of Jonathan Coleman’s four works of non-fiction are New York Times bestsellers, including the recent autobiography of basketball legend Jerry West, West By West: My Charmed, Tormented Life.  Garnish his impressive career with an Edgar Allen Poe Award and you get the feeling of greatness in our midst. The prodigal UVA alum sits down for a discussion and reading from his lauded works at Random Row, as well as treating us to excerpts from a work-in-progress, What He Stood For: The Many Worlds of Angus Cameron.

Dig a little deeper: Local author crafts autobiography of an NBA legend

Thursday, 10/11. Free, 7:30pm. Random Row Books, 315 W. Main St. 295-2493.