Tag: Fine Arts

Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library 2450 Old Ivy Rd. “Their World As Big As They Made It: Looking Back at the Harlem Renaissance,” plus other permanent exhibitions.

Chroma Projects Inside Vault Virginia, Third St. SE. In the Micro Gallery, “Topography: Travis Childers with Ashe Laughlin.” In Vault Virginia’s Great Hall Galleries, “David Copson: Events from the Ultima Thule,” and “Ann Cheeks: Body and Spirit: Moving Through Infinity.”
Crozet Library 2020 Library Ave., Crozet. Staff art show.

C’ville Arts Cooperative Gallery 118 E. Main St., Downtown Mall. “Beauty Meets Function,” featuring sculpture and furniture by Alex Pettigrew.

Elmaleh Gallery Campbell Hall, UVA Grounds. “Almost Useful: The Michael Owen Jones Exhibition” explores objects at the edge of utility, curated by Glenn Adamson. JT Bachman’s “Waste Not, Want Not” transforms discarded materials into long-lasting objects and building material prototypes. “Inclusive Narratives: Exploring Equity On The Manifesta Bookshelf,” an interactive exhibit.

The Fralin Museum of Art at UVA 155 Rugby Rd. “Structures,” a selection of 20th- and 21st-century artworks from the museum’s permanent collection, and the Charlottesville Indigenous Art Takeover.

Kluge-Ruhe Aboriginal Art Collection of UVA 400 Worrell Dr. The Charlottesville Indigenous Art Takeover.

Les Yeux du Monde 841 Wolf Trap Rd. The Charlottesville Indigenous Art Takeover.

McGuffey Art Center 201 Second St. NW. In the Smith Gallery, “Turn Up the Color!” by abstract artist Sara Gondwe. In the First Floor Galleries, “Counting the Days,” by Rosamond Casey. In the Second Floor Galleries, “(m)other,” a group show examining motherhood. Through April 28. First Fridays reception at 5:30pm. 

Northside Library 705 Rio Rd. W. “Color in Motion,” paintings by Randy Baskerville.

New City Arts 114 Third St. NE. In the Welcome Gallery, “Voroboros,” featuring new work by Adrian Wood. Through April 20.

Phaeton Gallery 114 Old Preston Ave. Group show featuring painters Karen Blair, Laura Wooten, and Priscilla Whitlock.

The Rotunda UVA Grounds. In the Upper West Oval Room, the Charlottesville Indigenous Art Takeover. Through July 7.

Second Street Gallery 115 Second St. SE. In the Main Gallery, “Jac Lahav: Foster Paintings.” In the Dové Gallery, “Leisure Suit” by Lou Haney.

Studio Ix 969 Second St. SE. “Visions,” by April Branham from the Monacan Indian Nation.

Dathan Kane has just completed a month-long residency at Visible Records, an artist-run gallery and studio space that focuses on contemporary arts and empowering the community, and is located in the Belmont/Carlton neighborhood. Kane’s residency is part of a joint project with the Contemporary Arts Network of Newport News that will see two Visible Records artists headed there to produce a mural.

During his time at VR, Kane painted the walls of the 1,000 square-foot space with one of his distinctive black and white murals, which he collectively refers to as “The World of Shapes.” The result is stunning.

Born and raised in Hampton, Virginia, Kane received his B.A. in art and design from Virginia State University in 2014, with a focus on illustration, charcoal drawing, and graphic design. He didn’t start painting until his senior year, but took to it immediately. After graduation, he embarked on a career painting still lifes and portraits. But this changed dramatically following a 2015 trip to Art Basel Miami. “Seeing the work that was there and the artists I’d been studying—having access to that was inspirational,” says Kane. “It’s not like I’m coming from L.A. or New York, where you’ll see a lot more of that type of art.”

Inspired, Kane took his art in an entirely different direction, going big, going bold, and going monochrome. “I was thinking of ways to create something, to develop a visual language that felt authentic to me,” he says.

Reducing his palette to black and white wasn’t such a stretch for him, given his focus in college. But this palette choice was more profound than mere facility with a genre, “Black and white has always represented the foundation of art,” Kane says. “The absence of color draws attention. When you think of art for the most part, you think of color. When color isn’t present, you tend to be a little curious.” And color may have had a chastening effect on the scale of his forms since the combination may have been too much visually.

Looking at images of Kane’s various installations around the Hampton Roads area, Richmond, and Baltimore, you’re struck by how individual the projects look, while obviously done by the same hand. You also see black and white’s timelessness and how its undeniable chic works so well within the urban landscape.

In 2018, Kane became involved in the public art scene. He loves working outside and he likes the way public art engages with people who might not set foot in a gallery or museum space, or might not feel comfortable in those spaces. “If you’re able to engage someone passing by on their daily commute and take them out of reality for a minute, that impact is really special to me.”

In 2021, Kane was given the opportunity by Contemporary Arts Network to present his work on a grand scale and create an immersive experience. “I was a big fan of theme parks growing up,” he says. “And I had this idea to create a visual theme park.” If this sounds similar to Yayoi Kusama, it is. But Kane, motivated by entirely different forces, is achieving a similar effect using paint only. For that project, he painted six different spaces in the CAN headquarters in Newport News, including walls, floors, ceilings, and objects in the spaces. It took about four weeks to complete, working 12 hours a day.

Kane’s installation at VR includes podiums and a framed painting mounted directly on the mural. Like visual exclamation points, these features draw the eye and set up interesting spatial relationships between the large shapes on the wall and those on the other smaller objects. The arrangement of shapes themselves, what goes next to what, provides opportunities for Kane to toy with space and depth, creating the illusion of three dimensionality, overlapping planes, and forms that seem to flicker back and forth between dimensions.

Kane painted steadily for about 16 days at Visible Records, often working into the early morning hours. He finds inspiration for his rounded shapes in organic forms, and he works without a projector or grid marks. Everything is drawn freehand directly on the wall, giving his shapes a pleasing irregularity. The one exception is the perfect circles, which are made using cut-out stencils.

After priming his surface and mapping out the design in his head, Kane sketches it on the wall, moving from left to right, using a paint pen marker. When he finishes this, he adds the paint. Some projects require a preliminary drawing, but nothing stays exactly the same since the texture of the wall determines what you can do. Kane is really big on clean lines, and uses a flat-tip brush to paint everything. This brush, with which he fills up massive expanses, is just two inches long.

It’s hard not to be charmed by Kane’s chunky jumble of forms that push up against each other and seem ready to burst forth from the constraints of their two-dimensional surfaces. They’re amusing and joyful, and also incredibly stylish. They tick all the public-art boxes because what’s better than inserting a little joy, humor, and beauty into the life of someone passing by?

It wasn’t creating the artwork that challenged fiber artist Phượng-Duyên Hải Nguyễn as she prepared for New City Arts’ January 2024 SOUP competition. It was the audience.

“I’m terrified of public speaking,” she says. “I’m terrified of being perceived by others in general, and ideally I’d like to stay in a corner and make things in relative peace and quiet.” 

In the process of competing at SOUP, a semi-annual community dinner series to create a crowdfunded grant for a Charlottesville-area artist, Nguyễn faced her public-speaking fears. With the support of friends and speaking coaches, and lots of practice, she delivered her pitch—for a new installation, her largest yet—and took home $4,235, SOUP’s biggest grant to date. 

The common thread throughout Nguyễn’s fiber constructions is a geometry that lends structure and evokes resilience in the pieces. Some are gauzy, drapey nets of thread and cloth, both fragile and strong, and other collections, like “Constructions,” displayed at the Welcome Gallery in 2020, provoke the mind with fuzzy abstract sculptures that pop with imaginative colors, objects, and textures.

A 2015 UVA graduate, Nguyễn started out pre-med, but left with a B.A. in studio arts and art history. “I walked into my first chem class, eyes glazed over the syllabus, and realized I’d rather go outside and draw,” she says.

Art provided Nguyễn a sense of place and familiarity, something that was sometimes hard to find as an immigrant from Vietnam who arrived in the United States as a teenager. Wanting to fit in, but finding herself stuck between cultures, she says she turned to art to carve out her own space and find comfort. 

Her fiber installations are a road map to solace, and finding it, whether in a physical place or inside ourselves. “My work is ultimately about home—what it takes to build/rebuild a home, to process the loss of and longing for a homeland, to build a life while yearning to belong,” she says. “As much as my work speaks to loss and longing, I want it to also convey hope and healing. And that’s why I sew because I think of sewing as a tender and healing act.”

Landscape photographer Karen Duncan Pape turns her lens to the page in “De-Circulated,” an exhibition of reconstructed covers of banned books on display at McGuffey Art Center through January 28.

“Growing up in Southwest Virginia, books were extremely important to me, as they exposed me to other worlds and broadened my perspective,” says Pape. “I was shocked to find that books I had read in AP English many years ago were being banned in America today, and I was upset that young people might lose access to literary tools that might help them develop critical and inquiring minds, or that might support them in their quest for self-understanding.”

Pape began checking out banned books from libraries and taking multiple exposure photographs of the covers, which she blended in post-processing to create new designs. Books like Lola at the Library, banned in Pennsylvania, The Hate U Give, and The Bluest Eye, both banned in multiple states, are refracted and reimagined into colorful new forms. The abstract photographs obliterate or obstruct the text—a reminder from Pape of the power of the written word, and what is lost when it’s eliminated.

Mystery vibes

Karen Duncan Pape: “‘Relativity’ ( above left) is taken from a book cover about Albert Einstein, all of whose work was burned in 1933 in Nazi Germany, simply because he was Jewish. The book cover itself is simple and sort of boring, gold and black, with a photograph of Einstein. As I was working on the piece, I thought about the mystery of Einstein’s work. He said ‘The most beautiful emotion we can experience is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion that stands at the cradle of all true art and science.’ The resulting blue piece speaks, I hope, of Einstein’s sense of mystery, and of something which we cannot see but can only sense. 

“‘Why We Can’t Wait’ by Martin Luther King, Jr. is another piece that brings me joy. This book was banned in South Africa at the height of apartheid. The image, with its elevating verticals and large WE, implies Dr. King’s idea that, now just as when he wrote this book, WE cannot wait, and WE together are responsible for moving humanity forward into a more balanced, peaceful, and loving state.”

The results are in! In November, C-VILLE readers submitted the best photo they captured in 2023, each illustrating the theme “What a day!” Our judges—Ézé Amos and Stacey Evans—reviewed more than 80 submissions, and what follows are the best of the bunch. The final list features gorgeous landscapes, bustling wildlife, and captivating shots in and around Charlottesville. Congratulations to the winners, and thank you to everyone who participated.

1. “Varied Interests” by Raman Pfaff

May 7, 2023. iPhone 14 Pro. Mona Lisa draws daily crowds at the Louvre, but in this photo some seemed more interested in other art. One seems to want the day at the museum to end.

2. “Rainy Day at Fourth and Market” by Steve Ashby

January 28, 2023. Canon-P. The intersection at Fourth and Market streets was glossy from a light rain as I waited for a shopper to exit the Market Street Market. Exposed at 1/8th of a second with a Canon-P equipped with a 53mm/2.8 Soviet-era lens and loaded with long-expired Kodak Plus-X film. Processed for 10 minutes in Kodak HC-110, dilution “H” (1:63).

3. “Alone Time” by Max Hoecker

October 1, 2023. Canon G7X. I was in Baltimore to see the Orioles. Meanwhile, there was an anime convention going on at the time. My family was at the food truck when I noticed this participant sitting by herself.

4. “White Pelicans Fish Buffet” by Stuart Scott

July 27, 2023. Olympus E-M1 MarkII with Leica DG 100-400/F4.0-6.3. While visiting Yellowstone National Park, I was surprised to see a group of white pelicans working as a team to herd small fish for their meal. I have a series of pictures as they stay in a line formation then curl around to trap their next meal. You can see the ripples in the water as they move in for a feast. I watched for over an hour as they repeated the fish herding.

5. “Labyrinth” by Carlton Carroll

May 20, 2023. Autel EVO 2 Drone. This new labyrinth was created at the Botanical Garden of the Piedmont by a local scout for her Eagle Scout project. The scout designed the labyrinth layout, and with the help of her troop, cleared, tilled, and placed the logs. This photo was taken as the project was completed.

6. “Fall Beauty in Aspen” by Laura Mark

October 1, 2023. iPhone 13 Plus. This picture was taken at the John Denver Sanctuary in Aspen, Colorado.

7. “Seaside Splendor” by Chloë-Ester K. Cook

May 28, 2023. Nikon L35 AF, Ektar 100 Film. This was taken at the Calanque d’En Vau in the Calanques National Park outside of Cassis, France, with my partner on my first-ever European trip. Calanques are beautiful steep-walled inlets of the Mediterranean Sea—and they’re worth every step of the slick, sharp, sweaty hike it takes to get there. 

8. “A Few of My Favorite Things!” by Bill Shaw

January 7, 2023. Canon EOS 6D, EF50mm lens. Depicting my wife with a few of her favorite things. Raindrops on roses, bright copper kettles, and warm woolen mittens!

9. “Bonfire at Bagatelle” by Mike Powers

October 28, 2023. iPhone 13 Pro. The full moon rises over a majestic bonfire marking the end of a perfect fall day in Albemarle County, as teens relax while keeping an eye on social media feeds.

10. “Ferry to Vinalhaven” by Forest Veerhoff

August 21, 2023. Canon Rebel 2000, Portra 160 Film. I took this photo on a backpacking trip in Maine this summer. We began our journey here on a ferry to the island of Vinalhaven. I captured this moment because I was drawn to how each subject is in their own world, some of them even ignoring the beauty around them. We see here a sense of wanderlust and adventure and a question of who these people are and where they are going.

Our judges:

Ézé Amos is a documentary photographer and photojournalist who immigrated to Charlottesville from Nigeria in 2008, and now captures the unique spirit and energy of our city.  His many photo projects include Cville People Everyday, Cville Porch Portraits, Witnessing Resistance, and his most recent and ongoing project, The Story of Us “Reclaiming The Narrative of #Charlottesville Through Storytelling and Portraits of Community Resilience.” Amos is also an affiliate photographer with numerous national and international media organizations, and his work has been featured by The New York Times, Getty Images, NPR, AP, CNN, BuzzFeed, The Washington Post, and The New Yorker, among others. Amos’ photo of the melting of Charlottesville’s Robert E. Lee statue made Time magazine’s Top 100 Photos of 2023.

Stacey Evans is the imaging specialist and project coordinator at the University of Virginia Library Digital Production Group. She has over 25 years of experience as an artist, educator, and professional photographer, and her work has been published, exhibited, and collected nationally. Her art practice focuses on the intersection of the built environment and nature through topographic photography from moving vehicles. She previously taught workshops on digital photography through the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts and Piedmont Virginia Community College, and now privately. Evans graduated from Savannah College of Art and Design with a bachelor of fine arts in photography. 

Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library 2450 Old Ivy Rd. “Their World As Big As They Made It: Looking Back at the Harlem Renaissance” showcases the visionary works of writers, artists, and thinkers of the Harlem Renaissance, plus other permanent exhibitions. 

Angelo Jewelry 220 E. Main St. “Sentiment in Place,” landscapes by V-Anne Evans. Through December 24.

Botanical Fare 421 E. Main St., Downtown Mall. Works by Judith Ely. Through December. 

The Center at Belvedere 540 Belvedere Blvd. The Second Annual Small Works Open Exhibit features works no larger than 13 inches in a variety of mediums. Through December.

Chroma Projects Inside Vault Virginia, Third St. SE. On the main floor, “Congregation,” mixed-media vignettes by Aggie Zed. In the great halls, Sara Clark’s “Ornatus Mundi” continues. 

The Connaughton Gallery McIntire School of Commerce, UVA Grounds. “Landscapes and Georgia O’Keefe Revisited,” alkyd oil paints on canvas, MDF panels, and textile/multi-media works by Eric T. Allen and the Fiber and Stitch Art Collective. Through December 8.

C’ville Arts Cooperative Gallery 118 E. Main St., Downtown Mall. “Making Spirits Bright,” a group show featuring seasonal designs. Through December.

The Fralin Museum of Art at UVA 155 Rugby Rd., UVA Grounds. Exhibitions include “Look Three Ways: Maya Painted Pottery,” “Processing Abstraction,” and “N’Dakinna Landscapes Acknowledged.”

Grace Estate Winery 5273 Mt. Juliet Farm, Crozet. Works by local landscape artist Anne French. Through March.

Kluge-Ruhe Aboriginal Art Collection of UVA 400 Worrell Dr. “Performing Country,” never-before-seen works from the museum’s permanent collection. Through March 3.

Les Yeux du Monde 841 Wolf Trap Rd. “Fleeting,” oil on canvas by Annie Harris Massie. Through December 20.

Live Arts 123 E. Water St. “Celebrating Life” by Chicho Lorenzo.

McGuffey Art Center 201 Second St. NW. The Holiday Show & Shop features three floors of original art, home goods, prints, ceramics, cards, fiber arts, and ornaments. Through December.

New City Arts 114 Third St. NE. “repair is the dream of the broken thing,” an installation by Matt Shelton. Through December 28. 

Northside Library 705 Rio Rd. W. A multimedia exhibit with BozART Fine Arts Collective artist’s Judi Ely, Katharine Eisaman Maus, and Shirley Paul. 

Phaeton Gallery 114 Old Preston Ave. “Never a Dull Moment,” abstract expressive art by Vickie Marsango, and the Carriage Works Studios Group Show. Through December 17. Reception December 14 at 5pm. 

The PVCC Gallery V. Earl Dickinson Building, 501 College Dr. In the North Gallery, “Looking Small, Thinking Big,” from Fenella Belle. In the South Gallery, “Drawn to the Light” by Deborah Davis. Through January 13.

Quirk Gallery 499 W. Main St. “game of telephone,” contemporary works by Michael Reisor. Through January 21.

Random Row Brewery 608 Preston Ave. Watercolors byJuliette Swenson. Through January 15.

The Ruffin Gallery McIntire Department of Art, UVA Grounds. “Thinking of Place iii” features 85 printmakers from around the world inspired by the themes of space and place. Through December 15.

Second Street Gallery 115 Second St. SE. In the Main Gallery, “The Labyrinth,” many-layered constructions of mineral-pigmented glazes by Clay Witt. In the Dové Gallery, “Under the Skin,” paintings and works on paper by Akemi Ohira. Through January 19.

Studio Ix 969 Second St. SE. “Wheel of the Year,” a collection of eight quilts by Amanda Wagstaff. Through December.

Superfly Brewing 943 Preston Ave. “Charlottesville Stages: Concert Photography” showcases photographs of local bands and international superstars performing on Charlottesville’s stages by Henry Strauss, Sanjay Suchak, and Rich Tarbell. 

Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello 931 Thomas Jefferson Pkwy. An exhibition that includes a rare engraving of the Declaration of Independence. Through December.

Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Charlottesville 717 Rugby Rd. “Season of Light,” a group show. Through December.

Susan McAlister uses a number of approaches to landscape, from direct physical representations to more nebulous suggestions of place, to riffs on the basic forms and patterns that are the building blocks of the natural world. “My process is essentially the same whether I’m working representationally or abstractly,” says McAlister, whose work is the subject of “Canopy,” now on view at Les Yeux du Monde. “I’m finding form, I’m pushing color, I’m layering materials, I’m thinking about the relation of all of these elements together.”

The plein air tradition of sketching and painting out of doors is central to McAlister’s practice. “When I take my walks in nature,” she says, “I think about the shapes that are happening and the way the light moves through those shapes and how a vine travels up a tree and continues over your head. I’m considering all of this and what it’s like being engulfed by nature and how that makes my heart feel.”

While outside, McAlister also forages for natural found objects, which she uses as inspiration, sometimes incorporating them into her assemblages, thus rooting them in a specific time and place. “Faunus I,” for example, features a feather, petal, and bee. Originally inspired by a visit to the Matisse room at the National Gallery in Washington, D.C., McAlister took the concept of cut-outs and ran with it, adding three-dimensionality into the mix to produce her gorgeous explosions of layered cut paper.

Luminous vistas of the Blue Ridge cloaked in fuzzy haze are conjured up from a combination of McAlister’s observation and memory. “These wooded landscapes are about my childhood. I grew up where my playground was the uncut forest outside my door. That kind of tangled landscape, that’s orderly but also disorderly, is endlessly appealing to me.”  

In “Near and Far,” the haze has been replaced with rain-washed crispness. McAlister uses extraordinary brushwork here, with bold expressive slashes, smears, and clumps of paint that describe the varied mountain terrain of woods, meadows, and streams. 

“Meeting in the Woods” depicts the sort of tangled woodland that appeals to McAlister. In this rollicking work, the scene has shifted from the gently sloping hills of memory seen in “Wooded Way,” “The Engagement,” and “Evening,” to more rugged Montana. McAlister has amped up her brush work accordingly, with slashing strokes that describe the wind tossing the trees, and add points of visual interest to the work.

“Spring Shadows & the Forest Floor” seems to exist on the knife edge between abstraction and representation. McAlister has visually nailed the sense of wind, using large brushes to produce blurry contrails of paint along with quick daubs of green that suggest fluttering leaves. 

The artist’s muted palette perfectly embodies the temporal and atmospheric conditions she wishes to convey. Light greens pinpoint the season as early spring. Dove gray represents the recesses of the forest interior. Elegant inky blotches describe roots, branches, and tree trunks, tiny flecks of cerulean blue and stark white brighten the sky with intense, pure pigment. In the upper left quadrant, the absence of green implies that we are at the edge of a clearing or body of water where the land opens up and the view of the sky is more expansive.

McAlister’s palette of sunny pastels is derived from Bonnard. It’s a challenging color scheme to make serious, particularly for an artist who states, “I don’t want to be cute, I don’t want to be sweet. I’m most pleased when my paintings read as bold and expressive.” So, she tempers her palette’s prettiness with the introduction of duller shades, gesture, and layering. You can see this in the rectilinear zones of “Edge of the Forest.”

“Come to the Woods” has a curious power that seems to build with each repeated viewing. The initial impression is of a work that is delicate and fragile, thanks to its pale colors and softly undulating shapes. But, the complex arrangement of pink, blue, green, and yellow and the interplay between painted surface and line, create interesting visual relationships. With its tessellated forms and passages that cascade down the picture plane, the work is really a deconstructed landscape.

Four paintings—“Vert,” “From the Open Window,” “Lost in the Forest,” and “Lush”—are hung together on the wall. McAlister did this to create a bigger expanse of painted surface. But the quartet’s juxtaposition, with two representational works and two abstract ones, hits at the crux of McAlister’s oeuvre, which is really about painting in and of itself, not one specific style. You see in these works, the ease with which the artist switches gears and her incredible facility, no matter how she’s painting. The “what” she’s painting remains a constant, however.

“Landscape is where my heart is,” she says. “It’s what I want to talk about.” As the works in the show reveal, McAlister uses various inventive means to “talk” about it, but one thing is clear, she is using a decidedly contemporary language to do so.