Tag: Fine Arts

Untrained and subject to the dual, almost insurmountable, constraints of economics and Jim Crow, the artists on display in “Of Another Canon: African American Outsider Art” at the Jefferson School African American Heritage Center possessed a creative fire. Despite cruelly stacked odds, Mozell S. Benson, Rudolph Bostic, Bessie Harvey, Anderson Johnson, Mary Proctor, Bernice Sims, Jimmy Lee Sudduth, Annie Mural Tolliver, Mose Ernest Tolliver (aka Mose T), and Ruby Williams persevered in their art, creating work that brims with raw authenticity, joy, and passion.

With the show’s title, the curators place the work, from the collection of Richard and Ellie Wilson, in its own alternate, yet equally valid canon to that of Western art history. They also raise questions about the term “outsider art.”

While it’s a generally accepted way to refer to art made by self-taught artists who operate outside the traditional art world, in this case, the work speaks not just to the individual artist’s experience, but to similar experiences shared by a large group of people. It was a 1982 exhibition at the Corcoran Gallery, “Black Folk Art in America, 1930–1980,” that played a significant role in elevating the art of self-taught African American artists and creating a market for their work. Nearly all the artists represented in this show are now featured in major museum collections. Mose T is widely known, and Williams, who sold her paintings off the back of a truck along with her produce, was the subject of an extensive New York Times obituary in August of this year. With this recognition, I wonder if the artists benefited in any substantial way from their artwork. It’s likely they did not, but it gives me hope that other, similar artists coming up behind them will.

Entering the gallery space, the eye is immediately snagged by Williams’ electric “Piano Playing Cow I Give Better Buttermilk.” I’m betting Picasso, who reputedly once said, “It took me four years to paint like Raphael, but a lifetime to paint like a child,” would envy this odd-footed orange bovine sporting black and white keys running along its back and a toothy, mask-like face. Nearly as riveting, “Ms Bonnie Bon Bonnie with Purse” is a simple composition made exceptional by her weird and wonderful hands.

Mose T, Sudduth, and Johnson share a similar approach. For the most part, they rely on vibrant color and bold shapes to render figures against flat expanses of pigment or just plain plywood—as in the case of “Self-Portrait with Willie Mae.” T’s sophisticated sense of color and composition is laid bare in this painting and in his “Portrait of a Woman with Baby.”  A similar sensibility is echoed in the work of Sudduth, who used a combination of house paint and mud from his yard to create his jaunty self-portrait, and his likeness of a girl sporting a stylish hat and holding a violin. Annie Mural Tolliver (T’s daughter) and Sims take this approach and expand it into spiritual and narrative directions. Tolliver’s stylized “Garden of Eden” employs a dramatic palette and striking arrangement of forms, while Sims’ “Edmund Pettus Bridge,” painted from memory (as was all her work) with childlike simplicity, is made more powerful knowing the artist was an eyewitness to the seminal event.

Harvey’s “Garden of Eden,” the only sculpture in the show, is made from a tree root. The label describes how root sculpting plays an important role in African American vernacular art. Here, Harvey daubs paint across the surface, and uses the longest root for her serpent. It seems to veer like a malevolent tube man toward the viewer. Harvey takes advantage of a knob in the wood to form the nose, adding stuffed animal eyes surrounded by painted lashes, a row of pearls for teeth, and a jaunty orange earring. This almost human face is creepy, thanks largely to the teeth, with a totemic quality that suggests a spiritual purpose.

Bostic’s “Egyptian Scene” and “Garden of Eden” take us even further into visionary territory. The first, a tondo painted on the cover of a flour container (Bostic worked at a baking company), is studded with Egyptian iconography that identifies the reclining figure as a dying pharaoh. Bostic mixes his colors to add volume and highlights, and to produce a range of hues that tend toward the richer jewel tones. Indeed, the works, with figures outlined in a Sharpie, resemble stained glass. The second painting, on a rectangular piece of cardboard, features an ornate composition, chockablock with the wonderfully rendered animal and human cast of the Judeo-Christian origin story. Bostic tops it off effectively by creating a trompe-l’oeil gilded frame with yellow squiggles on a black border.

Other artists also used materials that were at hand and free—odd bits of plywood, leftover house paint, a tree root, or worn-out clothes. Though employed out of necessity, these humble materials have a grittiness that add both visual and emotional weight to the work. In addition to information about the works, the accompanying labels also provide brief accounts of the artists’ lives. They were universally challenging, rife with enormous obstacles. And yet, from these terrible circumstances art was produced—a vital outlet for the artists and a record of their existence. It’s an extraordinary testament to the creative drive and to the resiliency of the human spirit.

The exhibition “Power Play: Reimagining Representation in Contemporary Photography” at UVA’s Fralin Museum of Art brings together the work of multiple female artists as they deconstruct and condemn classic presentations of feminine identities in popular culture. 

From the first moment that museum-goers enter the exhibition curated by Hannah Cattarin, Adriana Greci Green, and Laura Minton, they are assailed by a motley of bright colors coming from the photographs, and the introductory text at the center of the display. 

“For us, the works and the artists are what’s really at the forefront of the show,” says Minton. “….the concepts are also conversing with each other—because each artist is engaging with these concepts—but in a totally different way from each other. There’s overlap, but at the same time, they’re all doing something that is very unique, and that’s one of the really cool things about this show.”

In the work of British artist Sarah Maple, the artist centers herself in classic Disney princess costumes, presenting these iconic female figures in contemporary leadership roles—Snow White as a football coach, Sleeping Beauty as a surgeon, Ariel as a CEO. Through this series, she criticizes the relegation of women to the domestic sphere, and combats patriarchal definitions of femininity. 

The adjoining wall features innovative Atlanta-based artist Tokie Rome-Taylor. Her photographs spotlight young Black children dressed in rich fabrics, and sporting assortments of pearls and other accessories denoting extreme wealth. The photographs feel reminiscent of Renaissance paintings of wealthy European women from prominent families, while also incorporating elements of African diasporic material culture, as seen through her 2022 piece “Promising Sight.” Rome-Taylor thus combats the lack of African American representation in art history—she gives Black people, particularly Black women, a vision of a past that is not defined by subjugation. By reclaiming the past of Black femininity in this way, she also subverts the common reductive representations of Black women that appear in the media landscape. 

As a member of the Chemehuevi Indian tribe, Cara Romero works to deconstruct stereotypes of Native women in her photographs. Indeed, her pieces all feature a Native woman at the center, surrounded by an assortment of cultural items. Significant colorful patterns frame the photographs, further evoking the packaging in which children’s toys are sold. Her 2019 piece “Amber Morningstar” catches the onlooker’s attention with its vivid blue backdrop and red framing adorned with intriguing Native American symbols, the model at the center dressed in traditional clothing—a commentary on the commodification of Native femininity in popular culture. 

American artist Martine Gutierrez’s diverse work deconstructs classic representations of femininity as seen in magazines and dolls. In her 2014 piece “Line Up 4,” Gutierrez stands motionless among a group of mannequins—she is indistinguishable from them, a sharp criticism of femininity within the capitalist system. Gutierrez also subverts representations of femininity in contemporary media in her 2018 piece “Queer Rage, Imagine Life-Size, and I’m Tyra, p66-67 from Indigenous Woman.” In an excerpt from Indigenous Woman, her imaginary magazine, Gutierrez depicts the ever-shifting identities of a queer woman and her infinite potential as she reclines in her self-portrait in traditional Guatemalan dress, surrounded by vegetation, photoshopped animals, and dolls, among other things. 

Wendy Red Star is a Native artist from the Crow Indian Reservation in Montana. Her photograph series “Four Seasons” shows her over the course of different seasons. She is always in traditional attire and surrounded by nature, and is often looking directly at the camera with an air of defiance. These portraits evoke the life-sized dioramas commonly found in natural history museums; they usually depict extinct and near-extinct animals or insects. Though the natural elements that surround the artist are imitations, she is very real. Red Star thus asserts the continuing existence of Native women, and the value of their culture and heritage. Her final piece in the exhibition, 2016’s “Apsaalooke Feminist #4,” features the artist with her daughter. They are surrounded in Apsaalooke aesthetics and symbols, and adorned in traditional garb, with pensive looks on their faces. The piece draws attention to the importance of passing down Native culture and knowledge, particularly through matrilineage. In Red Star’s exhibition, Native femininity is invigorated both by its refusal to succumb to extinction, as well as its value in preserving Native culture through time. 

“What I love so much about all of these contemporary artists and their work is that there’s so much questioning happening,” says Cattarin.  “And we don’t want to come in with some idea of control or authority that tells you what you should think about.”

“One of the best things about collaborating with another artist is I learn a great deal about the other person’s sensibility to materials, aesthetics, and mark making,” says artist Diego Sanchez. His work is currently on view at the Quirk Gallery, together with fellow Richmonder Mary Scurlock.

In “Conversations,” each artist has eight paintings on display, which give the viewer enough information to understand and appreciate the artists’ individual approach and style, while providing a key, of sorts, to the intricate dance of give and take apparent in the 10 joint pieces. The artists worked in layers, on top of one another’s contribution, exchanging paintings back and forth three to four times, keeping a tally in pencil on the back of each work. 

Looking at the individual pieces, you might not put the two artists together. Sanchez favors bold color and geometric shapes, while Scurlock prefers a more streamlined palette and blurred edges. But spending time with their paintings, you begin to see that both artists employ a similarly diverse selection of media, and devote the same attention to developing their surfaces with layers of paint, wax, and paper.  

Sanchez’s paintings are hung in the front part of the gallery, where the Quirk’s soaring space can easily accommodate their exuberance. Scurlock’s are in the back, where the ceilings are lower in a quiet, more meditative area that suits these contemplative pieces.

One marvels at all that’s going on in terms of color, composition, and medium in a work like Sanchez’s “Composition #151.” The easy allure of turquoise and cobalt is tempered and elevated into something much more sophisticated by passages of dun and gray. The rectilinearity of the overlapping planes is subsumed in places by broad brushstrokes. Perfect orbs of blue dance across the surface, encountering more amorphous circular shapes. Partially obscured targets are “visual representations of ‘centering,’ of being mindful and present in our busy lives,” says Sanchez. They also summon Jasper Johns, an artist Sanchez admires, as does the mini crosshatch rectangle. Sanchez makes this his own by seasoning it with calligraphic scrawls of black and an odd tawny blob. Near the center, a lavender pastel rectangle dotted with burnt-orange dots more than holds its own against the more saturated passages.

“Composition #141” has a completely different effect. Here, it appears Sanchez has scraped off the background paint, leaving behind an expanse of fractured lines reminiscent of ceramic crazing. Whether it’s the light hue, or the network of lines that turn this flat expanse into a topographical map, the background appears quite distant with the strange shapes rendered in aqua, gold, and burnt sienna, floating above.

You might think it would be hard to compete with all the bright color and bold marks at the front of the room, but Scurlock’s paintings have a slow-burn heft and a presence that really gets under your skin. She relies heavily on the use of rubbings in her work. Instead of headstones, she goes after things like manhole covers, signs, and inscriptions, or even natural items. It all depends on her surroundings and what she wants to capture and convey about it, because, as she explains, “The intention of these paintings is to create a feeling—a space that mimics a place.” 

Back in the studio, she begins by adhering old paper—letters or clippings she’s saved—onto her panels. She then applies color, followed by the rubbings. These are done on delicate rice paper and are transparent, so when they are embedded in the surface they’re still legible. “The way I work, you put one thing down and something else changes, then you have to change that area so it works with the other area,” says Scurlock. “So, it’s hard to save things. But even though you can’t see them, they’re there. The idea is still there.” 

In “Ydra,” your eye is drawn to the graphically bold Greek lettering, especially the delta and zeta at center right that stand out against the vaporous clouds of pigment. There is the suggestion of houses on a hillside, evoking a Greek village. But it’s fragmentary, obscured here and there by blotches and daubs of shimmering paint. Similarly, incised lines and scratches form words or shapes, but they’re disjointed and incomplete. Just as memory does not present a perfect image, Scurlock intentionally renders this Saronic island in indistinct form.

With “Hatteras Village,” Scurlock introduces faded pink and dull green into the mix. Here, the composition is flatter, reflecting the topography of the subject. Again, we see bits and pieces, the eaves of a house possibly in the upper left, writing at the right center, and various circular shapes and squiggles scrawled across the surface.  

Within the collaborative pieces, you recognize the distinctive traits of each artist. There’s the color and geometric forms favored by Sanchez, but they’ve been softened, their tones and edges blurred by Scurlock’s hand. In doing so, she disturbs the integrity of those shapes and hues, shifting the timbre of the work to something more tenuous and uncertain.

Many artists would balk at the idea of letting go of a piece they’ve labored over and offering it unconditionally to another to augment as they wish. But the exercise can be remarkably rewarding, introducing new techniques and approaches, and producing exciting collaborative work.

Baker Gallery Walker Fine Arts Center, Woodberry Forest School. “New Works,” landscape paintings featuring scenes from Charlottesville by Richard Crozier. Through December 31. First Fridays reception.

The Center at Belvedere 540 Belvedere Blvd. A small-works open exhibit featuring over 30 artists, including Meredith Bennett, Susan Trimble, Joan Griffin, Frannie Joseph, and Judith Ely. Through December 19.

Chroma Projects Inside Vault Virginia, Third St. SE. “Listen,” paintings and sculptures by Aggie Zed. Through December 17. First Fridays reception.

C’ville Arts Cooperative Gallery 118 E. Main St., Downtown Mall. “Reclaimed,” a colorful mixed-media collection from Sigrid Eilertson. First Fridays opening.

The Fralin Museum of Art at UVA 155 Rugby Rd., UVA Grounds. “Power Play: Reimagining Representation in Contemporary Photography,” “Earthly Exemplars: The Art of Buddhist Disciples and Teachers in Asia,” and other exhibitions.

Jefferson School African American Heritage Center  233 Fourth St. NW. “Of Another Canon: African American Outsider Art,” includes works from 11 African American artists. Through January 7. 

Les Yeux du Monde 841 Wolf Trap Rd. “Perspectives on Place,” paintings that offer differing perspectives on place from Richard Crozier and David Hawkins. Through December 22. Lunch and conversation with artists December 4, 12:30pm.

McGuffey Art Center 201 Second St. NW. On December 4, Winterfest, featuring family-friendly art activities, a scavenger hunt, music, food, fire dancer, and more. Through December 31, the Holiday Show and Shop features two floors of original art, home goods, prints, cards, and jewelry. First Fridays celebration with live music and a screening of Horse Teacher, a documentary by Shandoah Goldman. 

New City Arts 114 Third St. NE. David Askew considers their relationship with social media through paintings of posted selfies in “i decided to do nothing (about everything).” Through December 22. First Fridays opening, 5pm.

Phaeton Gallery 114 Old Preston Ave. “Winter’s Edge,” new works by Cate West Zahl that pay homage to the simplification that takes place during the winter season.

PVCC Gallery V. Earl Dickinson Building, 501 College Dr. Two exhibitions from photographer, scientist, and conservationist Michael O. Snyder. “The Mountain Traditions Project” showcases photographs and oral histories from the Appalachian region. “Our Changing Climate: A Visual Chronicle” features works from Snyder’s former students. On December 3, the annual PVCC Pottery Club Sale.

Quirk Gallery 499 W. Main St. “Conversations,” recent individual mixed-media works by Mary Scurlock and Diego Sanchez, as well as nine works that are the result of months of collaboration between the two artists. Through December 11.

Ruffin Gallery 179 Culbreth Rd., UVA Grounds. “Breaking Water,” collaborative works from Calista Lyon and Carmen Winant. Through December 9.

Second Street Gallery 115 Second St. SE. In the Main Gallery, “Her Deeds,” mixed-media installations by Mariana Parisca. In the Dové Gallery, “Visions of Mary,” linocut prints, painting, and installation by Ramona Martinez. Through January 21. First Fridays opening.

Studio Ix 969 Second St. SE. “ar.ti.fac.tu.al,” works from local artists Kim Boggs and Mike Fitts. Through January 19. First Fridays opening.

Telegraph Art & Comics 211A W. Main St., Downtown Mall, and 398 Hillsdale Dr. Todd Webb’s annual “Picture Show” is on display at both locations. Through January 15. First Fridays reception at 5pm at the downtown location. 

Vault Virginia 300 E. Main St. “Final Bill,” an exhibition from Bill Atwood in a variety of mediums, including ink on newsprint, mixed-media collage, and sculpture. Through December. First Fridays reception.

Yellow Cardinal Studio 301 E. Market St. First Fridays open house with various artists and artworks. Also open Friday and Saturday afternoons from 1-5pm during December.

With the series of paintings that make up Kristopher Castle’s engaging show “Curriculum Vitae” at Phaeton Gallery, the artist explores Thomas Jefferson’s Academical Village and his innovative ideas for education. As the title suggests, the exploration is not a discourse on the UVA founder’s achievements, but rather the artist’s deeply personal relationship to Jefferson’s ideals and his university.

Quorum Pars Fui (“Of which I was also a part”) pays homage to that. In the work, a disembodied hand, Castle’s own, holds the end of a diaphanous ribbon that weaves through the colonnade that runs along the top of UVA’s Lambeth Field. A metaphor for Castle’s life, the fabric references his close ties not only to Lambeth, where he spent the summer of 2001 working at UVA’s costume shop during the Heritage Repertory Theatre’s season, but also, the larger university and Jefferson himself. That summer was a seminal experience for Castle, introducing him to Jefferson and his university, and charting the course that would eventually lead Castle back to the area to live.

Initius (“Commencement”) revisits the fabric of life motif. Here, the fabric’s tail can be seen at the far end of the colonnade that runs along the side at the base of the Rotunda. It’s fluttering away from us, about to leave the Academical Village to commence its existence outside those hallowed walls.

Ab Eo Libertas A Quo Spiritus (“The spirit comes from him from whom liberty comes”) updates the seated statue of Jefferson from the west side of the South Lawn, so that he is shown having just broken a tiki torch across his knee. The allusion is to the assault on the university that occurred in 2017, when protesters wielded these hitherto benign objects in an action that recalled Nazi Germany’s torch-lit parades, albeit with a Walmart touch. Jefferson’s left foot rests on volumes of Locke, Rousseau, and Montesquieu, all major figures of the Enlightenment. This movement, so influential to Jefferson (and other founding thinkers like Thomas Paine, Benjamin Franklin, James Madison, and John Adams), featured rationality and knowledge as its basic tenets.

Castle performs a similar treatment on George Washington in his version of the statue that sits on the east side of the Lawn. Exitus Acto Probat (“The outcome is the test of the act”) depicts Washington covering the Washington Monument, a phallic symbol representing the American patriarchy, with his cape. Castle places tomes by Foucault, Derrida, and Marx—all of whom, according to Castle, would “celebrate [a] critical and punitive reevaluation of [Washington’s] efforts”—at the base of the statue. They are teetering precariously, held in place by Washington’s cane, suggesting he is tolerating them despite their criticism. With this iconography, Castle reminds us of Washington’s integrity. Committed to the freedoms laid out in the First Amendment (freedom of religion, freedom of speech, freedom of the press, and the right to protest peacefully and petition the government), Washington led selflessly—twice renouncing absolute power. These are important considerations in both assessing Washington’s record, as well as the current events surrounding the 2020 election and January 6.

Inexplicabilis Libertas (“Illimitable freedom of the human mind”) alludes specifically to Jefferson’s vision for his institution of higher learning. For Jefferson, the expansive vista of the Blue Ridge Mountains, once visible beyond the south end of the Lawn, was a tangible representation of the illimitable freedom of the human mind, which is why his original plan kept the area opposite the Rotunda open. It remained this way until Old Cabell Hall, designed by Stanford White in 1898, was erected. Castle paints the building as a transparent ghost of itself through which we can see the view Jefferson always wanted us to see. The nocturnal scene also includes Castle as a young man, exercising his own form of illimitable freedom in the form of streaking the Lawn, a time-honored tradition at UVA.

Omnium Curriculum Gatherum (“Gather all the history”) is arguably the apotheosis of the show. A quintych composed of five panels, the work gives Castle plenty of room to depict Jefferson’s vision for the Academical Village made manifest in both its educational and physical forms. In his rendering, Castle makes it clear that his vision is not sealed in amber, but is changing and flourishing—a fundamentally viable and timeless approach to education and society that has bent, adjusted, and endured. 

Castle has a great time conjuring Jefferson’s original course curriculum (anatomy and medicine, fine arts, ethics and grammar, modern languages, zoology and botany, ancient languages, physio-mathematics, history and government, pure mathematics, natural philosophy, and law) with a diverse cast of human counterparts dressed in modern clothes. Castle’s professional experience as a costume designer comes in handy here in his selection of clothing and accessories that identify the various disciplines represented. His admiration for Jefferson’s architecture is evident in his detailed rendering of the Rotunda and pavilions I-IV, which feature respectively the Doric, Ionic, Corinthian, and Doric (again) architectural orders used by Jefferson with the intention of educating and elevating the student body. In the painting, the pavilions appear left to right: III, I, II, IV.

Rounding out the show are Castle’s riffs on the secret society emblems seen on various surfaces around Grounds. These delightful trompe l’oeil works of writing on brick play with the original symbols turning the esoteric into the often amusing contemporary reference.

It feels like Carnival time at Second Street Gallery. Megan Marlatt’s vibrant paintings and eye-popping big head sculptures are on view and the space sings with boisterous energy. Festival themes loom large in her show entitled “Mummers,” and though Carnival doesn’t officially begin for a couple of months, its fall equivalent is happening right now. As we head into winter, we celebrate seasonal change with Halloween and Día de Muertos, which, like Carnival, feature magic and costumes.

For an artist like Marlatt, who has built her career as a painter, her big heads may seem like a departure, but from the moment she first saw a capgrosso (“big head” in Catalan), she was smitten. Her fascination prompted her to travel to Spain in 2010 to learn how to make capgrossos from renowned folk artists Ventura and Hosta. 

“Through the big heads, I became very interested in the rituals of European carnivals,” says Marlatt. In 2018, she returned to Europe, this time to Belgium, where she studied Carnival culture at the International Carnival and Mask Museum.

“In Binche, Carnival participants carry little brooms, which they use to sweep the ground,” says Marlatt. “They’re sweeping away the evils of winter to make way for spring. If they don’t do this, winter will never go away. In Bulgaria, they use sticks to beat the ground, waking spring up. 

“These are pagan rituals adopted by the church. So Lent … coincides with the time when food supplies would be running low. When Carnival occurs, it’s not yet spring, the vernal equinox hasn’t happened. It’s the in-between time when it’s not one thing or the other, and it’s during this liminal period that magic happens.” 

Transition is not just evident in the shifting in-between-time, but also in the act of donning a mask and changing one’s identity. For Marlatt, this is a powerful exercise in empathy. “What I love about masks (and big heads) is they‘re empathetic,” she says. “They erase age, species, race, gender. They allow you to play at being someone else, get inside their skin and empathize with their lot.” Marlatt explores these ideas further in her paintings of Wysteria Ivy, who, as a drag queen, both occupies a transitional space and assumes another identity.

On display are both animal and human heads—there’s a hare, a rooster, the Belgian painter James Ensor, sisters Salt and Pepper, and even a heavenly host of angels. Instantly appealing, the heads seem benign at first. But there’s something sinister and manic about them. Marlatt employs the masks in various ways: some are one-offs that she uses in her Big Head Brigade parades and performances, while others, she incorporates into her paintings, where they sometimes appear as masks worn by figures. Some have entirely morphed into otherworldly creatures.

With its vivid palette and striking imagery, “Wysteria Ivy and the Woodland Creatures” is a captivating and glorious work that presents its subject lounging odalisque-like on a picnic table within a covered shelter. Perched astride the roof, a grinning red bunny sports track shoes, while two mischievous mice tiptoe around the sides of the structure. Marlatt conveys the atmospheric elements in the painting with complete authenticity, which anchors the work in reality. 

We are coaxed by familiarity into accepting the fantastical elements as Marlatt creates a space of transition between reality and fantasy using ordinary references—the table and shelter and the familiar clothes her animals wear root the picture in the here and now. She performs a similar thing with her big heads, which each sport some real item—a crocheted hat (made by local artist Eli Frantzen), a scarf, or a bell—all of which enhance their immediacy.

“Near Gloaming” offers a crepuscular yin to the sunny yang of Wysteria Ivy back at the picnic grounds. The two paintings are the same size and each feature spindly trees that rise across the picture plane in dynamic vertical rhythm. Here, the fairy tale forest is alight with fireflies. Wysteria Ivy, holding a sunflower, crouches on the ground, gazing at the viewer warily. Disturbing the idyll, a figure wearing a hare mask stands to her right. Smudges of lemony paint between the trees suggests the sun’s last light, blurred by misty air.

In these two paintings, Wysteria Ivy is painted outdoors—an unusual place for her to be. According to Marlatt, Wysteria Ivy assumes her persona only in the safe space of her bedroom, interacting with the outside world exclusively online. In Marlatt’s version, she is able to step outside her protected realm and roam free.

While she acknowledges that her work possesses surreal elements, Marlatt resists being classified as a surrealist. Perhaps magical realism is a more accurate description of an artist who feels “the world is full of mythologies and miracles.”

“Those who would follow a hard stoic line of practicality and logic are just fooling themselves,” says Marlatt. “They think they’re above mystic thinking, but then often they acquire a drinking problem for all their logical realism. They believe they can get rid of mythology in their life, but all we really can do is replace one mythology with another.”

Artisans Studio Tour Various locations around central Virginia. Tour the workshops of over 30 artisans. November 12-13.

The Bebedero 201 W. Main St. “Art Inspired by the Spirit.” Local artists created original art based on their experiences with mezcal and tequila. $30, November 6, 6pm.

The Center at Belvedere 540 Belvedere Blvd. A small works exhibit featuring over 30 artists, including Meredith Bennett, Joan Griffin, and Judith Ely. Through December 19. Reception November 8, 4pm. First Fridays opening.

Chroma Projects Inside Vault Virginia, Third St. SE. “Listen,” paintings and sculpture from Aggie Zed. Through December 17.

Corner Gallery Campbell Hall, UVA Grounds. “Edankraal en Route: Reviving an African American Space of Cultural Exchange in Segregated Lynchburg,” projects by UVA faculty, students, and area middle school students inspired by Harlem Renaissance poet, Anne Bethel Spencer. Through November 30. Reception November 10, 5pm.

Crozet Artisan Depot 5791 Three Notch’d Rd. “Small Graces” features photography by Bill Mauzy. Through November 30. 

C’ville Arts Cooperative Gallery 118 E. Main St., Downtown Mall. “Walks with Color,” works from  ceramic artist Trina Player. First Fridays opening.

Elmaleh Gallery Campbell Hall, UVA Grounds. “Mise-en-Scène: The Lives and Afterlives of Urban Landscapes,” from urbanist Chris Reed and photographer Mike Belleme. Through November 18.

The Fralin Museum of Art 155 Rugby Rd., UVA Grounds. “Power Play: Reimagining Representation in Contemporary Photography,” “Earthly Exemplars: The Art of Buddhist Disciples and Teachers in Asia,” and other exhibitions.

Jefferson School African American Heritage Center 233 Fourth St. NW. “Of Another Canon: African American Outsider Art,” includes works from 11 African American artists. Through January 7. 

McGuffey Art Center 201 Second St. NW. In the Smith Gallery, “Visions of the Rainforest,” mixed-media paintings by Dominique Astruc Anderson. In the First Floor Hallway, “Mindscapes, Landscapes, and Insights” by Lisa Macchi, and “Do the Trees Speak Back to the Wind” by Lindsay Diamond and Jeannine Regan. In the Second Floor Hallway, “Everything Paper,” a McGuffey member group exhibition. The Holiday Member’s Show and Shop opens November 22. First Fridays openings.

McIntire Connaughton Gallery Rouss and Robertson Halls, UVA Grounds. “From Water and Wheels to Abstracted Ideals,” acrylic and oil on canvas by Eric Cross and Stan Sweeney. Through December 9.

Phaeton Gallery 114 Old Preston Ave. Kristopher Castle’s “Curriculum Vitae” explores Thomas Jefferson’s Academical Village at the University of Virginia through a series of paintings. Through December 2. 

PVCC Gallery V. Earl Dickinson Building, 501 College Dr. Through September 9, the Annual Student Exhibition. Opening September 23, the Annual Faculty Exhibition and a retrospective of works from PVCC’s “The Fall Line” literary magazine. Through November 9.

Quirk Gallery 499 W. Main St. “Conversations,” recent individual mixed-media works by Mary Scurlock and Diego Sanchez, as well as nine works that are the result of months of collaboration between the two artists. Through December 11.

Random Row Brewery 608 Preston Ave. A. “Three Decades,” mixed-media collage from Ellen Moore Osborne.

Ruffin Hall Gallery 179 Culbreth Rd., UVA Grounds. “Breaking Water,” the collaborative work of Calista Lyon and Carmen Winant examines the profound psychological impact of ecological breakdown. Through December 9.

Second Street Gallery 115 Second St.
SE. In the Main Gallery, “Mummers,” a series of paintings and large sculptural big head masks inspired by the theme carnival by Megan Marlatt. In the Dové Gallery, “The Ceremony of Innocence,” paintings by Los Angeles-based surrealist artist Deirdre Sullivan-Beeman. Through November 18.

Studio Ix 969 Second St. SE. “About Face: Pt.1 Siren Eyes,” digital portraits by 12-year-old, self-taught artist Samari Jones. Through November 27. Artist talk and happy hour, November 17, 5pm. First Fridays opening.

Visible Records 1740 Broadway St. “Any Person I Have Robbed Was Judged By Me,” a solo show of photography by Sebastien Boncy. Through December 2.

Spooky, scary images send shivers down your spine at The Great Rotumpkin. The seasonal celebration blends the architecture of the Rotunda with pop-up projections to create a variety of haunting scenes featuring new designs from multimedia artist Jeff Dobrow. Eerie music accompanies visceral vignettes of dancing skeletons, ghostly graveyards, bubbling cauldrons, ghoulish pumpkins, and more.

Through 10/31. Free, 7pm. The Rotunda, UVA Grounds. arts.virginia.edu

Remixing, riffing, playing with memes: These are artistic modes that we sometimes think of as belonging to our own time, as though it was only in the 20th century, and only in Western countries, that artists began to knowingly recycle material. Think Roy Lichtenstein, Beastie Boys, and anybody who’s used the image of RBG’s lace collars. But artmaking has involved self-conscious imitation for a lot longer, and in a lot more places—including several hundred years ago in Asia, as revealed in “Earthly Exemplars,” a small exhibition of Buddhist art now showing at The Fralin Museum of Art at UVA.

“The exhibition features materials mainly from the 17th through 19th centuries,” says curator Clara Ma. “That was a time when there was lots of cultural exchange and diplomatic exchange between Qing China and Tibet, and also there are connections between China and Edo Japan through trade.” In choosing pieces to highlight—from elaborate paintings called thangkas to sculpture to an astonishing painting on the leaf of a Bodhi tree—Ma hopes to demonstrate that China, Tibet, and Japan were involved in a complex swirl of cross-influences. 

Walking into the show at The Fralin, that concept probably wouldn’t hit you immediately. Instead, you might be struck by the delicacy and precision of, say, a painting from Tibet, made in the 17th or 18th century, showing the Goddess of the Victorious White Parasol. She has a long name (Ushnisha Sitatapatra), a thousand faces, and a thousand arms, which are actually depicted in a dizzying, overlapping arrangement like a sunburst or a bullseye. Her ferocious power—maybe even greater than a Supreme Court justice—contrasts with the serenity of the deities around her, and the loveliness of flowers and leaves.

Or you might be drawn to a thangka, also Tibetan, showing the life story of Pindola Bharadvaja, an arhat—a disciple of the Buddha, that is, venerated in his own right. In this piece, he sits on a throne in the center of the painting, surrounded by vignettes from his biography. The piece is lush and rich, even with a constrained palette of red, green, blue, and white; it conjures a whole world and a lifetime. And Ma says its landscape, and the ornate Chinese-style throne on which the arhat sits, are elements a Tibetan artist would have borrowed from the art of the Qing dynasty. “There would be missionaries or diplomats the Qing sent to Tibet with gifts of paintings, or vice versa,” she explains. “So the style or the composition, they got influenced through these exchanges.”

She says we can think of these connections like souvenirs—bringing home a new idea for how an image could look or a technology for making something, like the woodblock print that closes the show. But maybe an even better analogy is fashion. To get dressed is to refer to any number of cultures and histories, making oneself a living library of clothes. A Japanese album from around 1695, made by a court painter named Kanō Tsunenobu, amounts to an artistic wardrobe: Tsunenobu used the album to demonstrate his mastery of different painting styles, including the loose, poetic look of the paintings Ma highlights.

“The way he created it was to study Chinese painting at the court,” she says. “At the time, China was the center of Zen, and lots of Japanese monks went to China. They’d bring back a lot of the Chinese paintings. He’s making the claim, setting up that lineage for his own art school: ‘We have these deep connections, our school has this long history.’”

It sounds very modern, like a 21st-century piano student learning Bach one day and Scott Joplin the next. “I guess one way to see that is that these artists, for them to establish their own identity is not to come up with something totally new, it’s to connect themselves to different traditions.”

There’s even another layer of borrowing going on here, she points out—one that she wasn’t able to represent in this show. “They are all making connections to India,” she says, “but I didn’t select any Indian artworks. It’s all about these regions trying to connect back to India.”

Lincoln Perry has been a prominent figure on the Charlottesville art scene since the mid-1980s. An acclaimed muralist with significant work in landscapes, figurative paintings, and sculpture, Perry’s murals grace walls around the country including the Met Life building in St. Louis and at the University of Virginia. “The Student’s Progress,” in UVA’s Old Cabell Hall, follows the journey of a fictional student named Shannon from her undergraduate days into her adulthood when she becomes a professor at the university. Consisting of 29 panels, the piece took 16 years to complete.

Perry first visited Charlottesville in 1970, and returned 15 years later to fill in for Philip Geiger, teaching drawing for a semester at UVA. It was during this time that he met his wife, author Ann Beattie, who was also teaching at UVA. After about a decade, the couple left Charlottesville, but returned in 2001. Both held teaching positions until 2012. They now divide time between Maine, Virginia, and Florida.

 C-VILLE caught up with Perry in Maine, where he was fresh off an interview with the local NPR affiliate, to talk about his new book, Seeing Like an Artist: What Artists Perceive in the Art of Others. He will discuss the book at New Dominion Bookshop on the Downtown Mall on Saturday, October 22.

C-VILLE Weekly: I think of you as a painter. Have you always written?

Lincoln Perry: No, in fact, I just came across a notebook I kept in 1981 that’s really badly written. So, somewhere along the line, I think maybe from living with Ann, I must have improved.

I was struck by the quality of your writing. There are numerous beautifully written paragraphs—I loved, in particular, your descriptions of the Bruegels. I also liked the way you integrated modern references and popular culture into your writing, it struck me as akin to what you did with paint in the Cabell Hall mural.

That’s actually interesting. I hadn’t even thought of that.

I would think your narrative talent would serve you well helping you
conceive of murals.

Yes. I wish I could do more of them. The hard part is getting the job. I was just a finalist for a courthouse in Alabama. It would have been fun. I enjoy the external collaboration of projects like that.

Are you continuing to write, and if so, how do you balance that with artmaking?

I can only paint for so long and I can only sculpt for so long, or draw for so long. Writing is a way to fill in the chinks between those other bricks.

I love the way the little sketches included in the book make us see the art through your eyes and pay attention to what you are looking at.

Some part of me thought I should make them more diagrammatic, but then I decided that doesn’t do justice to the things, so, I did my best to do copies.

What are you looking for when you look at art?

The book was originally going to be called Stealing from Museums, but the trouble was they thought it would be put in the crime section. But that’s really what it’s about—how painters and potentially non-painters learn to see in different ways. I think a lot of people are intimidated by visual art; they think there’s something they’re supposed to be getting. It’s a visual experience first. Let it wash over you and take pleasure in it. The idea is not to be intimidated or exhausted. It’s best to see some things well as opposed to trying to see everything. When I first went to Italy, I had one of the Blue Guides and I thought, because it was in the book, I had to go see it, and it became insane. Eventually, I realized that you can get more out of less.

I didn’t realize, until I read the book, that you sculpted. Is that something you’ve always done?

That started about 30 years ago. Difficulty interests me. Making a sculpture that’s legible and enticing from 360 degrees as opposed to, say, one view or two views is really difficult. About three years ago I started carving marble, which is ridiculously difficult. It’s almost too much: I feel like, c’mon, I’m too old for this. The stuff weighs a ton and is hard as a rock. But it does make me realize I spend at least as much time in museums looking at sculpture as I do paintings. They have to be seen in the round and, as I say in the book, you really have to be there in “the presence of” in order to read them properly. Which is also true of paintings, more than people know.

Describe a dream art-viewing trip.

A dream trip would be returning to the Villa Valmarana ai Nani in Vicenza, Italy, to see the Tiepolo frescoes. I also want to see Naples again because of the museums there.

As a successful creative person married to a successful creative person, how do you give equal opportunity to your respective practices?

Well, I read everything she writes, but not until she feels it’s done. It’s harder for me to lure her into the studio. She has a very good eye, but she’s really more interested in photography; she takes beautiful photographs—I think she should publish them. Painting’s a little mysterious to her and she wishes I wouldn’t carve marble because I’m getting old and I’ve got arthritis and she wonders what I’m doing this for. I totally respect what she does. I enjoy writing these essays but I cannot imagine writing fiction, and she can’t imagine painting. I suppose there are happy marriages among two painters or two writers, but in our case, it works well that we’re in different fields. 

Any upcoming exhibitions?

I’ll be in “Home and Away,” organized by Robert Stuart at the Beverley Street Studio School Gallery in Staunton, which runs from November 18 to January 2.

I hope the last line of the book sums it up. (“This isn’t the anxiety of influence; it’s the joy of influence.”) This is all supposed to be about the joy of influence. Rather than feeling oppressed or confused or intimidated by our tradition, we’re allowed to love it and enjoy it because it’s beautiful. It’s something we’ve done as humans that we can actually be proud of.