Tag: James Yates

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Arts Culture

Believing in ‘yes’

Image: Ashtin Bowman

Attempting to sum up a person’s life in a few words is often an unreasonable, almost futile, effort. But James Yates has a word for his wife, artist Beryl Solla, who died February 19 after a 13-year battle against cancer: Yes.

At some point during their 43-year marriage, Solla made a wooden folk-art inspired sculpture for Yates, a cutout wood angel holding a banner that says “yes.”

“It was mainly in response to my tendency to focus on what was wrong with the world, to focus on the negative,” says Yates, also an artist. “She really encouraged me to focus on what I could say ‘yes’ to in the world. I said ‘yes’ to summer, said ‘yes’ to flowers. I said ‘yes’ to spring, said ‘yes’ to a garden.”

Best known for her large mosaic murals (including one at McGuffey Park), often made in collaboration with people of all ages, Solla taught at Piedmont Virginia Community College for 15 years. As chair of PVCC’s visual and performing arts department, she advocated relentlessly on behalf of students and faculty to ensure that they had what they needed—a flat space for officeless adjunct professors to grade portfolios, a cup of tea and an ottoman for a pregnant student, a “yes” to a fantastical idea—to make and teach art.

She went out of her way to believe in people, says Lou Haney, a multimedia artist who Solla brought into the teaching fold at PVCC. “She had a way of lifting you up, and you wanted to prove her right,” she says, adding that people often went beyond the boundaries of what they thought they could do, because Solla believed they could.

Solla always spoke her mind, and her honesty was sometimes intimidating, particularly during portfolio critiques, says her longtime friend, colleague, and fellow artist Fenella Belle. “She always found something nice to say about even the most unimpressive piece…unless you hadn’t worked on it. …She did not have time for people who are full of shit.” But even that came from nurturing kindness, from knowing that everyone has something to offer the world. It was “remarkable mentoring,” says Belle.

Solla believed that art was play. She made art accessible and she made art fun. She painted the walls of PVCC’s basement-level art department in bright colors and peppered the walls of other campus buildings with student artwork. For 14 years, she made heaps of banana bread and hot chocolate for visitors to the popular “Let There Be Light” winter solstice outdoor light art show that she and Yates founded. She started a free community film series at the school. She held tile art workshops throughout the state via the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. She was funny. She paired the annual PVCC student art show with a “chocolate chow-down” to get more people in the room. Her favorite band was Talking Heads. Her students and colleagues adored her, and she adored them right back. She loved her husband, their two children, and three grandchildren deeply.

Solla “was an amazing gardener,” says Yates, who plans to continue tending to her patch. But Solla planted more than flowers, says photographer Stacey Evans, another longtime friend and colleague of Solla’s, and “although she has passed, what she has planted in Charlottesville will continue to grow.” It will. Yes.

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Arts Culture

Light in the distance: ‘Let There Be Light’ adapts to the pandemic

The exhibit takes place in front yards and businesses throughout Charlottesville Friday, December 4 and Saturday, December 5 from 6-9pm.

A few months ago, James Yates awoke from a nightmare.  He was hosting “Let There Be Light”—the same luminesce-focused art exhibit he has helmed for the past 13 years at Piedmont Virginia Community College—but there was a problem. “Nobody was wearing masks, and everybody was crowding together,” he says. “I woke up in a panic and realized we can’t do ‘Let There Be Light’ at PVCC this year.”

Yates arranged a meeting with Beryl Solla, PVCC’s chair of performing and visual arts and curator of “Let There Be Light,” to weigh their options. They agreed immediately that the program shouldn’t be canceled outright—for a number of reasons, Solla says, “we need it more than we’ve ever needed it before.”

In years past, “Let There Be Light’’ was headquartered at PVCC. The programming—which consists of several Charlottesville artists’ effulgent creations—took place outside on the college campus with refreshments, conversation, and a chance to warm up inside.

But the exhibition couldn’t exist in its typical form, which necessitated creative problem-solving. Yates thought of “Yard Dreams,” a 2016 project he had organized where installations were set up on various Belmont lawns. After some discussion, he and Solla decided to adopt the same structure for the winter solstice event.

This year, 23 “Let There Be Light” exhibits will be scattered across the city. Maps will guide people from location to location, and everyone will be asked to follow standard safety procedures, like staying in their cars when possible and wearing a mask when outside.

The curators are excited to see what might result from the restrained event, and Solla wonders how the pieces might transform it. “Drive-by art…art that’s meant to be seen at 40 miles an hour, is just so odd and surprising,” she says.

The foundational aspects of “Let There Be Light” remain unchanged. For example, the program’s emphasis on the secular will be preserved. “Separating it from Christmas,” Yates says, was a priority since its creation. The seeds for an illuminated art event were planted in his head when he was a “wee child,” and he and his family would drive around town to see neighbors’ light displays. “I wanted to replicate that magical feeling,” he says, while providing an alternative to the “hyper-commercialization of the holidays.”

This year’s program features many familiar artists, including PVCC professor Fenella Belle whose latest creation, “Border Lines,” enigmatically promises an “exploration of the role lines play in dividing and connecting us.”

Choreographer and filmmaker Shandoah Goldman returns to present two short, COVID-related films in a drive-in format at the Woolen Mills Chapel, and C. James Cunningham’s piece, “SOS,” will “be floating in the sky above the Downtown Mall,” says Yates.

Yates and Solla say that even when the arts world returns to normal, they’ll consider keeping the multiple locations as a new level of interactivity. Solla doesn’t anticipate pushback from the artists, who are a “peculiar breed…ready to try anything.”

They were, after all, amenable to this year’s changes, and willing to adapt so that a program intended to combat darkness could continue to do so in a particularly dim year. Solla says they all agreed: “We need the light, we need the love, we need the vision for the future.”

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Arts

ARTS Pick: ‘Let There Be Light’

The illuminated art installation “Let There Be Light” dapples the PVCC campus on Friday. Courtesy of the artist

Despite the short days and early nightfall, there’s light on the horizon at the 10th annual “Let There Be Light” installation. James Yates curates an eye-dazzling array of work from area artists that challenges the senses and offers magical perspectives, including Yates’ “Luminous Egg Hunt,” which he says is “drawn from the writings of Carlos Castaneda, which refers to the energetic configuration of humans that can be seen by seers or shaman from his shamanic lineage.”

Friday, December 9. Free, 6pm. PVCC, V. Earl Dickinson Building, 501 College Dr. 977-6918.

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Arts

PVCC’s ‘Yard Dreams’ installations take over Belmont Avenue

Fenella Belle and Stacey Evans’ “Allee of Dreams” is part of the “Yard Dreams” art installation displayed in the front yards of Belmont Avenue homes on Saturday and Sunday. Courtesy of the artist

During the second weekend in September, members of the community will have the opportunity to view and contemplate art while enjoying the outdoors and mingling with neighbors in what local artist James Yates calls an “out of gallery” experience. “Yard Dreams” is a collective of installations in the front yards of select homes along Belmont Avenue running east of Avon Street. There will be a reception on Saturday afternoon in front of one of the homes, and a map on the “Yard Dreams” website (yarddreamspvcc.com) shows the location of each installation.

The project is the nocturnal brainchild of Yates. He describes a dream he had two years ago in which he was walking in a neighborhood and looked up to see that the artist Christo had created an installation that spanned all the yards along the street.

Yates says, “I woke up and thought, ‘That’s a great idea. I’m going to steal it.’ So ‘Yard Dreams’ is happily named.”

He shared his idea with a friend who lived in Belmont and suggested they combine the art installation with a neighborhood block party. After securing the community’s approval, “Yard Dreams” was born.

Curated by Yates and sponsored by the Piedmont Virginia Community College Art Gallery, this year’s collective showcases the work of 16 artists with installations in 13 front yards. The event has grown organically without theme or direction, and the artists have the freedom to imagine whatever they like to fill the space they have been given.

“I never ask for a proposal with any events I do,” Yates says. “I just want to see if their work is great, invite them to join and allow them to do what they feel is best for the event.”

After neighborhood families volunteer their yards for the project and Yates provides the addresses, the participating artists decide where they would like to showcase their work and they reserve their desired location on a first-come, first-served basis.

Some of the art is dependent on the environment the yard provides, such as a piece by Fenella Belle and Stacey Evans titled “Allee of Dreams,” an installation of blue silk panels strung from trees that embraces the ethereal nature of dreams. In a piece called “There’s No Place Like…” Beryl Solla, the director of PVCC’s art gallery, and collaborator Angi Curreri explore the concept of home. Other installations vary from a steel-and-twine sculpture that invokes cobwebs, a garden of tubers and beets that produces music and trees intended for planting to revitalize the city’s green canopy.

One of the most elaborate installations is a collection of eight works curated by Bill Bennett, sculptor and professor of art at UVA. One of these is a project titled “Yard Dreams UNearthED: Art/Archeology” that entails an excavation that will take place on Saturday afternoon. Neighborhood elementary school students will work with UVA archaeology students to unearth a bronze-and-concrete monument called “The Tentacle,” buried beneath a mountain of adobe bricks, each containing a small artifact. Bennett explains that it is a small version of a large public artwork that the UVA sculpture community is creating at Baker-Butler Elementary School.

Yates credits Solla’s partnership in bringing “Yard Dreams” to fruition. They also work together on PVCC’s “Let There Be Light,” a show of artists’ installations using light, now in its 10th year and drawing as many as 3,000 people.

“She goes way out of her way to make these kinds of things happen,” says Yates.

Yates began curating at a young age. “It started when I was a kid and me and neighborhood kids would get together and just make stuff,” he says. “We made a miniature golf course. We made a big cart that was just a weird contraption with wheels. We were always doing stuff and making stuff together. We dug a hole deep under my house. We made a spook house and a magic show. I have a history of doing events involving people, interactive events, since I was a kid. Then I went to art school and kept doing it.”

After living in Charlottesville for more than 15 years, he is still drawn to the collaborative aspect, in sharing performance space and organizing interactive installations that bring the community together—in Belmont and beyond.