Laura Lee Gulledge (left) added LaQuinn’s lyrics to her pop-up gallery exhibition on the Downtown Mall. “Learning someone’s story turns strangers into friends,” says Gulledge in her artist’s statement.
Photo by Jill Mumie
By Alana Bittner
Just steps away from Heather Heyer Way, the faces of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Sage Smith, and others look out from the Silverchair office windows on the Downtown Mall. Painted with India ink on cardboard, 12 portraits comprise the series “Say Their Names: a BLM Tribute,” artist Laura Lee Gulledge’s homage to victims of police brutality and racial injustice. Interwoven among the portraits are the subjects’ biographies, as well as information on how to help their families.
The series began with a portrait of George Floyd that Gulledge carried to a Black Lives Matter protest in June. The work has remained connected to current events: as she was writing the subjects’ bios, white supremacists stormed the U.S. Capitol. Soon after, Gulledge collaborated with local rapper LaQuinn to create a large-scale composition book that incorporates lyrics from his song “Black Lives Matter”—only hours after they completed it, an encounter with local police left LaQuinn battered and bruised and leveling accusations of police brutality against the Charlottesville Police Department. The incident is currently under investigation.
Creating art that captures moments so immediate and devastating is difficult. “Writing out everyone’s stories for this exhibit was very challenging to process,” says Gulledge. “Plus this was the same time of the Capitol attack, which retriggered memories of the Charlottesville attack literally right next to the exhibit. It all felt very potent. Very real. Very now.”
In the face of these tragic events, honoring the memory of those lost can provide a sense of refuge and hope. “As an artist I feel that one of the best things I can contribute at this moment to my community is love,” Gulledge says. “This installation is an expression of love. It felt like a gift.”
To complement “Say Their Names: a BLM Tribute,” Gulledge is creating another series honoring those who are “Living in Peace.” She will be painting the portraits in the windows of the Silverchair building on February 19 and 20. Community members are welcome to drop by and say hello.
Drawn out:The local comic art scene is brimming with girl power and a desire to connect. Cartoonists Laura Lee Gulledge (The Dark Matter of Mona Starr), Hannah England (Strawbunny), and Mariah Bryant (Six-Petal Pyramid) present Wom Con, a pop-up gathering for those who can’t sit home anymore. The socially distanced event offers family-friendly activities such as a comics workshop, portfolio reviews, and livestreaming sister shows from studios of notable creators outside the region, including Sarah Trustman (The Memory Arts), Jennifer Hayden (The Story of My Tits), Carolyn Belefski (Curls Studio), and Paige Pumphrey (NYC Pinup queen). And if that doesn’t get you sketching, there’s a kickoff screening of Gulledge’s graphic novel musical, Will & Whit, on Friday evening (see Facebook for details).
Saturday 11/14, Free, 10am. The Bridge PAI, 209 Monticello Rd.
Saturday, April 4, graphic novelist Laura Lee Gulledge discusses her new book, The Dark Matter of Mona Starr, alongside fellow local author M.K. England. Image courtesy Laura Lee Gulledge
It goes without saying that the coronavirus pandemic has altered life as usual, but for area creatives the show must go on. Taking the place of her scheduled book release appearances, local authorLaura Lee Gulledge is hopping on Facebook Live to discuss The Dark Matter of Mona Starr, a YA graphic novel that explores anxiety, depression, the hurdles of high school, and creativity through evocative and sometimes surreal imagery. Gulledge will be joined in the discussion by fellow YA author M.K. England.
Devon Sproule is one of the Front Porch music teachers offering online lessons for her students. It’s helped her maintain some sense of routine and personal connection in this very uncertain, socially distant time, and she hopes it’s doing this same for her students. Photo by Paul Curreri
As we adjust to life amid the COVID-19 pandemic, we’ll likely turn to the arts—a favorite poem, a beloved album, a treasured painting—over and over in search of comfort and relief. Art, in all its forms, is a vital part not just of our personal lives but of our community. Social distancing measures and the resulting venue closures have turned the local creative world upside down, both for individual artists and the organizations that support them. Here’s what some of those folks are saying about the state of the arts in Charlottesville, and what might come next.
St. Patrick’s Day was supposed to be Matthew O’Donnell’s busiest day of the entire year. A multi-instrumentalist who specializes in Irish music, he was booked for 15 hours of serenading audiences, from senior center residents to late-night beer-swigging revelers.
But this year, his St. Paddy’s calendar was wide open. As the COVID-19 pandemic spreads throughout the United States, Virginia governor Ralph Northam has banned all nonessential gatherings of more than 10 people. In response, local venues that support the arts—concert halls, theaters, galleries, bookshops, libraries, restaurant-bars, you name it—have shuttered their doors for an undetermined amount of time.
This leaves O’Donnell and many other artists in Charlottesville without physical places to share their work—not just for art’s sake, but for a living. It’s also worth noting that many local artists participate in the service industry and gig economy—they tend bar, wait tables, work retail, drive ride-shares, and more. And most of those jobs are gone, or paused until, well, who knows when.
O’Donnell makes his entire living from performances, and he looks forward to the month of March—in large part because of St. Patrick’s Day—when he can bring in twice what he makes in an averagemonth, to make up for the lean ones (namely January and February).
“I began to get concerned in late February,” as the senior communities closed their doors to visitors, says O’Donnell, and that concern grew as gigs canceled one by one during the first couple weeks of March. “I thought the worst-case scenario would be that everything would shut down, but I honestly didn’t think the worst-case scenario would come.”
Matthew O’Donnell, who has seen his gig calendar wiped clean by the threat of COVID-19, hosted a concert via Facebook Live on March 18. “It went astoundingly well,” he says. “A boatload of people tuned in, [made] lots of requests. People sent videos of them and their families dancing to the music. It was really beautiful.” Photo by Katie McCartney
At first, “it was a professional worry of realizing that all of my business is gone,” says O’Donnell, who hopes he can make some money by playing donation-based virtual concerts. But the worry, the sadness, has turned personal: “These people are my friends,” he says of his audiences, particularly those folks at the senior centers. When he sings with them, he says he “feels something profound. And [now] I can’t go see my friends. I do want to be looking forward to the next thing…but all I know is that the next thing I do is going to be very different from what I’ve been doing.”
Graphic novelist Laura Lee Gulledge knows that, too. “I’m friends with change and constant reinvention,” she says.As a full-time artist Gulledge relies not just on book sales and illustration commissions but art teaching residencies. She says she often feels like she’ll “get by on the skin of my teeth, but [I] make it work.” Artists are always having to come up with new business models, she says. “It’s implode or evolve.”
Her new book, The Dark Matter of Mona Starr, is scheduled to be released on April 7, and she planned to launch it at last week’s Virginia Festival of the Book. But the festival was canceled due to the threat of COVID-19, as was the rest of her North American book tour.
In a way, the book is more relevant than Gulledge could have predicted, or ever wanted to imagine. The protagonist, Mona, is a sensitive and creative teen learning to live with anxiety and depression. In the back of the book, Gulledge includes a guide for creating a self-care plan for particularly dark and stressful times, and she shares her own.
“It’s like my masterpiece,” she says of The Dark Matter of Mona Starr. “I was finally mentally prepared to own it and step into it, and start conversations about mental health and not feel like a fraud.”
Rather than consider the whole thing a wash, Gulledge will do a virtual book tour via Facebook Live, where she’ll be talking about topics such as drawing through depression and cultivating healthy artistic practices.
The Front Porch roots music school is also pivoting to an online lessons model, to keep instructors paid and to keep students in practice. Songwriter Devon Sproule (who had to cancel her upcoming U.K. tour) usually teaches somewhere around 80 students a week between group classes and private lessons, and, so far, a handful of them have made the leap to live virtual lessons. Keeping the routine and personal connection of a lesson could be particularly important right now, says Sproule. She had to teach one young pupil how to tune a ukulele, a task Sproule had taken on in their in-person lessons. “I had no idea this kid could tune their own ukulele, and I don’t think they did either,” says Sproule. “I think it was empowering.”
The Charlottesville Players Guild, the city’s only black theater troupe, has postponed its run of August Wilson’s Radio Golf, originally scheduled to premiere at the Jefferson School African American Heritage Center April 16. The paid cast and crew were in the middle of rehearsals, and while they hope to be able to open the show on April 30, things are still very uncertain, says CPG artistic director Leslie Scott-Jones. “When you hear medical professionals say this might go through July or longer, it’s like, ‘What’ll we do?’”
Leslie Scott-Jones, a singer and theater artist who relies on performance for all of her income, is one of many Charlottesville artists left wondering what’s next, as venues have closed due to the threat of COVID-19. Publicity photo
The JSAAHC has also had to cancel two benefit concerts for Eko Ise, a music conservatory program for local black children, that the center hoped to launch later this year. Now, they’ll be months behind in that fundraising effort, says Scott-Jones.
The Bridge Progressive Arts Initiative, which provides not only a physical gallery space for visual and performance art, but funding for public art and after-school programs, has canceled all in-person events (though it is finding creative ways for people to participate from a distance, such as its virtual Quarantine Haiku video series). The Bridge has also postponed its annual Revel fundraiser, originally scheduled for May 2. Revel brings in between 20 and 30 percent of the organization’s operating budget for the year, says director Alan Goffinski,
Gulledge makes an excellent case for continued support of the arts as we face uncertainty: “This is the sort of moment where people will look to the creative thinkers to generate hope, and to generate positivity and be beacons of light in this moment of darkness. This is part of our purpose.”
The Bridge Progressive Arts Initiative and New City Arts announced Friday, March 20, that it has established the Charlottesville Emergency Relief Fund for Artists. We will have more information on that soon.
The Front Porch and WTJU 91.1 FM are also teaming up to broadcast live concerts Friday and Wednesday evenings. Follow us at @cville_culture on Twitter for regular updates about virtual arts events that will take place over the coming weeks.
Laura Lee Gulledge will launch Sketchbook Dares at The Bridge on February 10. Copies of the book are also available for purchase in the McGuffey Art Center gift shop. Supplied photo
With her new book, Sketchbook Dares: 24 Ways to Draw Out Your Inner Artist, artist, writer and teacher Laura Lee Gulledge challenges anyone of any skill level to draw. The former Louisa County art teacher says, “It’s the sort of book I wish I’d had starting off as a teacher but also as a creative working in a sketchbook.” It takes a holistic approach, she explains. “It’s about developing not just the hand but what happens to the heart, head and spirit in creative practice.”
The concept behind the sketchbook format is to present nonintimidating exercises that can be completed in a limited amount of time. “If you spend less time on a project your inner critic gets less involved,” Gulledge says. “It’s more about the process, the journey.”
One exercise, the Unwind Dare, challenges the reader to time how long it takes to draw an object, and then to draw it again in half the time, repeating the process until it can’t be repeated anymore. “It’s a way of loosening up and drawing faster so your fear can’t catch up to you,” says Gulledge. With each of the dares she pairs a relevant quote. For this one, she calls on the wisdom of Leonard Bernstein: “To achieve great things, two things are needed: a plan and not quite enough time.”
There are 24 exercises in total, 12 dares and 12 double-dares, which Gulledge explains are continuations of the initial dares “to reinforce the concept.” She suggests the book can be completed in three months by doing two exercises a week. “It’s ideal for over the summer or just for a season,” says Gulledge. “We can handle taking on a project for a season,” referring to it as “a little handheld class,” and “a way to develop your vocabulary visually.”
Some of the exercises elicit critical thinking, some self-reflection and others emotional intelligence. “Sketchbooks are vessels for collecting thoughts, emotions, ideas,” Gulledge says. For those interested in exploring their creativity but threatened by the blank page, the prompts are ideal. “I made half of a book and I need them to complete it,” she says.
It’s a sort of collaboration, or what Gulledge would call an “artnership.” She and a fellow artist coined the term when they began collaborating after each experienced a bad breakup. “We needed intimacy, but we didn’t want a boyfriend or girlfriend,” says Gulledge. “We wanted a creative intimacy. We talked about having an artner crush on somebody. I would think, ‘I want to make out with this person,’ and it was really, ‘I want to make art with this person.’”
Gulledge and her collaborator developed values for their artnership: healing, connection, flexibility, whimsy and success. “We have unofficial tenants, too,” Gulledge says, “like using snail mail and practicing self-care.” Gulledge—who returned to Charlottesville 18 months ago after seven years in New York City—says, “We’re not always creating. We have to rest.”
She likes to think of her artnerships “as part of this broader love movement. Everyone is helping redefine what love is, expanding the definition,” she says.
During the book launch at The Bridge on Saturday, attendees will have the opportunity to form their own artnerships. In addition to solo exercises, drawing activities will include the practice of drawing with an artner, creating artner valentines and filling in the remaining blank pages of Gulledge’s current sketchbook.
“Creatives aren’t necessarily good at working together but if we can, magical things can happen,” she says. “And if we can do that, we can be better about working together in the real world.”
Will and Whit stars Mia Buckley as the title character. Publicity photo
Laura Lee Gulledge wrote her young adult graphic novel Will and Whit as a show of gratitude to Charlottesville, a place that helped her pursue her ambitions. Four years later, the story is coming to life in the form of a musical in the very town where it began. Using live drawing and shadow puppetry, Wilhelmina “Will” Huckstep, a teen with a fear of the dark, faces her anxiety through a journey of friendship.
Through October 22. Pay what you like, times vary. Belmont Arts Collaborative, 221 Carlton Rd., Ste. 3. dmradventures.com.
