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Dog tales: Mysterious public art series uses frankfurters to make a point

They appeared over the summer, three identical wheatpaste posters of anthropomorphic hot dogs in buns, wearing sneakers and pedaling unicycles as they exclaimed in speech bubbles, “Hot dog!”

One, pasted to the side of the raised parking lot between Market and South Streets, was gone after about a week, but the others—on Cherry Avenue and West Main Street, stuck around. And then more started to pop up.

“A hard rain’s gonna fall,” warns a hot dog holding an umbrella on the Dewberry hotel skeleton. “Lockheed Martin stock increased 3.6% today,” its twin hollers from the side of another downtown building. “Rise up,” insists one standing atop a pair of stilts. “Shred the gnar,” “no war but class war,” say two others on skateboards.

A few weeks ago, the images appeared on Instagram under the handle @stilts_walker, and this reporter saw it as an opportunity to catch up with the artist, Charlottesville’s hot dog Banksy, if you will.

I slid into @stilts_walker’s DMs, expecting the wurst (“no way, you weenie”). But the artist agreed to an interview on three conditions: One, that we link up in the old Chili’s parking lot. Two, that I mention the location of our meeting in this story. And three, that their identity remain anonymous.

Image courtesy @stilts_walker

As we sit in my car on a chilly January day, the artist is frank about how the sausage was made. “People should do the things they wish were happening. I wanted to see this happening, so I did it,” the artist says. “I thought a hot dog on a unicycle sounded fun. It’s ubiquitous…everyone can inherently understand the humor in an animated hot dog. And it’s easy to draw, fast.”

“I initially didn’t plan on doing more than one,” @stilts_walker continues. “I had some supplies and a few free hours, so I threw it together and didn’t give much thought to continuing the project or doing new things, new adaptations.”

At the same time, the artist understands the influence art and culture can have in shaping movements, particularly progressive movements. Could an anthropomorphic hot dog help shape a movement, even in a small way? The artist believes it can. The character can be adapted into a variety of situations, and more than one dimension (at least conceptually speaking…the posters are 2-D), and it can say just about anything. “The things that are being expressed in these speech bubbles are things that a lot of people are thinking about all the time, so why wouldn’t the hot dog also be thinking about them? It seemed like a way to, in a fairly non-aggressive manner, communicate some pretty blunt ideas and ideologies,” says the artist, who’s incorporated social and political commentary into some of the posters (i.e., “Rise up”).

A couple weeks ago, the artist pasted up a hot dog riding a hobby horse in the CAT bus shelter on Market Street directly across from the Robert E. Lee statue in Market Street Park. The illustration humorously mocks the statue, but the speech bubble’s no joke: “That’s racist,” this hot dog said.

This particular poster, pasted in the CAT bus shelter on Market Street directly across from the Robert E. Lee statue, was removed within hours of its appearance. Image courtesy @stilts_walker

That particular poster disappeared only a few hours after it went up, but the artist isn’t jumping to conclusions about why it was removed. It may or may not have been a statue supporter who took it down, the artist says. “It could very well just be the reality that a bus driver sees something and reports it, and perhaps Charlottesville Area Transit has a reputation for quickly addressing graffiti concerns on their property.”

The artist (or artists…there may be more than one hot dogger out there) hopes the wheatpaste posters can inspire, or at least pique the curiosity of Charlottesville’s citizens. “It’s no earth-shattering or groundbreaking act,” the artist says of the work. “But I do strongly believe that culture, and having a vibrant, creative underbelly in a city is critical to maintaining [that city’s] cultural identity. And I would like that identity to be progressive and welcoming and friendly, and fun.”

And by doing this anonymously, @stilts_walker isn’t just watching their buns. That anonymity injects a much-needed element of curiosity into the city. People (including some Charlottesville city councilors) regularly post their own pics of the hot dog posters to social media, expressing surprise and delight over the project that began on a playful whim and has evolved into something quite engaging. Some folks have even sent the artist fan art.

Image courtesy @stilts_walker

Going forward, the series creator plans to play around with the poster illustrations, text, and context in order to keep Charlottesville on its toes and in conversation with whatever these hot dogs have to say.

“In a small-ish town like Charlottesville, where it’s easy to feel like you know everything about everything, having a little mysterious whimsy enter your day, enter your life, is exciting,” says the artist. The hot dogs give us something to relish.

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January galleries guide

Precarious balance

Polly Breckenridge’s monotypes at Chroma Projects

Part of the appeal of printmaking is that it gives an artist the ability to create multiple copies of the same image.

But for local artist Polly Breckenridge, the attraction lies in the printmaking process itself—the way the pressure of the press embosses each design element into the paper, for instance—and how it satisfies her craving for “creating objects of beauty with color and layers and texture.” And so she uses that process to make monotypes (unique, one-off prints), some of which are on view in “You Belong Here Now,” at Chroma Projects gallery through January.

Image courtesy the artist

Inspired in part by No One Belongs Here More Than You, a collection of short stories published by filmmaker, writer, and performance artist Miranda July in 2005, Breckenridge’s series of monotypes use shape, line, color, texture, and a set series of human gestures to create compositions that she says “[analyze] how much we have in common, and how we’re different,” that address “our precarious balance as we go through our lives, as to where we belong, and that feeling of belonging.”

Some of the prints are vibrant and bold, with layers of ink covering most of the space; others are more ephemeral. Similar figures repeat throughout the series, representative of gestures that Breckenrdige created and chose “as an expression of a certain universal feeling.”

In one piece, a figure plunges headfirst into a hoop, only its legs still visible, in what Breckenridge calls “a visual representation of diving down a rabbit hole,” of how sometimes it’s easy to dive into another person (or even oneself), but other times, with a different person, that same action is quite difficult.

Image courtesy the artist

Another piece shows a figure caught by the big hand in “a falling kind of gesture,” says Breckenridge. “Being caught by something bigger than yourself, which could be the collective consciousness, or another person that’s there to catch you.”

Because each viewer brings their own experience and interpretation to the pieces, Breckenridge constantly learns new things about the meaning contained within her works. Perhaps that’s because, like the monotypes themselves, we humans are all alike, and yet each of us is completely unique.


First Fridays: January 3

Openings

Chroma Projects Inside Vault Virginia, Third Street SE. “You Belong Here Now,” featuring monotype prints by Polly Breckenridge. 5-7pm.

Fellini’s 200 W. Market St. “The Creator’s Creation,” a show of photography by Laura Parker. 5:30-7pm.

McGuffey Art Center 201 Second St. NW. In the Sarah B. Smith Gallery, “”, featuring acrylic and mixed media works by Jim Henry; in all other hall galleries, the new members show, featuring photography, metalwork, oil paintings, and more by new McGuffey associate members. 5:30-7:30pm.

Michael Williams at McGuffey Art Center

New Dominion Bookshop 404 E. Main St., Downtown Mall. “New Zealand Watercolors,” an exhibition of work by Blake Hurt. 5-7pm.

WriterHouse 508 Dale Ave. An exhibition of photography by Charlie Dean. 5-7pm.


Other January shows

Albemarle County Circuit Court 501 E. Jefferson St. An exhibition of work by members of the Central Virginia Watercolor Guild.

The Bridge Progressive Arts Initiative 209 Monticello Rd. “Ridged,” an exhibition of work by local LGBTQ+ artists. Opens January 10.

Buck Mountain Episcopal Church 4133 Earlysville Rd., Earlysville. “Coloring Outside the Lines,” featuring fluid acrylic works by Paula Boyland.

C’Ville Arts Cooperative Gallery 118 E. Main St., Downtown Mall. Studio sale, featuring works from member artists.

The Fralin Museum of Art at UVA 155 Rugby Rd. “Otherwise,” exploring the influence of LGBTQ+ artists, and  “Time to Get Ready: fotografia social,” both through January 5; “Select Works from the Alan Groh-Buzz Miller Collection”; and “The Inside World: Contemporary Aboriginal Australian Memorial Poles,” and “Figures of Memory,” both opening January 24.

Java Java 421 E. Main St., Downtown Mall. “How do you C’ville?,” an exhibit by Allison Shoemaker highlighting local businesses and investors.

Jefferson School African American Heritage Center 233 Fourth St. NW. “A Place Fit for Women,” featuring paintings by Robert Shetterly. Opening January 18, 6-8pm.

Les Yeux du Monde 841 Wolf Trap Rd. “Dean Dass: Venus and the Moon,” featuring atmospheric landscape paintings as well as stylized works of abstracted shapes and heavily worked surfaces, through January 19, with a reception January 12, 2-4pm; and “Time: Ann Lyne, John McCarthy, Ana Rendich” opening January 25, 4-6pm.

Ana Rendich at Yes Leux Du Monde

Mudhouse Coffee 213 W. Main St. “CONFLICT/Resolution,” Adam Disbrow’s series reflecting the merger of the “seen” with the “unseen.”

Northside Library 705 Rio Rd. W. “Bold,” featuring acrylic paintings by Novi Beerens and collages by Karen Whitehill.

Over the Moon Bookstore 2025 Library Ave., Crozet. “Natural Light,” a show of oil and acrylic paintings by John Carr Russell.

Radio IQ/WVTF 216 W. Water St. “40 Faces, 40 Years,” a photography exhibit marking the forty years of service of the Virginia Poverty Law Center. Opening January 15, 5-7pm.

Second Street Gallery 115 Second St. SE. In the Main Gallery, “Illuminations & Illusions,” a show of paintings and sculpture spanning more than four decades of Beatrix Ost’s career as a visual artist, through January 10; and “By the Strength of Their Skin,” paintings by Regina Pilawuk Wilson, Mabel Juli, and Nonggirrnga Marawili, three of Australia’s most acclaimed women artists, opening January 24. In the Dové Gallery, “The Slow Death of Rocks,” reverse painting on glass and sculpture by Doug Young, through January 10.

Madeleine Rhondeau-Rhodes at Woodberry Forest School

Sentara Martha Jefferson Hospital 500 Martha Jefferson Way. “Dreamy Landscapes,” featuring work in oil by Julia Kindred.

Shenandoah Valley Art Center 122 S. Wayne Ave., Waynesboro. “Modern Folk Art,” a juried exhibition; “Iconoclasts,” featuring works on fabric by Annie Layne; and “Small Works,” featuring pieces by SVAC members.

Spring Street Boutique 107 W. Main St., Downtown Mall. “Marker’s Edge,” featuring works in marker on paper by Philip Jay Marlin.

Studio IX 969 Second St. SE. “Retrospective,” a show chronicling more than a decade of the “Every Day is a Holiday” calendars made annually by collaborative artists and lifelong friends Eliza Evans and Virginia Rieley. 5:30-7:30pm.

Welcome Gallery 114 Third St. NE. “Shadow Sites,” an exhibition of installation and photographic work by Steaphan Paton and Robert Fielding, two acclaimed contemporary Australian Indigenous artists. Opening January 24.

Woodberry Forest School 898 Woodberry Forest Rd., Woodberry Forest. “in context.,” featuring paintings in acrylic on canvas and paper by Madeleine Rhondeau-Rhodes. Reception January 9, 6:30-7:30pm.


First Fridays is a monthly art event featuring exhibit openings at many area art galleries and exhibition venues. Several spaces offer receptions. To list an exhibit, email arts@c-ville.com.

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All in good fun: ‘Retrospective’ at IX spans 15 years and thousands of holidays

Two days before the opening of their joint show at Studio IX, Virginia Rieley and Eliza Evans are together in the gallery space, spreading their art multi-dimensionally throughout the room. Evans is on a ladder, hanging dried gourds that she grew in her garden and then used as portrait canvases. Rieley stands in front of a long table, contemplating pages of the calendars the two artists have created every year since 2006. She’s trying to figure out how to represent 15 years’ worth of calendars on one wall. It’s big, but not that big.

The art in this show—simply and aptly called “Retrospective”—spans a lot of time within the boundaries of greater Charlottesville. The women are true locals and their friendship is local too, having begun when they were grade schoolers at Red Hill Elementary. In some ways, their collaboration reaches back to those childhood days. “The comedy thing came first—we would make each other laugh,” says Evans.

“We’d make rhyming poems,” says Rieley. “And little songs,” adds Evans.

Since Evans’ father, John Borden Evans, is a well-known local painter, “There was always paint around,” says Evans. Being an artist seemed natural.

The other walls of the gallery feature individual work: Evans’ portraits and Rieley’s collages. It was while Rieley and Evans were living together in Scottsville, around 2006, that Evans painted her first portraits of friends, in the form of a mural inside their shared house. She realized she’d tapped into a rich vein. Portraits—mostly simple, frontal portraits painted on wood, with a solid background color—soon became her signature.

“I really like people,” she says, “and I always paint from life.” For several years before her children were born, she was known for setting up a mobile studio on the Downtown Mall and doing on-the-spot portraits. Many of the 180 or so portraits that cover the long wall in this gallery—arranged so the background colors form an enormous rainbow—come from those mall sessions, and picture people who let Evans borrow the pieces back for this show. Then there are the ones she painted “of people without a job, who were sitting there talking to me anyway,” she remembers. “I accumulated quite a few.”

The show includes newer works too, and taken as a whole, they record a Charlottesville era. A lot of viewers will probably spot several faces they know on this wall. There are couples, kids, dogs and cats. “It’s history, but it’s not a photo,” Evans says. “It’s an impression.” Most of her subjects aren’t smiling or presenting themselves too self-consciously; one senses that Evans’ easy manner has allowed them to sit still and look back at her, even as she closely observes them. The portraits honor people in detail and spirit.

Evans doesn’t think her style has changed much over the years, but she says she’s gotten more efficient. “There used to always be a moment when I wasn’t sure it would come together, but now I never have a doubt,” she says. “I just do it.”

Rieley’s work, meanwhile, focuses on the local settings that the people in Evans’ portraits probably know well. Her collages—constructed from photos, watercolor, and ink—will feel familiar to anyone who’s lived in Charlottesville, with their mix of iconic and ordinary spots around town. Serpentine walls and the Beta Bridge are here, but so are modest streetscapes and anonymous garages. “I’ve been honing the formula over the last 10 years,” she says.

These images have often become backgrounds for the pages of the calendar that Evans and Rieley have created together for the last decade and a half. Though the images—which layer Evans’ portraits over Rieley’s collages, and sometimes include rhyming poems à la their school days—are appealing, the calendar’s real claim to fame is captured in its moniker: Every Day Is a Holiday.

The concept arose when both artists worked at the farm known as The Best Of What’s Around. One of them wondered aloud when the next holiday was, but then realized that the month of August is bereft of holidays. So Rieley and Evans started inventing their own reasons to celebrate and marking them on a calendar.

These run the gamut: Notice Your Privilege Day, Swimming Day, Do Someone A Favor Day, Kissing Day. Each one is lettered onto its square in Rieley’s neat hand. Over 15 years, some holidays have remained attached to their dates while others have shifted or been replaced.

Meanwhile, each year, the duo have come up with a slightly different concept for filling the upper calendar page, the one that features an image. Sometimes they’ve focused more on text in decorative frames, sometimes on landscapes. To represent the calendars in this show, they’ll choose eight complete years to tack up on that big wall—a sprawling grid of local people, places, and homegrown holidays. (If you’re interested in the 2020 version, look for it on Etsy.)

All the calendars—true to the concept—grow from the same spirit of celebration, not to mention freewheeling creativity. (Poem next to a portrait of a young, serious-looking man: “My name is Patrick. / I’m handsome and nice. / Lately I’ve been making / really good fried rice.”)

“We don’t take ourselves super-seriously,” says Rieley. “But we’re both perfectionists,” adds Evans. Rieley clarifies: “We want it to be enjoyed.”


Eliza Evans and Virginia Rieley’s “Retrospective” show is on view at Studio IX through February 2.

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ARTS Pick: Let There Be Light (rescheduled to Sat.)

Glow up: The longest night of the year is celebrated with beauty and promise at the annual Let There Be Light festival. To honor the approaching solstice, curator and artist James Yates features illuminated outdoor works by Circe Strauss, Patty Swygert, Chris Haske, Andrew Sherogan, Dom Morse, and a group of Murray High School students, plus faculty members Fenella Belle, Jeremy Taylor, Allyson Mellberg Taylor, and Ed Miller.

RESCHDULED to Saturday, December 14. Free, 6pm. PVCC Grounds, 501 College Dr. 977-6918.

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Stitches in time: Jo Lee Tarbell pushes the needle on quilting traditions

Jo Lee Tarbell likes fabric and color, and the evidence is all around this 85-year-old quilter’s Charlottesville home.

A traditional quilt she hand-stitched stretches across her bed, at its center a multi-color, many-pointed star bursting forth from an ivory background. Draped over the back of an upholstered armchair is a piece Tarbell calls “Earth, Wind, and Fire,” an abstract quilt made with rich, jewel-tone fabrics and mesh pockets full of stones she collected from her driveway.

Above the nearby mantel hangs a framed “confetti quilt” of a Tuscan villa scene made of countless tiny scraps of fabric and thousands of stitches. It looks like an Impressionist painting both in composition and its concern for light, each piece of fabric like an individual brush stroke. These are just a few of the pieces she has on display, folded on shelves, and on various tables and countertops.

Tarbell’s fascination with sewing began when she was a child, watching her great-grandmother work on a treadle machine. By the time Tarbell reached junior high school, she made all of her own clothes; in college, she sewed between her liberal arts coursework.

After college, she started teaching quilting, wrote quilting books, and ran her own quilt shop, The Handmaiden, in Dayton, Ohio. She started traveling, teaching and exhibiting her own work in just about every major city in the U.S. (and once in Salzburg, Austria). Her husband often gave her a hand, as did their two sons, Rich (a Charlottesville-based photographer) and Rob (a fine arts professor at Virginia Commonwealth University).

Throughout the first half of the 20th century, quilting was regarded by most as an old-fashioned, niche craft, a folk art. But as Robert Shaw notes in his book The Art Quilt, in the two decades leading up to the United States bicentennial in 1976, “feminist historians began to reexamine the role of women in American society and art and pointed with great pride to the forgotten work of their foremothers. For the first time, quilts were read as social documents, embodying the history and values of their otherwise silent makers.” And so mid-20th-century quilters revived and recreated some of those more traditional patterns, like the log cabin, bear’s claw, nine-patch, pinwheel, and eight-pointed star.

Before long, quilters started to put their own spin on the patterns and the process, creating expressive pieces that could be sculptural and painterly and blurred the line between fine art and craft. Thus began the art quilt movement, which Tarbell has helped evolve over the last half century, including here in Charlottesville, her home for the last 20 years. She’s a founding member of the local Fiber and Stitch Collective, offering both classes and critiques to local quilters. And she’s taught her two granddaughters to sew, too.

Tarbell describes her own quilting as abstract. She’s inspired by fabric first—its fiber, color, pattern, texture. She can use the fabric as it is, or alter it by adding or stripping dye. The fabric asks her, “What else? What else? What else?” as she considers how to make a circle more interesting: overlap them, make them different sizes, cut them up into other shapes. She’ll add embellishment and embroidery, use different stitching techniques, all the while considering color, texture, and composition.

“It’s endless, really,” what you can do “when it’s not a pattern anymore,” Tarbell says with a wink.

Tarbell’s passion was nearly interrupted a year and a half ago, when she went into the hospital for a knee replacement and came out five weeks later, unable to walk on her own. She moved into an assisted living facility and sewing became more of an effort that it had ever been before. She decided to part with most of her quilting accoutrements—keeping just a few boxes of material, which her sons brought to her, along with her sewing machine.

But, as it always has, the fabric called to her—the greens, the purples, the patterns—and she started a new quilt. “It doesn’t matter what it looks like,” she told herself as she cut, sewed, embroidered some botanical shapes, and added some buttons, going with the flow the fabric revealed to her. “The more I could prove to myself that I was making something artistic, the happier I was,” she says of the quilt that’s on view this month in the Fiber and Stitch Collective’s “Best of 2019” show at CitySpace. “It was very much a healing thing.”

Healing enough that she regained some mobility and moved back home to live among the work that causes her to innovate and push the limits of what she expects of herself as an artist. “I’ve surprised me sometimes,” she exclaims, eyes wide as she looks around at her pieces. “You have to keep doing what you love. You really do.”


Jo Lee Tarbell’s art quilt, as well as an instructional demonstration on “inspiration,” is on view at CitySpace this month, as part of the Fiber and Stitch Collective’s “Best of 2019” show.

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December galleries guide

Creature conflicts

People often describe Aggie Zed’s sculptures as “whimsical,” or “cute.”

“I can see whimsical, but I don’t ever see cute,” says the artist, who uses handmade ceramic and mechanical bits in combination with found materials such as scrap metal, wire, and plastic milk jugs to create what she calls “really dear beings that struggle” with themselves, with one another, and with technology.

Though Zed’s creatures possess both human and animal qualities—a human face beneath a pair of perky rabbit ears, or a dog dancing on human feet—Zed’s work, on view at Chroma Projects gallery through the month of December, is about the human condition. “My work is about people, the kinds of situations humans get themselves into and have to get themselves out of,” she says.

Aggie Zed’s “Catch Me.” Image courtesy the artist

This is evident in the 10-inch-tall sculpture “Catch Me.” As two dogs dance hand in hand among wires and some scaffolding, one stands on tiptoe and leans forward, trusting the bottom dog to catch her. But it’ll be difficult: The bottom dog has already rocked back over its heels, legs splayed out, falling backwards, seemingly prepared to hit the floor. There’s no telling the outcome for these familiar, weird little creatures; perhaps they’ll keep dancing, perhaps they’ll collapse. (Not exactly a “cute” scenario.)

And while the other pieces are smaller, they’re no less complicated in construction and story. “I see most of my characters as being the common man, or the common person—not a creature or being of power,” says Zed, who points out that her work “can get dark” sometimes. “What people do, what people are, there’s certainly dark material there.” But there’s still something hopeful about them. As Zed says, “they look like you want them to succeed.”


Openings

The Bridge Progressive Arts Initiative 209 Monticello Rd. “Give + Take,” a swap shop meets free store meets surplus redistribution meets curb alert. 6pm.

Chroma Projects Inside Vault Virginia, Third Street SE. “Dancing in Their Heads,” featuring Aggie Zed’s fantastical animated sculpture, and Kelly Lonergan’s drawings of the subconscious life of his protagonists. 5-7pm.

CitySpace 100 Fifth St. NE. “Best of 2019” a show of work by the Fiber and Stitch Art Collective. 5-7:30pm.

C’ville Arts Cooperative Gallery 118 E. Main St., Downtown Mall. “A Clothesline of Characters,” featuring imaginative, hand-knit puppets, mittens, and hats by Mary Whittlesey. 6-8pm.

McGuffey Art Center 201 Second St. NW. In all galleries, the McGuffey members holiday shop, featuring ornaments, cards, prints, original art, jewelry, glassware, home decor, and more. 5:30-7:30pm.

Adam Disbrow at Mudhouse

Mudhouse Coffee 213 W. Main St. “CONFLICT/Resolution,” Adam Disbrow’s series reflecting the merger of the “seen” with the “unseen.” 5-7pm.

New Dominion Bookshop 404 E. Main St., Downtown Mall. “New Zealand Watercolors,” an exhibition of work by Blake Hurt. 5-7pm.

Second Street Gallery 115 Second St. SE. In the Main Gallery, “Illuminations & Illusions,” a show of paintings and sculpture spanning more than four decades of Beatrix Ost’s career as a visual artist; and in the Dové Gallery, “The Slow Death of Rocks,” reverse painting on glass and sculpture by Doug Young. 5:30-7:30pm.

Spring Street Boutique 107 W. Main St., Downtown Mall. “Marker’s Edge,” featuring works in marker on paper by Philip Jay Marlin. 6-8pm.

Studio IX 969 Second St. SE. “Retrospective,” a show chronicling more than a decade of the “Every Day is a Holiday” calendars made annually by collaborative artists and lifelong friends Eliza Evans and Virginia Rieley. 5:30-7:30pm.

Terry Coffey’s Studio 230 Court Square, Ste. 101 B. “Good Cheer,” watercolor, acrylic, and oil paintings, as well as handmade jewelry and handpainted birdhouses. 5-7pm.

VMDO Architects 200 E. Market St. “VMDO Artisans,” a mixed-media show of work by Diana Fang, Bethany Pritchard, Maggie Thacker, John Trevor, and others. 5:30-7:30pm.

Welcome Gallery 114 Third St. NE. The 2019 New City artist exchange exhibit, featuring pottery, works on paper, photography, and paintings by Angela Gleeson, Amdane Sanda, Julia Loman, Kori Price, Somé Louis, Steve Haske, and others. 5-7:30pm.

WVTF Radio IQ 216 W. Water St. An exhibition of work by more than a dozen photographers from the Charlottesville Camera Club. 5-7pm.

Yellow Cardinal Studio 301 E. Market St. A show of small works for holiday giving. 4-7pm.

 

Other December shows

Tatiana Yavorksa-Antrobius at Woodberry Forest School

Albemarle County Circuit Court 501 E. Jefferson St. An exhibition of work by members of the Central Virginia Watercolor Guild.

Barn Swallow Artisan Gallery 796 Gillums Ridge Rd. A show of work by jeweler and fiber artist Nancy Bond. December 14, 3-5pm.

Carpediem Exhibit 1429 E. High St. A collection of artwork created by 40 artists and artisans, including Janly Jaggard, V-Anne Evans, and the Geiger family.

The Center 491 Hillsdale Dr. “At Home and Abroad,” photographs by Frank Feigert.

The Fralin Museum of Art at UVA 155 Rugby Rd. “Otherwise,” exploring the influence of LGBTQ+ artists; “Time to Get Ready: fotografia social”; and “Select Works from the Alan Groh-Buzz Miller Collection.”

Free Union Country School 4220 Free Union Rd., Free Union. Artisans’ open house, featuring pottery by Nancy Ross, backgammon boards by Dave Heller, and more. December 7 and 8, 10am-4pm.

The Gallery at Ebb & Flow 71 River Rd., Faber. “Golden Hours,” an exhibit of recent photographs by Jack Taggart.

Les Yeux du Monde 841 Wolf Trap Rd. “Dean Dass: Venus and the Moon,” featuring atmospheric landscape paintings as well as stylized works of abstracted shapes and heavily worked surfaces.

Over the Moon Bookstore 2025 Library Ave., Crozet. “Natural Light,” a show of oil and acrylic paintings by John Carr Russell. Opens December 7.

Piedmont Virginia Community College 501 College Dr. PVCC Pottery Club’s annual sale. December 7, 9am-noon.

Shenandoah Valley Art Center 122 S. Wayne Ave., Waynesboro. A juried exhibition of modern folk art; “Iconoclasts,” featuring recent works on fabric by Annie Layne; and a  show of small works by SVAC member artists. Opens December 14, 5-7pm.

Jerry O’Dell at Studio 453

Studio 453 1408 Crozet Ave. Artisan open studio with stained glass artist Jerry O’Dell. December 14, 1-4pm.

Thomas Jefferson Memorial Church Unitarian-Universalist 717 Rugby Rd. “Season of Light,” a community show. Opens December 1, noon.

Uplift Thrift Store 600 Concord Ave. An exhibit of works by painter Karen Mozee. Opens December 20, 4-6pm.

Vitae Spirits 715 Henry Ave. “A Pilgrim’s Journey to Spain, Scotland, and France,” featuring new oil paintings by Randy Baskerville.

Westminster Canterbury 250 Pantops Mountain Rd. “The Pleasure of Your Company,” an exhibit of paintings by Judith Ely. Opens December 2, 2:30-3:30pm.

Woodberry Forest School 898 Woodberry Forest Rd., Woodberry Forest. “Living in the Moment,” featuring drawings and paintings by Tatiana Yavorska-Antrobius. Reception November 14, 6:30-7:30pm.


First Fridays is a monthly art event featuring exhibit openings at many area art galleries and exhibition venues. Several spaces offer receptions. To list an exhibit, email arts@c-ville.com.

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Inspired recollections: Dean Dass’ stylistic parallels on view at Les Yeux du Monde

A professor of printmaking at UVA, where he has taught since 1985, Dean Dass began painting 20 years ago, with the process-rich, methodical approach of a printmaker. “Dean Dass: Venus and the Moon” at Les Yeux du Monde marks the artist’s 10th solo show at the gallery, and he continues to work in both disciplines.

Looking at the show, two styles of work are immediately apparent. There are the evocative paintings that capture so perfectly the effects of light and atmosphere on the landscape. And then there are the more stylized works that feature abstract shapes and heavily worked surfaces.

Dass produced the landscapes following a trip through northern Michigan and Ontario that paralleled one taken by The Group of Seven, a cohort of Canadian landscape painters, active between 1920 and 1933. Like Dass, the Seven shared an affinity for the rugged beauty of the north as well as an appreciation of the work of Nordic artists like Edvard Munch, Jonas Heiska, and Akseli Gallen-Kallela.

“Fireflies,” “Figure in Space,” “Seven Clouds,” and “Flower,” are representative of the other strain, revisiting images Dass initially used in collages and prints produced 25 years ago that were first exhibited in a 2001 show he did at Galleria Harmonia in Jyväskylä, Finland entitled “Räjähdyksiä Maisemassa” (“Landscape with Explosions”). The works were inspired by screen shots of the video games his children were playing at the time, as well as sci-fi film stills. You never know when inspiration will strike and these small, seemingly insignificant and rather eccentric images have provided a wealth of fodder for Dass over the years.

Dass takes a profoundly cerebral approach to his practice, incorporating history, mythology, and philosophy into the work. This may help explain why he sees his entire output as closely aligned. It’s true, even his most abstract works are rooted in nature—the titles: “Clouds,” “Fireflies,” “Flower,” and “Explosions” tell you this. And he goes further, incorporating nature directly into the works, using such organic materials as graphite, gold leaf, and mica. Even the washes of pigment that pervade the work have a connection, recalling the “impossibly pink” rock formations Dass encountered in Canada.

Working with intention, but also leaving a good deal up to chance, Dass embraces both new and old media and techniques. He uses the same glazes that northern Renaissance artists employed and mixes his own pigments at the same time that he takes inspiration from computer and TV screen images, while availing himself of an inkjet printer.

With its heavily worked, almost excavated quality and dynamic abstract form, “Figure in Space” seems both ancient and contemporary, flat and three-dimensional. Rendered in gold leaf, the figure of the title, with its knobby, splayed “arms,” has a kinetic quality and it seems to be floating or spinning. Its scale is unclear, it could be molecular, or some giant extraterrestrial body.

Displayed in the back room of the gallery are a series of small, mixed-media works on paper, most of which incorporate printmaking techniques. These charming, often amusing, odd pieces are appealing both aesthetically and on account of the quirkiness of their subject matter. Particular favorites are “Astronaut,” produced in collaboration with Jyrki Markkanen, the memento mori, “The King!” from 1995, “Four Tents,” and “Camping in the Clouds.”

Dass’ paintings of downy woodpeckers are remarkably evocative. There’s no bird body there, just an arrangements of brushstrokes and pigments. They’re like deconstructed birds, but they deftly emulate the soft feathers, distinct markings, and essential birdiness of their subjects.

“Etna Highlands” and the smaller, looser “Frozen Bog Etna Highlands” present the same scene of woods and water in winter. The paintings are modest in terms of subject matter and palette, and yet, they ring true thanks to the way Dass creates the light of the setting sun. And it’s not just that the apricot hue is spot on, but the way Dass replicates sunlight filtering through the woods—its soft intangibility, the way the air can make it seem blurred, and the spots of brightness near the horizon that occur under certain atmospheric conditions.

“Birch Near Superior” displays a similar combination of modesty and virtuosity. Here, Dass uses precise daubs of paint in the foreground, giving over to elongated blurs in the background, to capture the visual effect of wind through leaves. The overall palette is quite somber, but even with very little, Dass conveys the sparkling quality of the day with dots of yellow pigment on the birch leaves, a couple of white reflections, and a small patch of blue sky.

In the glorious “Bog Near Sault Ste. Marie,” we see both the technique—the brushstrokes, rubbed areas, and squiggles that are brilliant stand-alone passages of pure abstract painting—and also the illusion, the movement of the trees and the sunlight dancing on water that they evoke.

Dass’ images of pristine nature are deeply moving. We appreciate their beauty, but we also recognize how very fragile they are, especially today when so much is under assault. And this gets at a fundamental objective for Dass, namely, a two-pronged reaction to the work, where there is always something implied beyond the explicit.

There is the beauty of the image, but then something more primal, more weighty, and possibly quite melancholy creeps in. German philosopher Theodor Adorno, whom Dass greatly admires, refers to this as a “shudder.” It catches you off guard and engenders a deepened appreciation of what you are looking at. In Dass’ work, the shudder Adorno refers to may take different forms, but it is always there.


Dean Dass brings a variety of influences to his show “Venus and the Moon” at Les Yeux du Monde gallery through December 29.

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Arts

November gallery guide

ARTCHO festival makes art available to all

Home. It’s sweet. There’s no place like it. It’s where the heart is, and it’s where charity often begins.

“Moonrise,” by Laura Aldridge

The same can be said for this year’s ARTCHO festival, to take place this Saturday, November 2, at IX Art Park from 10:30am to 5:30pm.

ARTCHO’s goal is a simple one: to exhibit quality artwork at affordable, regular-folk prices, while raising money for a charity partner.

Participating artists donate a work of their choice for a silent auction, with proceeds this year benefiting Habitat for Humanity of Greater Charlottesville, hence this year’s festival theme: home.

More than 50 local, national, and international artists have donated works this year, including Laura Aldridge, known for her watercolors of simplified Blue Ridge mountainscapes; Leslie Greiner, a collage artist with an eye for humor; Norma Geddes, stained glass artist; Frank Shepard, wood sculptor; Christina Osheim, ceramicist; and Gina Sobel, a local jeweler and musician who’s contributing to the day’s musical offerings as well.

A handful of artists will offer workshops throughout the day. Sigrid Eilertson will teach paper mache mask making, while Flame Bilyué will demonstrate how to use junk mail and art scraps to make small, textured relief paintings and jewelry. And Ken Nagakui, a potter who digs his own clay from the earth, will lead a workshop on Japanese hand-building pottery technique, which uses molds instead of a pottery wheel.

So whether you place a winning auction bid or not, ARTCHO’s a chance to add some new art to your home and make the place a little more your own. —Erin O’Hare


Openings

The Bridge Progressive Arts Initiative 209 Monticello Rd. “Tricontinental Acts of Solidarity,” an exhibit of posters, films, magazines, and more from one of the most significant solidarity movements of the 20th century. 6pm.

Chroma Projects Inside Vault Virginia, Third Street SE. “Archaeology of the Omnivore: Paintings from the Garden Soil,” featuring works by Beatrix Ost about her fascination with the emotional and psychological within the physical world. 5-7pm.

CitySpace 100 Fifth St. NE. “Eight Women, Eyes Open,” featuring work by Scheline Crutchfield, Chloe Raynor, Anne French, and others; and “Soliphilia,” a multi-artist, multimedia exhibit demonstrating a love of interconnected wild places in Virginia. 5:30-7:30pm.

C’ville Arts Cooperative Gallery 118 E. Main St., Downtown Mall. “The Art of the Circle,” featuring Gillian Ruffa’s jewelry and textiles exploring symbolic representations of the circle. 6-8pm.

Eichner Studios Gallery 2035 Bond St. #120. A show of work by Sandra Lawrence and a number of local artists working in a variety of media. 6-8pm.

The Garage 100 E. Jefferson St. “Shop Talk,” highlighting the work of the Blanc Creatives team, including David Heins, Molly Schermer, Vu Nguyen, Sarah Schleer, Charles Lucien Feneux, Jacqui Stewart, Chad Coffman, and Sarah Grace Cheek. 5-7pm.

IX Art Park 522 Second St. SE. “ARTstache,” a multimedia collection of visual tributes to flavor savors and lip ticklers by Bernie McCabe, Todd Pope, Alex Brown, Justin Gaydos, and Henrik Jorgensen. 5-7pm.

Tatiana Yavorska-Antrobius at McGuffey Art Center

McGuffey Art Center 201 Second St. NW. In the Sarah B. Smith Gallery, “Garden of Eden,” oil and egg tempera works on linen canvas examining the fragility of the self and the soul, by Tatiana Yavorska-Antrobius; in the Downstairs North Hall Gallery, “Journey,” Lee Alter’s watercolor paintings reflecting a sense of presence, liberation, and freedom over the past two years; in the Downstairs South Hall Gallery, “Impermanence,” Heather Owens’ watercolor and mixed media show on the modern quest to create lasting marks on a rapidly changing world; in the Upstairs North Hall Gallery, “Off the Wall,” an exhibition of recent sculptures from UVA sculpture students; in the Upstairs South Hall Gallery, “Between 7 and 8,” a two-panel black and white projection of the space between moments in time, by Will Jones; and in the Red Shed, “Karen Eide: Art + Wonder,” a show of encaustic and mixed-media works. 5:30-7:30pm.

Mudhouse Coffee Roasters 213 W. Main St. “Mindscape Collection,” a show of work by Jaron White. 6-8pm.

New Dominion Bookshop 404 E. Main St., Downtown Mall. “The Art of Chris Butler,” an exhibition of paintings. 5-7pm.

Second Street Gallery 115 Second St. SE. In the Main Gallery, “Illuminations & Illusions,” a show of paintings and sculpture spanning more than four decades of Beatrix Ost’s career as a visual artist; and in the Dové Gallery, “The Slow Death of Rocks,” reverse painting on glass and sculpture by Doug Young. 5:30-7:30pm.

Doug Young at Second Street Gallery

Spring Street Boutique 107 W. Main St., Downtown Mall. “Virginia Winter Landscapes” featuring oil on canvas paintings by Deborah Brooks. 6-8pm.

Studio IX 969 Second St. SE. “Promises, Promises,” appropriated and collaged works by Aaron Terry examining, among other things, how truth is determined today in the media and how different cultures continue to respond to a post-Cold War global politic. 5:30-7:30pm.

Welcome Gallery 114 Third St. NE. “cloudwatching,” works on paper and sculpture by Anna Morgan, whose work comes from observing nature and the idiosyncrasies of life. 5-7:30pm.

WVTF Radio IQ 216 W. Water St. An exhibition of direct observations by Nancy Campa, inspired by the beauty of the Blue Ridge Mountains. 5-7pm.

Chris Butler at New Dominion Bookshop

Other November shows

Albemarle County Circuit Court 501 E. Jefferson St. An exhibition of work by members of the Central Virginia Watercolor Guild.

Annie Gould Gallery 109 S. Main St., Gordonsville. “Color Notes,” featuring oil on linen paintings by Lee Halstead.

Buck Mountain Episcopal Church 4133 Earlysville Rd., Earlysville. Oil and pastel paintings by John Kozloski.

Carpediem Exhibit 1429 E. High St. A rotating, expanding multi-media exhibit of works by local, regional and out-of-state artists, including Kerney Rhoden. Reception November 3, 2-4pm.

The Center 491 Hillsdale Drive. “At Home and Abroad,” photography by Frank Feigert. Through December 31.

Crozet Artisan Depot 5791 Three Notch’d Rd., Crozet. A show and sale of fabric handbags by Victoria Horner. Reception November 9, 2-4pm

The Fralin Museum of Art at UVA 155 Rugby Rd. “Asian Art from the Permanent and Select Private Collections,” through November 10; “Otherwise,” exploring the influence of LGBTQ+ artists; “Time to Get Ready: Fotografia Social”; “Of Women By Women,” through November 3; “Select Works from the Alan Groh-Buzz Miller Collection,” opening November 22; and “Oriforme” by Jean Arp.

The Gallery at Ebb & Flow 71 River Rd., Faber. “Golden Hours,” an exhibit of recent photographs by Jack Taggart. Opens November 9, 4-6pm.

Leftover Luxuries 350 Pantops Center. “On the Verge: A World of Chaos and Quivering Moments,” a series of abstract works by Jane Goodman. Opens November 7, 6pm.

Les Yeux du Monde 841 Wolf Trap Rd. “Field Days,” a show of Susan McAlister’s multi- media works initiated “out in the field,” with a closing reception November 3, 3-5pm; and “Dean Dass: Venus and the Moon,” opening November 9.

Piedmont Place 2025 Library Ave., Crozet. “Landscapes and More,” a show of work in a variety of media by members of the BozART Fine Art Collective.

Shenandoah Valley Art Center 122 S. Wayne Ave., Waynesboro. An exhibit of ceramic pottery by staff, students, and studio artists of the Make Waynesboro Clay Studio.

Summit Square Retirement Community 501 Oak Ave., Waynesboro. “Serenity,” featuring photography, watercolor, and mixed-media works by Terry Coffey, Gail Haile, Shirley Paul, and Juliette Swenson.

Susan Brodie at Thomas Jefferson Memorial Church Unitarian-Universalist

Thomas Jefferson Memorial Church Unitarian-Universalist 717 Rugby Rd. “Water Like Memory,” featuring Susan Brodie’s paintings of the mystery of different bodies of water. Opens November 13, 11:30am.

Woodberry Forest School 898 Woodberry Forest Rd., Woodberry Forest. “Living in the Moment,” an exhibition of drawings and paintings by Tatiana Yavorska-Antrobius. Opens November 14, 6:30-7:30.


First Fridays is a monthly art event featuring exhibit openings at many area art galleries and exhibition venues. Several spaces offer receptions. To list an exhibit, email arts@c-ville.com.

Categories
Arts

In Living Black and White—with Shades of Gray: Colorless Expression Proves Lively in Second Street Gallery’s “She’s in Monochrome”

What do we really see when hues are subdued, diminished, or deleted outright?

Tough question. If you’re like me—colorblind—that’s kind of how you go through life. Art’s power when deprived of its full spectrum of possibility is difficult to gauge, since most of us who live the difference are simply born this way and have no basis of comparison. Yet in an interesting challenge, Second Street Gallery’s curator Kristen Chiacchia issued an invitation to local artists to create works that remove their usual reliance on color to express themselves. The resulting exhibition, “She’s in Monochrome,” now occupying SSG’s Dové Gallery until October 25, is surprisingly rich and varied, despite the black, white, and gray rules strictly governing the works on display.

Gray Dodson (whose very name along with fellow artists Sam Gray and Pam Black makes it seem as if she were practically born for this type of show) doesn’t stray from her aesthetic inclination to focus skyward, a go-to subject of hers along with landscapes and images of water. Devoid of her usual soft color interplay, “Big Rain” and “Place of Unknowing” are downright monolithic, with protuberances of cloudbursts taking on an Old Testament lashing out on the land in the former, while muddled sunlight struggles behind the wet wisps of the trees in the latter. We’re entering an unreal setting that’s gloomy but not without a dim glimmer of promise at its heart.

Krista Townsend’s views of the land in “Glacier” and “Vermont Woods” offer a more clear-cut sense of form and shadow in nature. By taking what comes across as a nearly two-dimensional approach while working within the confinement of greys, her work reveals a chilliness that is either a believable presentation of a steely-skied day or an icy night.

Providing an altogether different vision of landscapes, Laura Wooten’s five numbered “Alentejo” pieces expose verdant hillsides robbed of their greens and browns, eliciting colder images of south central Portugal. There’s something of Japanese sumi-e brush painting in her India ink and synthetic Yupo paper, as well; the stark pitch of the land loops and rolls, sliced by lightning bolt walking paths that catch the sun in cool forks, splaying the earth with serpentine pathways.

Nature nearly reaches its simulacrum breaking point in the grandmotherly floral patterns that have found a strange home in Lou Haney’s works on fabric and aluminum. The absence of bright pastels or cheerful shades on the petals of “Black Velvet If You Please” and “Quilt Gilt” are unsettling even to the colorblind eye. The Lycra, cotton, and beadwork feels more wrong than perhaps it should, but that very space is where the profound difference between expectation and this monochromatic reality plays most heavily upon both our senses and ability to interpret without the usual crutches or cues.

Considering the constraints of the show, perhaps the most vivid works come from Sam Gray, who presents mythical plant people occupying sharp locales that shimmer with fantastically cartoonish, stylized graphic qualities. “Cosmic Seed” reveals a being emerging from its plant pod and floating to celestial heights via its free-flying roots. In “New Stories,” the fungal woman ignores the jet goop dripping off her mushroom-capped head despite it getting everywhere—but with good reason, as she’s deep in ritual. Smoldering flame alights her blackened left hand while she draws with her right: a beginning, the start of a circle on a page, in black and white.

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Arts

October galleries

An artist’s journey

The night Alp Isin heard that his friend and fellow artist Gabriel Allan passed away, he couldn’t stop thinking about Allan’s sculptures.

Though Isin had seen “a bunch” of Allan’s pieces, covering a range of times and places, he “wasn’t sure what the totality was. That day, that night, I got this overwhelming feeling that I would really like to see [all of] it,” says Isin.

This week, Isin gets his wish: “What Is To Give Light Must Endure Burning: A Retrospective of Gabriel Allan’s Artistic Evolution” is on view at McGuffey Art Center for the month of October. It’s a collaborative curatorial effort between Isin, Gabe’s father Freeman Allan, and artist Bolanle Adeboye.

Allan, who died in March of this year at age 37, was a fairly prolific artist, but he didn’t sell many of his pieces. He left the curators a lot of work to plumb for the exhibition (Isin imagines it’s most of Gabe’s oeuvre).

His most visible work, “The Messenger,” a larger-than-life bronze sculpture of a fire-winged man, will be moved from its spot at IX Art Park to welcome viewers to the show from the McGuffey front stairs. Inside, the show begins with a T-shirt that an 11-year-old Allan designed for a Free Union running event, and courses through some of the sketches and sculptures he made in high school (including his first, a bust painted blue and inscribed with a Khalil Gibran poem), before arriving at work he made while in school at UVA, and later as a working artist in Charlottesville. It will also include some of the photographs he took while traveling abroad.

Freeman, who was very close with his son, put together a timeline that accompanies the artwork to contextualize what was going on in Allan’s life at the time he made each piece.

“The Messenger” was cast into bronze fairly recently, at a Santa Fe foundry, and Allan exhibited the work at Burning Man before bringing it home to IX Art Park last year. Photo by Brian Wimer

Isin imagines that the show will be a different emotional experience for those who knew Allan, than for those who did not. But he expects all viewers to be deeply moved by the work itself, which he says deals with psycho-spiritual issues in “a very interesting way, a very deep way.”

What’s more, adds Adeboye, “seeing it all at once, in the same room,” whether the viewer knew Allan or not, “you’ll get a full picture of [Allan] and his journey. It paints the picture of life through art.”


Opening October 4

The Bridge Progressive Arts Initiative 209 Monticello Rd. “BEYOND: Virginia’s Enduring Exploration of The Mind,” half mini-museum and half art exhibit showcasing the ongoing exploration of human consciousness occurring within area organizations such as The Monroe Institute, The Association for Research and Enlightenment, The University of Science and Philosophy, and Yogaville. 5:30-9:30pm.

Chroma Projects Inside Vault Virginia, Third Street SE. “The Asemic Landscape (a calligraphy of trees),” featuring paintings by Michelle Gagliano. 5-7pm.

CitySpace 100 Fifth St. NE. “Recent Paintings,” a show of new works by Warren Boeschenstein. 5:30-7:30pm.

Warren Boeschenstein at CitySpace

 

C’ville Arts Cooperative Gallery 118 E. Main St., Downtown Mall. “Pattern and Color Play: A Journey with Polymer Clay, Stone, and Wood,” featuring works by woodturner Floyd E. “Pete” Johnson and polymer clay artisan Judith N. Ligon. 6-8pm.

Eichner Studios Gallery 2035 Bond St. #120. A show of work by Julia Lesnichy and a number of local artists working in a variety of media. 6-8pm.

Fellini’s 200 W. Market St. An exhibition of landscapes in watercolor by Linda Abby. 5:30-7pm.

The Garage 100 E. Jefferson St. “Utility: New Paintings by Cate West Zahl,” highlighting the accidental and often overlooked beauty that can result when function consciously overshadows form. 5-7pm.

IX Art Park 522 Second St. SE. “1-2-3,” an exhibit of affordably-priced work by 12 local artists, in a variety of mediums. 5-8pm.

McGuffey Art Center 201 Second St. NW. In the Sarah B. Smith Gallery, “The Art of BEING a HERo,” portraits of heroic women by Krista Townsend; in the Downstairs North Hall Gallery, “Room to Breathe,” rural landscapes from Maine to Florida by Lindsay Freedman; in the Downstairs South Hall Gallery, “Do You Live Here?,” paintings of Mid- Atlantic scenes by artist John Trippel; and in the Upstairs North and South Hall galleries, “What Is To Give Light Must Endure Burning: A Retrospective of Gabriel Allan’s Artistic Evolution.” 5:30-7:30pm.

New Dominion Bookshop 404 E. Main St., Downtown Mall. “Ars Combinatoria,” an exhibition of paintings and mixed-media sculpture by John Lynch. 5-7pm.

Second Street Gallery 115 Second St. SE. In the Dové Gallery, “She’s In Monochrome,” featuring works in grayscale by Pam Black, Jessie Coles, Gray Dodson, Sam Gray, Lou Haney, Krista Townsend, and Laura Wooten; and “Subculture Shock: Death, Punk, & the Occult in Contemporary Art,” featuring paintings, works on paper, sculpture, and mixed media by Jessicka Adams, Peter Benedetti, Paul Brainard, Eve Falci, Frodo Mikkelsen, Porkchop, and Tamara Santibañez. 5:30-7:30pm.

Spring Street Boutique 107 W. Main St., Downtown Mall. “Original Animal Paintings,” featuring acrylics on canvas by Lesli DeVito. 6-8pm.

Studio IX 969 Second St. SE. “Inspired by Van Gogh,” new works by members the Fiber and Stitch Art Collective, including Jo Lee Tarbell, C. Ann Robertson, Miriam Ahladas, and others. 5:30-7:30pm.

VMDO Architects 200 E. Market St. “Buy- O-Chromatic,” paper and waxed thread book art by Amanda Nelsen. 5:30-7:30pm.

Liz Zhang at Welcome Gallery

 

Welcome Gallery 114 Third St. NE. “Echoes,” a series of oil paintings by Liz Zhang in which the familiar, the family, becomes foreign. 5-7:30pm.

WriterHouse 508 Dale Ave. “Who We Are,” featuring acrylics on canvas by Chris Butler. 5-7pm.

WVTF Radio IQ 216 W. Water St. A joint show of work by Betty Brubach and Jim Cato. 5-7pm.

 

Other October shows

Albemarle County Circuit Court 501 E. Jefferson St. An exhibition of work by members of the Central Virginia Watercolor Guild.

Annie Gould Gallery 109 S. Main St., Gordonsville. “Evening Boaters,” featuring work by Linda Verdery, through October 6; and “Color Notes” by Lee Halstead, opening October 12.

Art on the Trax 5784 Three Notch’d Rd., Crozet. “A Mind of Seasons,” paintings by Linda Verdery. Opens October 12.

Buck Mountain Episcopal Church 4133 Earlysville Rd., Earlysville. Oil and pastel paintings by John Kozloski. Opens October 5, 4-6pm.

Carpediem Exhibit 1429 E. High St. A rotating, expanding multi-media exhibit of works by local, regional and out-of-state artists.

Crozet Artisan Depot 5791 Three Notch’d Rd., Crozet. A show of work by Elizabeth Herlevsen of Red Mud Hen Pottery. Opens October 12, 2-4pm.

The Center 491 Hillsdale Dr. “Close to Home: Painting What We Love,” an exhibit of oil paintings by Randy Baskerville.

The Fralin Museum of Art at UVA 155 Rugby Rd. “Asian Art from the Permanent and Select Private Collections”; “Otherwise,” exploring the influence of LGBTQ+ artists; “Time to Get Ready: Fotografia Social”; “Of Women By Women”; and “Oriforme” by Jean Arp.

Jefferson School African American Heritage Center 233 Fourth St. NW. “Ernest Withers: Picturing the Civil Rights Movement 1957-1968,” a show of 13 works from the African American photojournalist best known for capturing 60 years of African American history in the segregated South.

Kluge-Ruhe Aboriginal Art Collection 400 Worrell Dr. “Ngayulu Nguraku Ninti: The Country I Know,” featuring the work of Sharon Adamson and Barbara Moore; and “With Her Hands: Women’s Fiber Art from Gapuwiyak: The Louise Hamby Gift.”

Les Yeux du Monde 841 Wolf Trap Rd. “Field Days,” a show of Susan McAlister’s multi- media works initiated “out in the field.”

Susan McAlister at Les Yeux du Monde

 

McIntire School of Commerce Connaughton Gallery Rouss and Robertson Halls, UVA. “Woodland and Sky,” featuring oil paintings by Kendall Cox and Linda Staiger.

Milli Coffee Roasters 400 Preston Ave. #150. A show of work by Georgie Mackenzie.

Mudhouse Coffee 213 E. Main St., Downtown Mall. “People Other Than This One,” a show of Greg Antrim Kelly’s smartphone photographs of friends, colleagues, and strangers.

Piedmont Place 2025 Library Ave., Crozet. “Landscapes and More,” a show of work in a variety of media by members of the BozART Fine Art Collective.

Shenandoah Valley Art Center 122 S. Wayne Ave., Waynesboro. Featuring the work of five artists from the Beverly Street Studio School.

Summit Square Retirement Community 501 Oak Ave., Waynesboro. “Serenity,” featuring photography, watercolor, and mixed media works by Terry Coffey, Gail Haile, Shirley Paul, and Juliette Swenson.

Thomas Jefferson Memorial Church Unitarian-Universalist 717 Rugby Rd. An exhibition of perceptual paintings by Susan Viemeister. Opens October 13, 11:30am.

Georgie Mackenzie at Milli Coffee Roasters

University of Virginia Hospital Main Lobby 1215 Lee St. Landscape and wildlife photographs by George A. Beller.

Vitae Spirits Distillery 715 Henry Ave. “Lovely Landscapes,” a show of work by Julia Kindred.

First Fridays is a monthly art event featuring exhibit openings at many area art galleries and exhibition venues. Several spaces offer receptions. To list an exhibit, email arts@c-ville.com.