Photographer Kori Price’s first solo exhibition, “You can’t compromise my joy” is at Welcome Gallery though Friday. Image courtesy of the artist
By Matt Dhillon
Joy is something we must create space for, says artist Kori Price. In her first solo exhibition, “You can’t compromise my joy,” on display at the Welcome Gallery through January 28, the artist explores the relationship Black women in particular have with their own happiness amid external pressure to compromise it. As the title suggests, Price celebrates the choice to feel joy while acknowledging that it is a choice and rarely comes passively.
“For Black women, choosing joy is an act of resistance,” she says. Resistance to fear, Price points out, which can come in the form of relatively minor acts of exclusion or major acts of overt violence. But, she insists, to live with fear or to live with joy is ultimately a choice.
“There’s not a lot that we can control in our lives, but we can control how we face the world,” Price says.
Grounded in portraits of Black women in moments of personal joy, the exhibition brings in cultural references to build an atmosphere of tension in the room between two contrasting emotions. A tapestry of weaves in a variety of different hairstyles curtains the gallery’s front windows, individual pages hang in the middle of the room—pieces from the Louisville police report on the shooting of Breonna Taylor in her home in March of 2020.
“What I wanted to create was a headspace,” says Price. “When you walk through the door, you walk through the fringe, you’ve touched her hair, and you are now intimate with this headspace of a Black woman.” Inside that head, you have to navigate through the evidence of violence to reach the portraits of joy.
“I thought it was important to place [the case files] as such where it made it a little difficult to walk through the gallery, because it’s an obstacle,” she says.
Yet the focus of her work remains on the strength and resilience of her subjects. Branching out from a background in portraiture, Price’s photography retains a core theme of identity. Her 2018 series, “28 Days of Black Hair,” is also a celebration of self that lands with a similar weight of an “act of resistance.”
“I think Black hair is an entry point into having deeper discussions about class and race and identity and how all of those things intersect,” says Price. “I wasn’t natural for a long time. I permed my hair, and what I didn’t realize until I started digging into this is that we were trying to fit in, and to fit in means to look white.”
Price’s portraits often stand in resistance to that pressure. For “You can’t compromise my joy,” she asked her subjects a simple question: What are the things that bring you joy? What we see are their answers.
“I felt privileged and honored to be able to document the different ways that Black women in our community experience joy,” Price says of the process. “There’s definitely some photos where people aren’t smiling, because joy isn’t all about smiles. It’s about feeling like, okay, I’m in the right place.”
As for Price, her joy is found close to home. “I’m a very proud nerd and I love playing video games,” she admits. A picture of herself, she imagines, “would have my headsets on, nose almost to the TV, with the guys that I play with online, and we’d just be in it.”
Brick by brick: Transformative, collaborative, and rooted in intersectional and queer feminism, Patrick Costello’s “Ceding Ground II” is more than meets the eye. A slim, snaking wall reminiscent of Thomas Jefferson’s serpentine walls that were designed to hide enslaved workers at the University of Virginia, each brick is an earthy amalgam of native perennial grass and wildlife seeds. Gallery visitors are invited to take a brick home and plant it, turning a piece of racist architecture into a blooming plot of beauty. Join Costello and artist Federico Cuatlacuatl for a virtual talk about “Situated Knowledge,” the gallery’s collaborative exhibition.
Monday 10/25. Free, 7:30pm. New City Arts, 114 Third St. NE newcityarts.org.
Award-winning poets Valencia Robin and Irène Mathieu teamed up with New City Arts for Poetry of Power, a workshop that encourages teens from marginalized backgrounds to express themselves through writing.
By Alana Bittner
When expressing the value of writing poetry, Valencia Robin references a quote by U.S. Poet Laureate Joy Harjo: “You begin to learn to listen to the soul, the soul of yourself in here, which is also the soul of everyone else.”
Robin says that, when she was young, no one told her poetry could work this way. In high school, the poets she learned about felt “archaic” and intimidating, with little connection to her own life. The urge to write poetry didn’t arise until years later, when she discovered contemporary poets she could identify with. Today, Robin is an award-winning poet whose work has appeared in The New York Times, The Virginia Quarterly Review, and Black Renaissance Noire, to name a few.
With support from New City Arts, Robin has paired up with poet and pediatrician Irène Mathieu to help Charlottesville teens find the connection to writing that she feels she missed out on as a young person.
“It’s empowering when a person can take control over their own narrative and say what they need to say, exactly how it needs to be said,” says Mathieu.
In February, the pair put out a call for writers that expressly welcomes high school students of color, queer and nonbinary students, low-income students, immigrants, and differently abled students to participate in Poetry of Power, a virtual workshop for young people from marginalized backgrounds. (Scroll down for samples of submitted poems.)
Robin and Mathieu hope to dispel the misconception that poetry is grim or somber. Instead, Robin says they’ll introduce students to “poetry that privileges joy.” This joy can be a form of empowerment, she says, pointing out that “what has sustained communities of color and other marginalized groups is our creative spirit, our songs and poems and other forms of art.” Robin says the idea of “joy and poetry as tools for survival” inspired the name of the workshop.
She cautions, however, that poetry is not a magic wand that will solve all problems. It is a tool that allows “all poets, whether young or old, to make sense of what’s going on in their lives, to unpack what’s confusing, joyful, or painful, and figure out how they feel about it.”
Adolescence brings confusion, joy, pain, and other intense emotions. Through writing, young poets can wrap their minds around whatever they may be struggling with, emerging with a sense of satisfaction and accomplishment. “To capture your particular way of walking in the world is incredibly empowering,” says Robin.
The workshop addresses the logistical aspects of writing poetry as well. Students get career advice, free author headshots, and the chance to perform their work at a virtual public reading. Organizers have also invited a guest speaker, local student activist and writer Zyahna Bryant, who organized her first demonstration against police injustice at age 12 and published her first book of poems, Reclaim, as a high school senior.
“She’s living proof that age is just a number, that if you feel called to speak and serve, you’re never too young,” says Robin.
Reese Bryan, Nhandi Hoge, Zoe Shelley, Violet Tillman, Autumn King, and Madeline Caduff present original poetry during a virtual reading on April 1. For more information, go to newcityarts.org.
SAD
By Violet Tillman
They say that absence makes the heart grow fonder,
And perhaps that is true
I missed the rain during that ice and snow,
and then,
After a long winter of stark forests,
As wisps of life sprouted up from grey soil
My love for the earth flared bright and bold
I’d clawed at each scrap, clinging to any warmth and calling it
spring
Here I am now, April
standing in the forest, putting blackberries in my basket
Tasting a few, seeds stuck in indigo teeth
That soft and whimsical voice calling to me—
Frogs in the creek at dusk, flowers shifting in the breeze, drizzle on the tin roof—
Ushering me out to the cliff by the swollen river that overlooks the hills
Where I end my day to the sun setting low,
Warm
And so, it’s like this:
Stars peek out from clouds
That lingering scent of rain
Wafts up near the trees at the edge of the yard
Where I am lying and thinking quietly that
Absence made my heart grow desperate
While presence, this presence
Was what made my heart grow fond
Girl Team
By Zoë K Shelley
You know what’s sad?
I get told my stomach
Is scandalous
My breasts are bad
Something to be saved for a
Supposed husband?
I don’t agree
You know what’s sad?
Some boy barely older than me
Brings out a phone
And tries to stealthily snap
Several shots
Of me in my swimsuit
But I see him
I don’t know him
He’s sitting all the way over there
What can I do for myself?
How do I save my dignity?
You know what’s sad?
I get told that I shouldn’t wear a bikini
But my brother doesn’t have to wear a shirt
Society, what have you done to me?
I need a support team
You know what’s sad?
When I ask my girl friends
If this happens to them too
Each one has a similar story
But something makes me happy
I have a girl team
Always supporting me
All my stories
And my stress
They listen
When I’m with them
I feel free of
Societies grip on me
I’m grateful
For my girl team
Mixed-media artist Brielle DuFlon’s work speaks of comfort in bold ways. Imagine putting on your favorite sweater, wrapping up in a fuzzy blanket, or donning a lacy garment. DuFlon takes those emotional aesthetics to a textile reality in her show, “huddle,” at New City Arts.
Using repurposed and reclaimed materials, DuFlon’s dramatic pieces are a playful tug of war between exciting and calming that confronts the viewer with vulnerability and honesty. She describes them as “physically deep works, that the audience looks into, rather than at.”
DuFlon has been showing her work publicly since 2011, and “huddle” is her first solo exhibition in four years. Creating these pieces, she says, taught her about trusting herself with unusual materials. And timed with our societal need for closeness and empathy, DuFlon says she could not have predicted how relevant the theme of her show would be when she began working on it in the spring of 2019.
‘Legacy: heirloom’
Brielle DuFlon: “This piece, a jacket made completely of plastic produce mesh packaging, is one of three ‘legacy’ pieces in ‘huddle’ that speak to what we leave behind, as individuals and as a species. The concept of an heirloom garment is widely known, but in this case the piece is handed down to the next generation because it cannot biodegrade. ‘Legacy:Heirloom’ is a coming together of my passion for environmentalism and my flirtation with garment making (and yes—it actually fits me!).”
Rayne MacPhee’s “Swarm,” an exhibition about the plight of the honeybee, is on view at the New City Arts Welcome Gallery through the month of August. The show includes this piece, "Chicago Covered in Honeycomb." Image courtesy the artist
Rayne MacPhee thought her dad was having a midlife crisis. Apropos of nothing, he’d announced to the family that he was going to start keeping bees in their Greenville, South Carolina, yard. The next weekend, there they were: A few hives and thousands of honeybees.
MacPhee didn’t pay much attention to her dad’s new hobby until she saw the inside of a hive with her own eyes. “It was instant magic,” she says about what she saw: an apiary metropolis full of activity, like a golden, amazing-smelling New York City, she says. “It’s so busy. And the buzz…it does something to you.”
She may have thought beekeeping was her dad’s midlife crisis, but it turned out to be her passion. About a decade later, MacPhee’s not only keeping honeybees in her Charlottesville-area yard, she’s making artwork about them. Her first local solo show, “Swarm,” is about the plight of the honeybee, and it’s on view at the New City Arts Welcome Gallery through the month of August.
Artist and beekeeper Rayne MacPhee with some of her honeybees. “The buzz…it does something to you,” she says. Image courtesy subject
Perhaps you’ve heard the news: Honeybees are dying at record high rates in America. According to a Bee Informed Partnership survey released in June of this year, between April 1, 2018 and April 1 2019, beekeepers reported losing about 40.7 percent of their managed honeybee hives, on top of a 40.1 percent loss the previous year.
It’s due to a constellation of reasons, including global warming and climate change; increased use of insecticides; and the increased prevalence of cell phone towers, whose signals have been shown by some studies to interfere with how bees communicate and navigate. And then there’s colony collapse disorder, a still-mysterious phenomenon in which worker bees suddenly abandon their colony, leaving behind a vulnerable queen and some nurse bees to care for the baby bees.
We should be concerned, says MacPhee. Managed honeybees contribute $20 billion to the value of U.S. crop production, according to the American Beekeeping Federation. Blueberries, cherries, apples, and broccoli are almost exclusively pollinated by honeybees, and almond trees are entirely dependent on them. No honeybees, no almonds.
So, you want to help the bees…
You don’t have to keep hives to help out honeybees—you can start by just reconsidering your lawn. Think about it: Unless you’re raising cows or other grazers, you don’t really need all that grass. Bees love trees, says MacPhee, so consider planting a few more of them. Or plant a small pollinator garden that doesn’t require much tending, but can be very beneficial for honeybees and your own olfactory pleasure—aromatic lavender and basil are a good place to start, says MacPhee. Here in the Charlottesville area, a lot of folks spray for mosquitoes (understandable), but those chemicals can harm helpful insects (like honeybees). Instead of spraying, try prevention first—eliminating places around your home where water can collect, or putting up a bat house (bats eat thousands of mosquitoes a day).
MacPhee keeps two or three hives at a time, and she says that each has its own personality—some are pretty chill, others are more aggressive about her presence near the hives—and cleverly-named queen (Bee-yonce, Bee-thoven). Every year for the past few years, she’s lost half her hives. And since each hive can house up to 16,000 bees, that’s tens of thousands of bees, dead.
“I started to get really, really angry about it,” she says, in part because, as a backyard (non-commercial) beekeeper, she forms the sort of relationship with her hives that some people might have with their cats or dogs. MacPhee herself does not use insecticides, but because honeybees can fly distances of up to three miles, if anyone within a three mile distance sprays their lawn with, say, Raid Yard Guard, MacPhee’s honeybees can be affected.
In her anger, MacPhee wondered: What would bees do if they could take their revenge on us? They’d cover cities in honeycomb, she decided. Hives are rather city-like, after all.
MacPhee took a series of urban plans—including Boston, Los Angeles, and Chicago; Siena, Italy; and Aleppo, Syria—and drew thousands of hexagons atop them to build bulbous, globby, two-dimensional honeycomb in pencil and India ink rather than beeswax. They’re oddly beautiful and curiously compelling. They’re also fairly large (about four feet by six feet), so the viewer has no choice but to confront these honeycomb cities and the message contained therein, that the bees are dying and we need to do something about it.
The same goes for the pieces incorporating taxidermied bees. As MacPhee’s hives have died over the years, she’s preserved the bodies of bees from her favorite hives and affixed them to pieces of paper in such a way that they mimic honeybee flight patterns. “I want someone to look at it and really face their impact here. You can’t avoid it when you’re looking at, well, dead [bee] bodies,” she says.
“Swarm” is about bees taking their revenge on humans (the ones who use the aforementioned insecticides that are so dangerous to bees’ existence), but there’s something hopeful about it, says MacPhee, in that it imagines how honeybees could reclaim their homes that have been stolen from them.
MacPhee knows a little about reclaiming what has been taken. She says of this work, “it was the first time in my life that I ever made work that was truly my own…a concept born out of thinking and working, and I wasn’t trying to emulate anyone’s style,” and a big chunk of it was stolen, along with her car, earlier this year. Her car was recovered but her work was not, and she had to begin all over again. But her idea remained, and she could continue on. Honeybees, she fears, might not be so fortunate.
As Welcome Gallery visitors move through “Swarm,” MacPhee hopes they consider their own human relationship to nature, however conflicting and complex it may be. “Nature is beautiful. It’s volatile. It’s precious. It’s destructive,” all at once,” she says. And while these realizations can be overwhelming, “Swarm” is a swell reminder that when tackling big problems, looking at art is often a good place to start.
Rayne MacPhee’s “Swarm,” an exhibition about the plight of the honeybee, is on view at the New City Arts Welcome Gallery through the month of August.
Karina A. Monroy highlights the stories of immigrant and first-generation Latina women in “Brotando,” opening Friday at New City Arts’ Welcome Gallery. Photo by Amy Jackson Smith
When artist Karina A. Monroy moved from California to Charlottesville in February 2017, she started making pieces that comforted her.
She reinterpreted or slightly altered scenes from her mother’s and grandmother’s homes, places where she rooted and grew not just herself, but the bonds with the women in her family.
“It’s been really difficult being so far from them,” says Monroy, a Chicana mixed-media installation artist.
The project grew into one that involved talking with immigrant women, who know all too well the challenges of being far from the people and places they love.
The resulting exhibition, “Brotando,” combines paintings with embroidery, drawings, and sewn sculptures, and is on view at New City Arts’ Welcome Gallery through the month of February.
Throughout the process, Monroy thought of her grandmother’s home, a place always filled with plants and trees. “I’m using my connection to plants and the idea of transferring plants from different soils into new soils as a metaphor for the women in my life who have immigrated and thrived in new places,” says Monroy. “My goal for this was to create pieces that the women I am talking about can relate to.”
“trasplantar” is one of the pieces on view in “Brotando.”
Openings
The Bridge PAI 209 Monticello Rd. “Face to Face: Portraits of Our Vibrant City,” an exhibition of portraiture that connects artists and community members. 5:30-9:30pm.
Central Library 201 E. Market St. A show of mixed-media artwork by Sara Gondwe, who shaves brightly colored crayons to create a 3D effect. 5-7pm.
Chroma Projects 103 W. Water St. Two shows, “Spirit of Place: Landscapes Real and Imagined” by Laura Wooten, and “When Time Abstracts Truth” by Jennifer Esser, both of whom approach color imaginatively. 5-7pm.
CitySpace 100 Fifth St. NE. Two exhibitions, “A Photographic Aggregation,” featuring work by Steve Ashby, and a series of paintings by Jane Goodman. 5:30-7:30pm.
Firefly 1304 E. Market St. An exhibition of work by Flame Bilyue full of hidden images. 4-7pm.
Dovetail Design + Cabinetry 309 E. Water St. “Beauty Abounding,” featuring acrylic works on canvas by Janet Pearlman. 5-7pm.
McGuffey Art Center 201 Second St. NW. A monthlong celebration of black creativity in Charlottesville, featuring Darrell Rose, RoseHill, Michael E. Williams, Anthony Scott, DenaJennings, Bolanle Adeboye, Liz Cherry Jones, and others. 5:30-7:30pm.
Milli Coffee Roasters 400 Preston Ave. “Sea and Sky,” an exhibition of acrylic and oil paintings by Brittany Fan. 7-10pm.
New Dominion Bookshop 404 E. Main St., Downtown Mall. “Metamorphosis: The Art of the Fiber and Stitch Collective,” featuring textiles by members of the Fiber and Stitch Collective. 5-7pm.
Roy Wheeler Realty Co. 404 Eighth St. NE. A show of photography by Laura Parker focusing on wildlife and horticulture. 5-7:30pm.
The Salad Maker 300 Market St. “Animal Medicine,” featuring works in watercolor, acrylic, pen, and ink by Dana Wheeles. 5:30-7pm.
Second Street Gallery 115 Second St. SE. In the main gallery, “Inside the Artists’ Studio,” a group exhibition featuring the work of local artists; and in the Dové Gallery, Jessica Burnam’s artist-in-residence exhibition. 5:30-7:30pm.
Spring Street Boutique 107 W. Main St., Downtown Mall. “Fashion on Canvas,” featuring mixed-media paintings by Debbie Siegel. 6-8pm.
Studio IX 969 Second St. SE. “Emergent Sea and Internal Static Land Scrapes,” a show of paintings by Gregory Brannock, whose work isa portal to the unseen. 5:30-7:30pm.
VMDO Architects 200 E. Market St. An exhibition of work by the late Kenrick Johnson, whose work is influenced by Robert Rauschenberg, Paul Klee, Wassily Kandinsky, and others. 5:30-7:30pm.
Welcome Gallery 114 Third St. NE. “Brotando,” featuring Karina A. Monroy. 5-7:30pm.
WriterHouse 508 Dale Ave. “Photos in Fiber,” an exhibition of work by Jill Kerttula. 5-7pm.
WVTF and RadioIQ 216 W. Water St. An exhibition of work by Jane Lillian Vance and Gil Harrington, two women who dedicate theirlives to making the world safer for young women. 5-7pm.
First Fridays is a monthly art event featuring openings at many downtown exhibition spaces, with some offering receptions.
Other February shows
Annie Gould Gallery 121B S. Main St., Gordonsville. A show of acrylic and collage works by Judith Ely, and watercolors by Chee Ricketts. Through March 11.
Art on the Trax 5784 Three Notch’d Rd., Crozet. An exhibition of work by Hannah Chiarella, whose work seeks to reconcile the disorder of nature and the rigid order of graphic design. Opens February 9.
The Batten Institute at the Darden School of Business 100 Darden Boulevard. “Celebrating Creativity: Works by Local Women Artists,” featuring work from 27 women in Charlottesville and the surrounding areas. Opens February 20, 4:30-7pm.
Buck Mountain Episcopal Church 4133 Earlysville Rd., Earlysville. “Transformations,” featuring a variety of works by Blue Ridge School faculty and students.
The Barn Swallow Artisan Gallery 796 Gilliums Ridge Rd. “Owls!,” an exhibition of paintings on rock, wood, and canvas by Susan Sexton Shrum.
C’ville Arts Cooperative Gallery 118 E. MainSt., Downtown Mall. “Peace and Love,” a group show featuring members of the cooperative.
The Fralin Museum of Art at UVA 155 Rugby Rd. “Pompeii Archive: Recent Photographs by William Wylie”; “sometimes.we.cannot.be.with.our.bodies,” opening February 22;“The Print Series in Bruegel’s Netherlands: Dutch and Flemish Works from the Permanent Collection,” opening February 22; and “Oriforme” by Jean Arp.
The Front Porch 221 E. Water St. “Anthology,” featuring oil paintings by Gregor Meukow.
Green House Coffee 1260 Crozet Ave., Crozet. “On Our Way,” an exhibition of paintings by Judith Ely.
Jefferson School African American Heritage Center 233 Fourth St. NW “Deborah Willis: In Pursuit of Beauty” examines how beauty is posed, imagined, critiqued, and contested. Opens Saturday, February 9, 6:30-8:30pm.
Kluge-Ruhe Aboriginal Art Collection 400 Worrell Dr. “Kent Morris: Unvanished,” a series of digitally constructed photographs that explore the relationship between contemporary Indigenous Australian identity and the modern built environment; “Beyond Dreamings: The Rise of Indigenous Australian Art in the United States,” through February 21.
Leftover Luxuries 350 Pantops Center. An exhibition of paintings from life by Nancy Wallace, inspired by Virginia, landscape, and garden compositions. Opens February 7.
Les Yeux du Monde 841 Wolf Trap Rd. “Surrealities: The Art of Ed Haddaway and Russ Warren,” a show of sculpture and paintings that coincides with Second Street Gallery’s “Inside the Artists’ Studio” exhibition.
Martha Jefferson Hospital 500 Martha Jefferson Dr. “Calm Reflections,” featuring the work of the BozART Fine Art Collective.
McIntire School of Commerce Connaughton Gallery UVA Central Grounds. “Seasons of Color and Light,” featuring work by Chuck Morse and Steve Deupree.
Northside Library 705 Rio Rd. W. “Bold,” featuring acrylic paintings on canvas by Novi Beerens, through February 9; and various works in oil by Kris Bowmaster.
Random Row Brewing Company 608 Preston Ave. Ste. A. “Still Life: Love of the Familiar,” featuring paintings by Randy Baskerville.
Shenandoah Valley Art Center 122 S. Wayne Ave., Waynesboro. An exhibition of work by the Shenandoah Valley Governor’s School of Arts and Humanities. Opens February 2.
Thomas Jefferson Memorial Church 717 Rugby Rd. “Someday Everything is Gonna Be Different,” an exhibition of works in chalk pastel by Bill Hunt, who was a carpenter for many years. Opens February 10.
UVA Medical Center Main Lobby 1215 Lee St. “Plant Life Up Close,” featuring 36 of Seth Silverstein’s close-up photographs of plant life, seeds, flowers, and more.
Vitae Spirits Distillery 715 Henry Ave. “Inspired Art,” a show of multimedia works in crayon and fabric paint by Sara Gondwe.
