The scene is set for a sideshow spectacular at this year’s Gallery Rally. Showcasing an eclectic collection of local artists creating works live in the gallery, the event gives visitors an opportunity to meet creators, witness the artistic process, and purchase freshly made pieces on the spot. All artworks are priced at $100, and all proceeds support upcoming exhibitions and programming. This annual fundraiser also features raffle prizes, DJ sets, caricatures, an afterparty, and entertainment inspired by acts staged alongside the big top circus tents.
Saturday 12/7. Free, 5–9pm. Second Street Gallery, 115 Second St. SE. secondstreetgallery.org
Art collectors big and small cheer Teeny Tiny Trifecta 7, an exhibition and fundraiser to launch the 51st season of Second Street Gallery. The show features more than 181 artists who contribute three works each that do not exceed 8 inches x 8 inches. With hundreds of choices, and each piece priced at $100, SSG broadens access by allowing more collectors to take home a bite-sized work of contemporary art. Outreach programming, a family studio day, and artist-led workshops accompany the annual celebration.
Friday 9/6-9/27. Free, 5:30pm. Second Street Gallery, 115 Second St. SE. secondstreetgallery.org
“Stuart Robertson: A Suh Wi Dweet” is at Second Street Gallery through March 25. Photo: Courtesy of the artist
By Luke Williams
Despite the chilly February evening, Second Street Gallery was filled with warm energy for the opening of “Stuart Robertson: A Suh Wi Dweet.” The exhibition offers a never-before-seen collection of portraits by Robertson, a Jamaican artist. The patois title translates roughly to “This is How We Do It,” foregrounding Robertson’s love of music, which can be seen—and heard—throughout the show. Created between 2021 and 2022, the vibrant paintings blend figurative and abstract elements to capture intimate moments of Black life.
The artist’s mixed-media paintings render friends and family in a luminous medley of metal, domestic debris, and textiles. Effectively, Black skin is made to shine like bling, emphasizing Robertson’s dedication to a Jamaican and Afro-diasporic dance hall aesthetic. We are prompted to imagine the futuristic possibilities of metallic skin, and to marvel at the technique used to harness upcycled debris into luminous shapes and textures. By reflecting, refracting, and warping the light, these paintings challenge viewers to engage with the importance of the surface and the power of shine.
While Robertson is intentional about the formal and theoretical questions his work proposes, he also values the power of representation. “It’s amazing to receive comments from people who feel uplifted by the work,” he says. “It’s amazing to see the psychological, emotional impact of putting people into things that are valuable and prominent.”
In his work, Robertson celebrates some of the Black folks in Charlottesville who hospitably welcomed him into their community for his first solo exhibition. In “To Derrick, Power Link link Power Figure (2022)” Robertson uses mixed media to pay homage to Charlottesville-based photographer Derrick Waller in a dazzling array of vibrant paints and cool metallic surfaces. The portrait frames a portion of Waller’s face, forming a contemplative moment between artist and subject. Similarly, “Pree Bee an’ di young G! One hand cyah clap…(2022)” is both an object of celebration and a signal for collaboration to illuminate artist Marley Nichelle, whose exhibition “Ghana to Gullah” catalogs a travel narrative of expert photographs in Second Street’s Dové Gallery. Both pieces topically and materially reflect Charlottesville’s Black arts community, itself full of intricate ability and outstanding energy.
SSG Executive Director and Chief Curator Kristen Chiacchia, who worked closely with Robertson to curate his first solo exhibition, sees great promise in the artist. “I really see his work taking off,” she says. “It’s not only the quality of the work and the great aesthetics…it’s his ethics and his personality. He is true to himself, and when the work is so personal it comes through as an artist.”
“A Suh Wi Dweet” is, above all else, personal. The show softly reflects the care Robertson holds for each of the subjects in his portraits, and it comes through in how thoughtfully he approaches the double-edged sword of Black representation.
Just as the skin of Robertson’s figures glitters like jewelry, it also seeks to protect the wearer from violence. We are invited to admire the beauty of the shine, but we are also prompted to ask why armor is necessary when showing Black people.
It is impossible to see Black portraiture and not think of the endless cycle of Black people killed by the police. (While writing this piece, Amir Locke, a 22-year-old Black man killed by the police in Minneapolis, is in the headlines.) Their portraits circulate on social media, T-shirts, and murals, creating an interminable association between anti-Black violence and Black portraiture. So while it can be exciting to see more Black folks on the walls in a gallery, the specter of violence looms in the background.
Robertson responds to the often ambivalent position of being seen while being Black by shifting the focus away from the faces of his portraits. He says, “People would be excited and say, ‘Oh, that could be my aunt. That could be my sister. Oh! That’s my mom’ all the while knowing it’s not them.” In this case, the refrain of mistaken identity is meant to celebrate the position of Black people on the gallery’s walls. Yet, nearly 10 years ago to the day, the same sentiment was expressed by President Barack Obama about Trayvon Martin: If I had a son, Obama said, he would look like Trayvon Martin. It is an acknowledgment that Black people, no matter their age, gender, status, or ability, need to be protected from violence.
Seeing these portraits of Black community created within an ethic of care, we are challenged to hold two important values simultaneously: celebration and protection. In “A Suh Wi Dweet,” we are invited to imagine such a community formed in intimate moments like gardening or getting a haircut, but sustained by a cultural resilience forged like metal. When asked how it’s possible to hold two such difficult realities simultaneously, Robertson laughs quietly and shakes his head, smiling as if to reflect the shine of his portraits. A suh wi dweet.
Josh Dorman says his complex dreamscapes are a “response and homage” to In the Aeroplane Over the Sea, a 1998 record by Neutral Milk Hotel. Photo: Eze Amos
Questions of intent and meaning loom palpably over a pair of exhibitions at Second Street Gallery: Josh Dorman’s “how strange it is to be anything at all” and “Dirty Mirror” by fiber artists Dance Doyle and Caitlin McCormack. Both shows invite extended scrutiny because the artists take unconventional approaches to their chosen forms of expression. Expect to have long looks, but be aware that conclusions may vary: Prepare to be confounded or frustrated or fascinated or delighted—or all of the above.
On the walls of Second Street’s main space, Dorman helpfully admits the open-ended intent of his art, yet he lays his muse bare from the get-go anyway: the 1998 record In the Aeroplane Over the Sea by Neutral Milk Hotel. He says that his complex explosive dreamscapes are a “response and homage” to the album and “derive a poetic inspiration” from its “language and internal logic.” Dorman himself—and indeed, a consensus across the internet—believes that the words of the band’s visionary Jeff Magnum are beyond any rational explanation. Where does that leave us?
If that squirrelly meaning best defines the indie rock influence for his work, it’s admittedly difficult to draw direct parallels to the Neutral Milk Hotel songs beyond the borrowed titles and lyrical phrases. At least for me it is, since my familiarity with the group pretty much begins and ends in knowing it’s the favorite band of April Ludgate from “Parks and Recreation.
No matter, though, because there’s a great deal to digest and decipher. In a way, Dorman’s shiny resin-coated ink, acrylic, and antique paper on wood panels are reminiscent of the nightmare fauna in Hieronymus Bosch’s “The Garden of Earthly Delights.” Faceless human busts lurk, headless animals and beasts hewn of later industrial age debris plunge ass-over-head into waterfalls, helplessly ride conveyor belts, and foolishly climb precarious cliffs. They navigate worlds with opaque perspectives: a pastiche of landscapes folding upon themselves with blueprint guidelines tussling for space against mountain crags while classical columns hover over railway bridges.
Tapestries and cushions, by fiber artists Dance Doyle and Caitlin McCormack, are currently on display in Second Street’s Dové Gallery. Photo: Eze Amos
Dorman’s most uniquely effective device is his use of depth. What might function as a decorative gimmick in a lesser artist’s hands provides one of the strongest arguments to visit Second Street to see these works in person, as two-dimensional photos fail to capture them. Some employ an inward layering of resin to form swirling wave pools, active insect nests, or in “Villa of the Mysteries” (2018), a flesh-eating cauldron rife with capillary-like root growth. His mix of painting with collage reflects a mind at play—in “Excavating Babel” (2020), Dorman recasts the scissored relics of aged book illustrations into a city of no particular century, pointing its mismatched spires into the nebulous belly of an improbable sky. Psychedelic, sure. But there’s more than simple trippiness here. The problem—or the solution, maybe—is that any kind of narrative will likely only reveal itself to the individual. Like hundreds of Rorschach tests exposed at once, each piece defies you to focus.
More uneven cityscapes await in Second Street’s intimate Dové Gallery, where Doyle and McCormack trade tapestries and cushions. That’s not a putdown, because for all the textile in the space, the products of their handiwork are not what anyone would sanely call comforting.
Textile art rarely trades in urban grit as thoroughly as Doyle does here, with figures striding atop strata of subterranean profundity that is home to a bestiary of surprising beings engulfed in murky topographies. Angry sexuality pops out in the nude flipping us the bird in “Six Feet High” (2018). Others construct hazier moods and dare us to trust our eyes. An outsized female treads upon a sewer grate that leads into a striped-horizon fantasy world, while in “The Witness” (2017), a face lords over high rises and under a graffiti tag-style rendering of the word “SEEN,” while further below, a rift unearths deep space and a passing satellite. “Ebbflow” (2015) features a shadow crossing a starry field, but beneath it, another time and/or another location is let loose.
The deliberately irregular shapes of the tapestries themselves are creations as personal as the artist’s relationship with urban life. And a second connection to Dorman emerges in the difficulty of determining our point of view: Here, too, staking out temporal and geographic assurance is a bitch.
McCormack, Doyle’s show partner, brings an ironic hand to crocheted bird skeletons (“Thicket I & II,” 2020, “Swim Team,” 2021) and lusty westerners (“Libidinous Drifter,” 2021), as well as smirkingly provocative textual pieces like “You Know He Told Everyone” (2021), a banner proclaiming “Edging” (“Modesty Blanket,” 2021), and a pillow topped by a handgun appliqué (“Sweet Dreams,” 2021). McCormack’s works encourage speculation like good gossip; the phrases concoct a humorous, sinister theme that carries the immediate intrigue of overhearing a single line of a passerby fighting with someone on the phone. And as far as stitched pillow messages go, ”Live, Laugh, Love” this ain’t.
“how strange it is to be anything at all” Josh Dorman & “Dirty Mirror” Dance Doyle and Caitlin McCormack
Art bargain: One of the best bangs for your art world buck is the annual Gallery Rally, when more than 20 local artists create work on site to be purchased to support Second Street, one of the oldest nonprofit contemporary art spaces in central Virginia. Book an appointment and score an original piece from Michael Fitts, Eileen French, Meesha Goldberg, Lou Haney, Steve Haske, Sri Kodakalla, Tobiah Mundt, Susan Northington, Madeleine Rhondeau-Rhodes, Lisa Ryan, Andrew Sherogan, Cate West Zahl, and others.
Saturday 5/15, All artwork is $50. 11am-5pm, by appointment only. Second Street Gallery, 115 Second St. SE. secondstreetgallery.org.
“Ochre Stillness” is one of 99 different paintings of the same “View from the Ridge” by Laura Wooten. Courtesy of the artist
She paints the same view day after day, recording the subtle and great changes of hour, season, and weather. Her subject is both profoundly familiar to her and constantly changing. Laura Wooten’s “View from the Ridge” at Second Street Gallery features 90 small paintings (8 inches x 8 inches) and nine larger works (30 inches x 30 inches), all depicting the same stretch of land just outside of town. Painted over the course of 2019, the images are devotionals to nature, inspired by the daily walks Wooten takes with her dog.
Wooten’s mentor, Stanley Lewis, with whom she studied in the 1990s, first at the Chautauqua summer program and then the MFA program at American University, once said something that has resonated with her ever since: “It is possible to find yourself in the painting, a part of yourself that you didn’t know before.”
“This opened me up to the idea of both looking outward and looking inward through the painting process,” says Wooten. “Even within the context of observational plein-air painting, there was the possibility of exploring an inner world. This became a guiding idea in my work for the next 26 years.” To ensure she maintains this quality and prevents the work from becoming too literal, Wooten rarely does preliminary sketches, reconstructing what she’s seen from memory back in the studio.
According to Wooten, the smaller landscapes are “perhaps equal parts looking out and looking inward. The impetus for the series was an enthrallment with the color, light, and atmosphere of the place, but the series continued to develop with an awareness that the landscape is being seen through the emotional lens of the self.”
“View from the Ridge” Nos. 1 and 2 provide a good set-up for what is to come. All the elements of the landscape are distinctly visible. The road bends down through fir trees on the left and a striking birch on the right to where the land opens up to an expanse of meadow. On the far side, wooded hills lead to mountains in the distance. This is the vista that we will see again and again, transforming before our eyes through Wooten’s brush. These two paintings capture the palette of early winter in the Piedmont and also the quality of light—brilliant sunlight in “No. 1” and a more muted version in “No. 2.” They are so evocative that we almost don’t notice the sophisticated brushwork with which they are rendered.
As you proceed around the room, following the seasons of the year, you notice something different about the larger works. In these paintings, created in 2020, the view has “become a stage set,” Wooten says, “an empty tableau upon which to project the imaginings of an inner world.”
In “Tundra,” the meadow, now sheathed in ice, is composed of a series of brittle, horizontal lines with the hills beyond, a rich mélange of paint that’s daubed, smeared, and scraped across the panel. Wooten uses the same horizontal brushstrokes again in the meadow and also the road in “Great Flood, 2020,” a painting that seems to loosen its ties to reality and venture into the expressionistic territory of Emil Nolde. The landscape is still there, but it functions as scaffolding for the remarkable technical effects. As you look at the work, linger on the hills wreathed in vaporous clouds. Here, Wooten applies light blue, yellow, and lavender pigment and then scrapes it off using a spatula-like tool to create topographical features, vegetation, and reflections of light. Infused with golden radiance, another painting, “Meadow Music,” is the summertime counterpart of this work.
In “View from the Ridge No. 34” the horizontal lines of the meadow are replaced by cloud-like blobs of paint that provide a softer effect. We can almost feel the wind that’s ruffling the grasses and producing the blousy, verdant mounds.
“View from the Ridge No. 57” calls to mind the wonderful pre-abstract paintings of Richard Diebenkorn, with their flattened field of view. The mottled, tawny field contrasts with the blurry yellow-green hills beyond. In the foreground, the road has become just a purple suggestion.
“Carnival, 2020” captures the explosion of color that is high fall. Bold splotches of yellow and orange describe the tree foliage. The slick indigo of the road dappled with yellow smears suggests it has just rained. Green again after the summer heat, the meadow now provides a calm foil to the foreground tree and the riot of color forming the hills on the far side.
Wooten clearly revels in the act of painting and in paint itself, finding in it a means to imbue her work with a deep sensuality and expressive resonance. “I think of each color palette as holding a distinct emotional tone,” she says. “While loving those glorious sharp-shadowed sunny days, I learned to embrace the foggy and gray, those mysterious neutral colors without names. This became a metaphor for being willing and open to examine all parts of myself, with nothing to fear and nothing to hide. Each day was a gift, whatever the view presented, and whatever emotions might come up.”
Wooten also uses brushes, knives, and scrapers to mark her painted surface, giving the pieces a texture and offering another opportunity for expression. “Through addition and subtraction, obscuring and revealing a clear cut shape or a blurred edge, I am exploring the emotional possibilities of the outer and the inner landscape,” she says. “It’s not something I could sketch ahead of time, but something I discover through the process of painting.”
Of “View from the Ridge,” Wooten says, “I made 99 paintings of the same landscape, a place I visit every day, and also 99 paintings of places in myself that I didn’t know before.”
Laura Wooten’s “View from the Ridge” is on view by appointment at Second Street Gallery through January 22.
"Teeny Tiny Trifecta 3" opens at Second Street Gallery on Thursday. Images courtesy of SSG.
Little looks: The biggest little show of the year returns when “Teeny Tiny Trifecta 3” begins this week. The juried group exhibition is a collection of threepieces, all measuring nine inches or smaller, from over 100 area artists who work in a variety of styles. The show also celebrates Second Street Gallery’s 47th season, and its reopening to the public. Thursday and Friday viewings are offered as private access ticketed entries, before free appointments begin on Saturday. Public voting for the Audience Choice Award will be available online and in the gallery.
Through 9/25. Second Street Gallery, 115 Second St., SE. secondstreetgallery.org.
“‘This Familiar Space’ is two years in the making, and the dozens of works that comprise the show (including this collage) were made by artists here in Charlottesville and in Besançon, France, one of Charlottesville’s Sister Cities. Image courtesy of Stacey Evans
One of the first assignments Stacey Evans gives her photography class is to visit the same place at different times throughout the day, a few days in a row. She tasks her PVCC students with noticing the light, how it’s different minute to minute, hour to hour, day to day. If Monday’s morning light is soft, Tuesday’s might be bright, and Wednesday’s might be grayed by rain.
It’s a practical lesson for an art that relies on light not just for composition but for mood, for atmosphere, for meaning. It’s also a rather practical (and sometimes difficult) lesson for life: Change is constant.
Change is also a major theme in Evans’ own photography. She ruminated on it in “Ways of Seeing,” a series of collages from photos shot through train car windows and exhibited at Second Street Gallery in April 2017. It’s present again in Evans’ current SSG exhibition, “This Familiar Space/Cet Espace Familier,” which opened online last week.
“‘This Familiar Space’ is two years in the making, and the dozens of works that comprise the show were made by artists here in Charlottesville and in Besançon, France, one of Charlottesville’s sister cities.
Evans served as artist, producer, and curator for the show, which is divided into four unique, but related, groups of works. Evans planned to mount it on the walls of SSG’s Dové Gallery, until the space closed due to the COVID-19 pandemic, and she had to envision and execute it for the web.
One of the photos in the “Daily Muse” series. Photo by Stacey Evans
The first segment, “Daily Muse,” is a series of 11 photographs of the same rooftop view in Besançon, taken by Evans on a 2018 Sister Cities Commission trip. Capturing this view from her hotel room became a routine for Evans on the trip, and though the visual perspective is technically the same, none of the photos are. The sky differs, sometimes drastically and sometimes subtly, from image to image, affecting the colors of the building below, the shadows, and the overall tone of the photographs. In the bottom center space of the grid, Evans has written, “This too shall pass,” putting to words what the eyes and the mind have already acknowledged, consciously or not.
Evans expects the text might resonate deeply with viewers right now, as we’re all eager for the pandemic to pass. But, she says, we’re not always so open to change: We like our routines, too. And the set of photographs presented in “Daily Muse” shows how routine and change are not necessarily opposite, but complementary, co-existent. It’s about “understanding that things aren’t permanent. Change does happen, and [you have to be] okay with change, because if you get stuck in your ways, I don’t see that as a good thing,” either.
Another image from “Daily Muse.” Photo by Stacey Evans
Evans’ role shifts a bit in “Look to See.” She made photographs in both Charlottesville and Besançon, and students altered them into collages. She had Charlottesville High School students start a batch, then brought them to Besançon for Lycée Louis Pasteur students to finish; the Louis Pasteur kids started a new set of collages that Evans brought back to Charlottesville to be completed at CHS.
Evans also served in a production role for the third piece, “The Ones We Can Still Save,” a sculpture and video collaboration between Charlottesville-based artist Nina Frances Burke and Besançon-based artist Gabriel Hopson. Each artist gave Evans a small package of materials (the one requirement: that it fit in Evans’ suitcase) for the other to use. Hopson, who is diabetic, sent Burke an insulin pen full of the life-saving medication, something he can easily access (and even spare) thanks to French health care, something that is difficult, sometimes impossible, for people to access in the U.S. health care system. The pen was full but unusable, and Burke embedded it, inaccessible, in a nest-like sculpture. Together with Hopson’s video (we won’t give away all the details), it’s a comment on the differences between the American and French health care systems.
One component of “The Ones We Can Still Save,” a collaboration between Charlottesville artist Nina Frances Burke and Besancon artist Gabriel Hopson. Image courtesy the artists
The fourth piece, “The Light Between,” is a video collage Evans made of both moving and still footage of daily life in Besançon and Charlottesville. It’s full of marked differences (architecture, language) and similarities (going to work, dining al fresco) among life in both places. One of Evans’ favorite juxtapositions is around the 1:40 mark—note the power lines in Charlottesville, and the absence of them, in Besançon.
Across all of the works in “This Familiar Space/Cet Espace Familier” there’s evidence of connection of people across time and space. “That’s always been in the show,” says Evans, though the theme might project a bit more right now.
Recognizing the ways in which we’re all connected—and how our own decisions can affect others—is important, says Evans, who considers herself “a global citizen first and an American second.” That realization can complicate our constant internal, highly personal, negotiation between change and routine, already a delicate balance to strike. For Evans, the secret to staying grounded is looking up, thinking about the ever-shifting sky, and “the umbrella that connects us all,” she says.
"Dreams" by Netherlandish artist Frijke Couman is one of the pieces featured in Second Street Gallery's "Bond/Bound," which address the complicated experience of adjusting to life during a pandemic. Image courtesy the artist
Throughout the month of March, sad email after sad email landed in Kristen Chiacchia’s inbox. Art fairs postponed, gallery shows canceled, museums closed to the public—and then there were the news reports.
The Second Street Gallery executive director and chief curator decided to close her gallery on March 13, but she didn’t want to contribute to the deluge of despair if she didn’t have to.
Instead of focusing on what SSG couldn’t do for patrons and artists at this time (they’ve had to postpone four exhibitions at this point), Chiacchia and Outreach and Events Coordinator Lou Haney decided to put expertly curated exhibitions online.
And on Wednesday, April 15, the gallery launched “Bond/Bound,” on a new site, virtualssg.org. The exhibit, which takes stock of the complex, complicated experience of adjusting to life during a pandemic, is the first show the gallery has curated specifically for the web.
Haney had the idea for “Bond/Bound” as she started contemplating the dichotomy of bonding with other people—either those we’re already physically and emotionally close to, or the millions of complete strangers suddenly sharing our experience—during a time when we are bound to our homes.
One-hundred-and-eleven artists from around the world submitted work, and SSG accepted a little less than half for the exhibition, which covers a variety of media, from sculpture to collage to video. Viewers can click on individual images for a closer look, and to read the artists’ statements.
“‘Dreams’ visualizes the feeling of self isolation for me. The desire for being close to other human beings,” explains Netherlandish artist Frijke Coumans of her photograph, in which a man lies sleeping on a bed in a pair of boxer-briefs, mannequin arms draped over his body. “Seeing videos of hugging friends and people being close to each other almost starts to feel unreal,” she writes.
Hanna Washburn, based in Beacon, New York, thought a lot about the term “shelter in place” as she created “Hive,” a soft sculpture hanging in a tree that “emulated a home, and [is] constructed from the materials of home,” including her old backpack, a rug from her childhood, two of her T-shirts, and a work blouse from her mom, all in hues of pink, red, and white.
Other statements explain how the pandemic has affected artists’ creative processes. “The gloom hanging over our global heads has filtered into my work,” writes Chris Gregson, a Fredericksburg, Virginia, artist whose black-and-blue sumi ink grid of shapes on paper is a stark departure from his usual work, which he describes as “life-confirming abstract oil paintings rooted in the joys of spring.”
“Fairies always did admire the crocodiles,” by Madeleine Rhondeau-Rhodes. Image courtesy of the artist
Charlottesville artist Madeleine Rhondeau-Rhodes submitted “Fairies always did admire the crocodiles,” a collage in which a human-rabbit figure, wearing moth wings both on its back and as clothing, carries a crocodile away from a house, against a purple-red-blue sky. “The pandemic has forced me to further retreat into my own imagination,” Rhondeau-Rhodes writes.
It’s unusual for artist statements to play such a prominent role in an exhibition, but for “Bond/Bound,” “in some cases, the statement was just as important as the work,” says Chiacchia.
Take Penny Chang’s 38-second movement piece, “If You Came This Way,” presented in black-and-white video. The camera focuses on Chang’s open palm as she spins around her bedroom, then wraps herself in an embrace, and holds her own hand. Chang’s statement deepens the viewer’s understanding of the piece: For the past 10 months, she’s been home alone, recovering from a traumatic brain injury sustained after a tree branch fell on her head in New York City’s Washington Square Park. Even before the pandemic, she knew the difficulty of isolation.
Chiacchia anticipates that COVID-19 will change the way we look at, and interact with, art. “We’ve taken for granted being able to just pop into a gallery on a Saturday afternoon, or go to a museum,” she says. And though she hopes people will once again fill those spaces when it’s safe to do so, she plans to continue adapting SSG’s exhibits for the web. SSG may even hold more online-only exhibitions.
At this point, it’s cliché to declare that a lot of great art will come out of this period in history; artists always create work as a response to the world around and within them, and the coronavirus pandemic will be no different. “Bond/Bound” offers an early look at some of this work, and how it will evolve from here. Whether some of these images become tropes of this period in time, or stand as original reactions, is impossible to tell, says Haney. But in this moment, they’re evidence of the ties that bind us.
Kuwinjku artists Joe Guymala (left) and Gabriel Maralngurra (right) stand amid some of the memorial poles that are part of "The Inside World: Contemporary Aboriginal Australian Memorial Poles" on view at The Fralin Museum of Art through May 24. Photo by Amy and Jackson Smith
This week, something extraordinary will happen in Charlottesville: Four exhibitions of contemporary Aboriginal Australian art will open in four different venues across town, bringing the total number of such exhibitions currently on view to six. And a seventh will open in mid-February.
Having this many concurrent shows of contemporary Indigenous Australian art in one locale is an extremely rare occurrence outside of Australia, if it’s even happened at all, says Henry Skerritt, curator of the Kluge-Ruhe Aboriginal Art Collection of UVA—the only museum outside of Australia dedicated to Indigenous Australian art.
And it’s some of “the best Australian contemporary art” at that, adds Skerritt. Many of these artists have won prestigious awards, and their work is collected by some of Australia’s major museums (as well as some international celebrities, like comedian Steve Martin). We’re talking “major, heavy-hitter artists,” says Skerritt.
Taken together, these exhibitions give a broad view of contemporary Indigenous Australian art. Artists of many distinct language groups (of which there are more than 250 across Australia), cultures, ages, and experience are represented. Some live and work in remote communities, others in major cities. Some work with materials and methods that have been used for thousands of years, others work with digital cameras. Their art is often political, engaging topics of identity, heritage, race, colonization, sovereignty, globalization, climate change, and resilience. At the same time, these works express a reverence for the wonder and beauty of the natural world.
Nonggirrnga Marawili’s work is on view in two shows, “The Inside World” at The Fralin Museum of Art, and “By The Strength of Their Skin” at Second Street Gallery. Photo by Pep Phelan, courtesy of Buku-Larrnggay Mulka Art Centre, Yirrkala
The shows arrive as catastrophic bush fires are still raging across the Australian continent. Bush fires are not uncommon in Australia, but the current out-of-control blazes, caused at least in part by climate change, have singed tens of millions of acres of land; at least 28 people and an estimated half a billion animals have perished.
Skerritt says that the artists exhibiting in these shows don’t live in the areas affected by the fires, but there are plenty of Indigenous Australian artists (including some former Kluge-Ruhe artists-in-residence) who do.
With that in mind, these shows present an opportunity for viewers to ruminate on land, land that is important to the lives, traditions, and art practices of all of the artists here, land that has sustained their peoples for generations, even when it was violently stolen from them—and subsequently abused—by white European colonizers.
Land is spiritually, conceptually, and physically inseparable from these artists and their practices. It is the vital artery running through these bodies of work.
Have a word
In discussing their work, many Indigenous Australian artists talk about “Country,” and “Dreaming,” two terms describing concepts that are vital to understanding all of the art in these exhibitions.
Country: A place or places that have deep significance for them and their ancestors over many thousands of years.
Dreaming: The English word “dreaming” is inadequate to explain this vast, complex concept. As described in the Kluge-Ruhe’s permanent installation, the Dreaming is a belief system, a worldview shared by many Indigenous peoples. It is “powerfully connected to individual and collective identity. Individuals are born with unbreakable ties to ancestral beings and particular places for which they are custodians.” It can “refer to the time when ancestral beings created the earth and everything in it, including people, animals, plants and features of the land.” Those beings established kin relationships, art practices, laws, ceremonies, and more. The Dreaming is not marked by Western concepts of chronological time, and these narratives “continue to be passed down through generations in painted designs, ceremonies, and songs. The continuation of these activities keeps culture strong. The Dreaming was there in the beginning, it underlies the present and shapes the future.”
“Munguyhmunguyh (Forever)”
The Rotunda Upper West Room, January 23 – April 5
“Kurdukadji Djang (Emu Dreaming),” 1991 by Bardayal Nadjamerrek AO. Courtesy the estate of the artist and Injalak Arts
Kunwinjku artist Gabriel Maralngurra was just a boy when his uncle, the artist Thompson Yulidjirri, took him over the hill to see the rock art paintings of their ancestors. For tens of thousands of years, the Kunwinjku people have painted their Dreamings on rock formations in what is now known as Western Arnhem Land, using the images to educate younger generations on their culture and history.
The sites include many, many paintings of Kunwinjku Dreamings, which go back some 40,000 years, and, as artist Joe Guymala points out, some of the paintings also include images of white people with wagons, which go back about 200 years, to the European colonization of Australia. “The old people thought, what’s this white man? They draw the rifles, shotguns, and knives that the white people brought with them,” Guymala explains.
In the early 1990s, Kunwinjku artists at the Injalak Arts and Crafts Association started painting some of these stories on paper, a more portable medium than rock, as part of a project commissioned by John W. Kluge, in partnership with the arts center.
Maralngurra was president of the Injalak center at the time, and in a letter included in the commission’s published catalog, he and Gunbalanya Community Council chairman Moses Mangiru wrote that one of the goals of the commission was to help viewers of these pieces “develop a greater understanding of Aboriginal culture, our relationship to the Dreaming, and the creation of our clan lands…it is our sincerest hope for the future.”
The commission was an important moment for these artists, says Margo Smith, the longtime director of the Kluge-Ruhe, because “with paper, the artists really had to adjust to painting on a flat surface, but it enabled them to increase their detail, and so you see the development of different styles in painting on paper that [also] included some of the standard [techniques] of rock art” painting, such as hand stencils. Artists would fill their mouths with paint, put their hands up against the rock (or in this case, paper), and blow the pigment around their hands, creating the effect of a sort of starry galaxy around the negative space hand outline.
“Ngalyod dja Ngalkunburriyaymi (Rainbow Serpent and Water Spirit),” 2018 by Joe Guymala. Courtesy the artist and Injalak Arts
Once the commission was over, Kunwinjku artists continued sharing their stories on paper, and to commemorate 30 years of the commission and the resulting art historical moment, five of those original 45 pieces will be on display in the West Oval Room of the Rotunda. Two brand new pieces from Maralngurra and Guymala, artists who have incorporated rock painting techniques and intentions into their own works on paper as a direct result of that initial commission, will also be on display.
With this exhibition, “we’re looking forwards and backwards simultaneously,” says Skerritt.
For “Munguyhmunguyh,” Guymala, who usually paints on eucalyptus bark surfaces that he collects and treats himself, has painted on paper Ngalkunburriyaymi (female Water Spirits who guard sacred water holes and Dreaming sites) encircled by Ngalyod (Rainbow Serpent, the most important ancestor spirit in West Arnhem Land, who appears in a variety of animal forms in Kuwinjku mythology). He used ochre pigments, which he collected from the bush and mixed himself.
“I like to paint for myself, so kids can learn the stories. I want to pass down the stories to my sons, daughters, and grandchildren. Our grandfathers learnt from their fathers and gave this knowledge to us, and I want to share this with the younger generations,” says Guymala, who also wants to inspire young people to paint, so that they, too, can share these stories.
“Kunwardde Bim Kakukyime (Rock Art Style),” 2019 by Gabriel Maralngurra. Courtesy the artist and Injalak Arts
Maralngurra describes his work as “similar to the rock art but different; it comes out of my head.” What’s notable about Maralngurra’s piece in this show is that it combines a variety of painting traditions in a single image: He uses an X-ray style to paint overlapping mimih spirits (a 50,000-year-old subject) and animals (a 7,000-year-old subject), in combination with ceremonial cross-hatching (made public only in the last 50 years), and colonial influence (European missionaries introduced the bright blue pigment that Maralngurra uses, but does not allow to take over the piece).
“I’ve got stories to tell the whole world,” says Maralngurra, who will be in Charlottesville, along with Guymala, to open the exhibition. “About how it’s done, the painting and the stories and our culture, bininj way.”
“Shadow Sites”
New City Arts Welcome Gallery January 24 – 30
“Echoes #3: Tjalini,” 2019, by Robert Fielding. Courtesy the artist and Mimili Maku Arts
On view for just one week at Welcome Gallery, the works of Steaphan Paton and Robert Fielding together demonstrate how modern media such as photography and video have become a vital part of some Indigenous artists’ practice.
Through the works in this exhibition, both Paton (a member of the Gunai and Mondero nations) and Fielding (a Western Aranda and Yankunytjatjara artist from Mimili community on APY Lands, who also has Afghan heritage) inspect their cultural identity and history, along with notions of Country, belonging, race, colonialism, and more.
In his artist statement about the three “Echoes” works that will be on view at Welcome Gallery, Fielding writes:
“The objects in these photographs are echoes of the past. With them come the memories of past afflictions upon our land and culture: the memories of rations, missions, mining, and farming.
“Like manta (earth) continually reclaiming the physical remnants of the past through rust and erosion, Anangu culture continually reclaims its place as part of our landscape. By reshaping echoes of the past into songs of our future, we create new memories, new ways of keeping culture strong.
“Where one sees an oil barrel, I see a fire pit, a place to share stories.
Where one sees a flour bucket, I see the many secrets we carry and hide.
Where one sees a water tank, I see shelter and protection.
Where one sees desecrated land, I see a resilient future.
“The words sandblasted into the rusted surfaces expose our radiant and unblemished truth that stands strong against the test of time and change. We have absorbed the past, and made it our future.”
Land of contrasts
There’s quite a bit of diversity among Australia’s Indigenous (Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander) peoples. Today, there are more than 250 distinct language groups across the continent, which is slightly smaller than the continental United States and has a varied geography comprised of deserts, temperate and tropical forests, and snow-capped mountain ranges.
“By the Strength of Their Skin”
Second Street Gallery, January 24 – March 20
“If you had to pick three of the top artists in Australia at the moment, Nonggirrnga, Regina, and Mabel would be pretty high on most people’s lists,” says Kluge-Ruhe curator Henry Skerritt about the three artists exhibiting in “By the Strength of Their Skin” at Second Street Gallery.
Nonggirrnga Marawili, Regina Pilawuk Wilson, and Mabel Juli are three of Australia’s most revered artists (their works are collected in major Australian museums), and each has created new works specifically for this show.
“Each of these women artists approach their art practice through the prism of their Country, their Dreamings, and the everyday expression of living in a place where the spiritual and the quotidian are seamlessly connected,” writes Second Street Gallery curator Kristen Chiacchia in the show’s press release.
“Baratjala,” by Nonggirrnga Marawili. Courtesy the artist and Buku-Larrnggay Mulka Art Centre
“The animating tension of Aboriginal art has always been this tension between innovation and tradition,” says Skerritt, who opines that Marawili’s works are some of the finest examples of that very thing. She learned to paint on bark in the 1980s, when she was in her 40s, assisting her late husband, Djapu statesman and artist Djutadjuta Mununggurr. After her husband’s death, Marawili continued painting the Djapu themes approved by her husband, and, as the Second Street press releases notes, over time came to explore “intuitive subjects and mark making outside the realm of the sacred.” Now a multidisciplinary artist living and working at the Buku-Larrnggay Mulka art center in the Northern Territory, she’s known for her bark paintings, larrakitj (memorial poles, including a few on view in “The Inside World”), and prints. Her works articulate how country comes alive, both physically and spiritually, by the movement of natural elements seen and unseen.
“Syaw (Fish Net),” 2019, by Regina Pilawuk Wilson. Courtesy the artist and Durrmu Arts Aboriginal Corporation
Charlottesville audiences may be familiar with Wilson’s work—she had a solo show at Second Street in summer 2018. A painter and master weaver, Wilson is also known for her role in the Aboriginal land rights movement. As European whites colonized the land, they forced Indigenous peoples to live on reserves and missions, with strict rules that in many cases sought to slowly dissolve or outright eliminate Indigenous traditions, languages, and cultures. (It is not unlike what European whites did to Indigenous American peoples.) In the early 1970s, Wilson and her husband decided to move off the mission and back to their country (traditional land), starting a community for Ngangikurrungurr people in the Daly River region, with not much more than a tent. During her visit to Charlottesville in June 2018, Wilson explained that they had to leave the mission in order to practice their traditions, their art, their language. Many of her paintings are of weavings, preserving stitches in paint so that they can live on, visible and present for future generations.
“Marranyji & Jiyirriny,” by Mabel Juli. Courtesy artist and Warmun Art Centre
Gija artist Juli has been painting since the 1980s, when she settled in Warmun, East Kimberley Western Australia. She was about 50 years old at the time, and two of the community’s celebrated elder artists encouraged her to make artwork. According to the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia’s website, Juli has effectively incorporated pinks, purples, and greens into the Gija color palette, which was previously traditionally comprised of ochres. Her large-scale works often feature a few icons or symbols (say, a crescent moon, a four-pointed star, or a bird) on a solid color surface; they may appear simple, but they tell rich stories. For many years, she painted Ngarranggarni (Dreaming) creation narratives of her country, Darrajayn, but more recently, she’s broadened her practice to include works about language conservation and climate change.
“The Inside World”
The Fralin Museum of Art at UVA, January 24 – May 24
The largest of these shows, “The Inside World: Contemporary Aboriginal Australian Memorial Poles” presents the work of more than 50 artists from the remote Aboriginal communities of Kunbarrllanjnja (or Gunbalanya), Maningrida, Milingimbi Island, and Yirrkala, all located in Arnhem Land, in the Northern Territory. On view in the upstairs gallery at The Fralin Museum of Art, “The Inside World” is more than a large-scale installation. It’s a journey.
“There are some things that unite the peoples of Arnhem Land,” Henry Skerritt writes in the exhibition catalog. “One is their belief that everything in existence has an ‘inside’ and an ‘outside meaning,’” and that together they “[operate] as a continuum that structure the entire universe.”
Some of the memorial poles featured in “The Inside World,” a traveling exhibition now at The Fralin Museum of Art. Photo by Amy and Jackson Smith
“Traditionally, memorial poles like those in ‘The Inside World’ would have been used as ossuaries: the final resting place for the bones of the dead,” Skerritt says. “The poles would be made from the trunk of a carefully selected eucalyptus tetradonta (stringybark tree) that had been naturally hollowed out by termites. The most perfectly cylindrical trunk would be selected and its bark stripped so that it could be painted with powerful clan designs that would identify and protect the spirit of the deceased.”
But in recent years, writes Wukun Wanambi, a Yolngu artist, “the elders have given us authority to use [memorial poles] in our art.”
Aesthetic use of memorial poles really began in 1988, with “The Aboriginal Memorial” exhibition at the Biennale of Sydney, says Margo Smith. Artist Djon Mundine organized the installation of 200 painted poles from 43 artists from the community of Ramingining in Arnhem Land, one pole for each year of European settlement, commemorating all of the Indigenous people who died defending their lands and their cultures from colonizers. (The highly political installation is now a permanent exhibition in the National Gallery of Australia in Canberra.)
Since then, memorial poles—called larrakitj, lorrkkon, or dupun—that have been painted as art and not used as ossuaries, have been regular fixtures in Aboriginal art shows around the globe.
“The reason why the old people have given this authority is so that we—the Yolnu people—can maintain our culture and pass it on to the generations that come after us, to build up their strength and wisdom,” adds Wanambi. “But larrakitj can’t stand by himself: larrakitj’s identity comes from its family, and this attaches it to our culture and Law. Balanda (non-Aboriginal people) need to understand the whole structure—not just the art part—or they will never understand.”
Photo by Amy and Jackson Smith
And so, the 112 poles in “The Inside World” (at other venues, the traveling exhibition has shown 99 poles from the Debra and Dennis Scholl collection; this iteration also includes 13 from the Kluge-Ruhe’s collection) are grouped by artist, and then by location, throughout the gallery space. With the walls painted black, the objects spotlit and anchored in glittering black coal slag, eco-acoustics recorded in the bush floating through the air, viewers (the vast majority of us Balanda) will symbolically traverse time and the Australian landscape in a motion to begin to understand the stories contained within, and projected by, these groups of poles.
“Llarakitj need their family because it gives them strength and power,” says Wanambi. “One larrakitj on its own is like nothing—it doesn’t mean anything—but if you put three or four together in one group it is like a family: they have the strength of the family ties from that area.”
“Tithuyil: Moving With the Rhythm of the Stars”
The Kluge-Ruhe Aboriginal Art Collection, February 11 – May 31
Brian Robinson often says that he was born with a pencil in his hand. “No surface was sacred for me…I drew on pretty much everything from the kitchen table to household walls, to windows to the back fence…pretty much everywhere, and so that creativity continued to grow and flourish.”
Robinson is of the Maluyligal and Wuthani tribal groups of the Torres Strait and Cape York Peninsula, and a descendant of the Dayak people of Malaysia.
“By virtue of this act I hereby take possession of this land,” 2017, by Brian Robinson. Courtesy the artist and Mossenson Galleries
“The artworks presented in ‘Tithuyil’ look at life in the Torres Strait with a bit of a twist,” Robinson says. He writes in his artist statement that these etchings and linocut prints “present an intoxicating worldview, one where iconic works of classical art and popular sources from global culture are co-opted into the spirit world of the Islander imagination. Wise-eyed sea creatures, muscular warriors, stars in the heavens, broad-petaled flowering plants, and hollow-eyed skulls sweep through his works. Interwoven amongst this realm of references to his island home and the surrounding sea waters and islands of the Torres Strait, are the tokens and talismans of a parallel life within a global culture of superheroes, comic characters, and ancient Classical mythologies.”
In juxtaposing these seemingly disparate visual icons with a delicately struck balance of humor and seriousness, Robinson captures the viewer’s curiosity, requiring a close look to parse out the relationships among these icons.
About a dozen of Robinson’s works will be on view in this show. One of them, “By virtue of this act I hereby take possession of this land,” is rendered in white line on a black surface that stylistically recalls ancient Greek vase painting. At its center is James Cook, the British Royal Navy captain whose ship brought the first Europeans to the coast of the continent now known as Australia in 1770. Cook’s arrival precipitated extraordinary violence, and eventual colonization, committed by European Whites against the land’s native peoples.
Scrolling Torres Strait aquatic flora designs surround Cook as he charts a course on the map, navigating by the stars in the sky above him—pixelated alien creatures from the 1978 arcade game “Space Invaders”—as he plans to invade the space of Indigenous Australian peoples.
“Ngayulu Nguraku Ninti (The Country I Know)”
The Kluge-Ruhe Aboriginal Art Collection, Through February 2
Country is the subject of this series of paintings by Barbara Moore and Sharon Adamson, two artists who live in the Amata community in the APY Landsin northwestern South Australia, a geographically vast but sparsely populated area made up of numerous unique Aboriginal communities. Both women paint very personal expressions of the natural world that has nourished them and sustained their peoples for tens of thousands of years.
Barbara Moore paints a mural in the Kluge-Ruhe breezeway in November 2019. Photo by Tom Cogill
Moore, an Anmatyerre artist who started painting later in her life, in 2003, maintains a devoted art practice while also working full-time as a senior health worker at an Amata clinic. She paints large-scale, colorful works that convey the great variety and vivacity of the landscape and her relationship to it. The circles in her works represent water holes in the desert rock formations—vital sources of drinking water for the people who live among and travel desert lands.
Two of her paintings in the show are rendered in grayscale. During an artist talk at the Kluge-Ruhe in November 2019, Moore, who was in town for a residency along with Adamson, explained why she departed from her usual palette for these particular works: They’re of the nighttime.
Sharon Adamson. Photo by Tom Cogill
Like Moore, Adamson paints at Tjala Arts center in Amata, where she’s also employed. And though the two artists’ works share a certain fluid dynamism, they are distinct.
Adamson, a young, emerging artist, grew up watching her great-grandfather paint Rainbow Serpent stories, and she’s chosen to carry on not just his methods of mixing pigments, but his preferred subject. In many Aboriginal cultures, the Rainbow Serpent is a creating deity regarded as protector of the land, its people, and sources of life (such as rivers and water holes); if enraged, the Rainbow Serpent can also be a destructive force. Adamson usually paints these momentous stories on rather large canvases, but here she shows three smaller—but still considerable—works that better fit the Kluge-Ruhe’s limited wall space.
“With Her Hands: Women’s Fiber Art from Gapuwiyak”
Kluge-Ruhe Aboriginal Art Collection, Through April 5
Fiber works made by women have “historically been regarded as craft and devalued in the art world,” says the Kluge-Ruhe’s Smith, who’s also an anthropologist, and “With Her Hands” pushes back against that idea, with pieces that demonstrate the artistry that goes into such work. Twenty-five women from the community of Gapuwiyak, in Australia’s Northern Territory, created these 100 diverse pieces, which include necklaces made from shells, seeds, and nuts; mats; a variety of baskets made from natural and dyed pandanus palm; ceremonial headbands and armbands; and a selection of sculpture. All of the works are part of the Kluge-Ruhe’s collection, and the show was curated by six women of color working through the Mellon Indigenous Arts Initiative.
Kangaroo by Lucy Malirrimurruwuy Wanapuyngu. Courtesy the artist and Gapuwiyak Culture and Arts
Together, the pieces in “With Her Hands” speak to the rich history of fiber work in Aboriginal cultures but also “to women’s lives today in Aboriginal communities,” says Smith. The works demonstrate each individual artist’s reverence for tradition and inclination toward innovation. For example, artist Anna Ramata Malibirr discovered that she could boil emerald green crepe paper (not something her pre-colonial ancestors would have had access to) to dye her fibers.
But…how?
How did Charlottesville end up with the only museum outside of Australia dedicated to Indigenous Australian art? A billionaire was moved by an art show.
John W. Kluge—at the time one of the richest men in America, and also an Albemarle County resident—saw the landmark “Dreamings: The Art of Aboriginal Australia” exhibition at the Asia Society Galleries in New York City in 1988. Inspired by the show, Kluge made his first of several trips to Australia in 1989, and he began collecting and commissioning works from Aboriginal artists.
In 1993, Kluge purchased the collection of the late Ed Ruhe, a University of Kansas English professor who began collecting Aboriginal art during a professorship in Australia in 1965. Ruhe purchased work directly from artists, community art centers, and Aboriginal art dealers (a few of these pieces are currently on view in a small exhibition in the Brown Science and Engineering Library at UVA), and amassed a library of related books and articles.
In 1997, Kluge donated the bulk of these collections to UVA, and the museum opened in its current location—in an old mansion on Pantops—in 1999, where it serves as a global hub for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander art.
