Tag: The Bridge Progressive Arts Initiative

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Culture

Fresh eyes

“Eyes on Sen Soley,” featuring work by Mackenley Darius, Anthony Martial, Richard Nesly, and Erivaux Prospere, is on view by appointment at The Bridge through September 30. Supplied photo.

When Haitian American art collector and curator Jeanremi Verella first encountered the Sen Soley art collective during a residency in Port-Au-Prince, he knew he had to bring the artists to America. But he quickly learned that strict visa quotas made this nearly impossible. So he brought their artwork instead.

Sen Soley is a Haitian art collective that includes artists Mackenley Darius, Anthony Martial, Richard Nesly, and Erivaux Prospere. It takes its name from the patois spelling of Saint Soleil, a Haitian art movement founded in 1973, and revives the stylized human and animal forms and Haitian Vodou symbolism that was the focus of the earlier group. Haitian Vodou is a religion that fuses the West African Vodun religion with Roman Catholicism. For Saint Soleil and Sen Soley alike, visual art represents a synthesis of mind, body, and nature. These artists look to their rural roots and the Haitian traditions of storytelling, music, writing, and religion, as well as dreams and visions for their inspiration. 

Verella, who attended UVA, spent time learning about the artists in Haiti, and has now helped organize an exhibition at The Bridge Progressive Arts Initiative. “Eyes on Sen Soley” is open until September 30. 

Haiti is in the midst of a tumultuous period. “There’ve been natural disasters, and political tension, again and again,” says Verella. Earlier this year, the country’s president was assassinated, and this week an earthquake killed more than 1,200 people. 

“With everything that’s happening in Haiti right now, it feels really valuable to offer something beyond the headlines,” says Alan Goffinski, executive director of the BPAI.

Verella still hopes to find a city or organization willing to sponsor the artists. This would enable them to get their visas, interact with other artists, and expose their work to a wider audience. “It’s been such a humbling journey of living with the artwork and getting to unfold it at a different location and look at it with people,” says Verella.

The work is characterized by bold color and design with a surface that is kept flat with no illusion of depth. This jibes with the paintings’ role as symbolic entities depicting spiritual matters, rather than realistic vignettes of the physical world. 

The exception to this is the work by Mackenley Darius, which has three-dimensional volume. “His style kind of branches out of the Sen Soley movement,” says Verella. “He does ethnography of Haiti and I think this gives him additional perspective, enabling him to blend the ideas of Sen Soley into his artwork.” 

The stunning portrait of Haitian American art superstar Jean-Michel Basquiat (“Honor to My King”), who gazes soulfully from the canvas, is his. Basquiat incorporated Vodou images in his work. Here, Darius not only captures Basquiat, but he does so while emulating his subject’s distinctive style.

Richard Nesly’s paintings have the all-over rhythm of a frieze or piece of fabric. He reduces the palette to one or two colors to showcase the pattern that undulates across the work. Human, animal, and plant forms ooze out to form other entities, or flow into one another to suggest the interconnectedness of all things. In some pieces, these take on the appearance of a serpent, an important Vodou symbol.

Smack dab in the middle of Nesly’s “Nids Dé Zwazo,” you can see a Vodou symbol called a vèvè. An important part of Vodou ceremonies, vèvès are “drawn” on the ground using corn meal, flour, or some other powdery material. The vèvès are ritualistically destroyed during the ceremony when congregants dance across them, scattering the powder. Vèvès also appear in other works in the show.

Looking around the room, and perhaps with the exhibition’s title in mind, one is struck by the number of eyes that stare back at you. Prospere’s “Untitled 1” and “Untitled 2” feature densely packed ribbons of richly hued paint, that at first appear to be completely abstract, before you notice the eyes and mouths emerging from the ornate bands of color, and the suggestion of a figure. Are these intended as representations of otherworldly presences observing us from another dimension?

The eyes are also remarkable in Nesly’s “Lé Ancien,” adding a punch of energy to this striking work. Nesly creates enormous visual excitement through the interplay of pattern, figures, and color. Though Nesly’s work is highly stylized, the figures are individualized with characteristics and features that give us the impression of real people.

Anthony Martial’s work seems the most serious, perhaps because it is rendered in black and white. His figures of humans and birds are simple, but his works have a complexity and power, thanks to his compositional arrangements and sophisticated surface patterns.

When dealing with Haiti, it’s natural to focus on the suffering endured by the Haitian people, whether at the hands of Mother Nature or corrupt politicians. But “Eyes on Sen Soley” shows another side of Haiti, and in Goffinski’s words, “presents some humanizing culture so we can appreciate the Haitian people as people, and these artists as individuals.”

The paintings in the exhibition are all for sale as are prints of them. All proceeds directly support the artists.

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Arts Culture

Milk, but no honey

Locally produced zine Mala Leche offers a forum for underrepresented voices. “Saint Lucy Eyes” by Sam Gray accompanies a handwritten explainer of Lucia of Syracuse’s persecution. Photo courtesy of the artist

On the cover of Mala Leche’s inaugural issue, the name of the zine is tiny, hardly visible. The focus is much more on the “bad milk” itself—a cut-out image of a baby bottle, emblazoned with a black skull and crossbones and resting in an equally inky puddle.

It’s an eye-catching design, one intended to draw passersby to its distribution boxes at the Bridge Progressive Arts Initiative. But the cover is just the start, as anyone who picks up a copy will discover upon reading the letter from the editors, Sri Kodakalla and Ramona Martinez, Mala Leche’s co-creators. The zine, they write, “reflects the voices and interests of womxn, non-binary, and genderqueer artists & thinkers.” Kodakalla and Martinez also assert that their zine plays a part in the “death and rebirth of society.”

The first issue’s 16 pieces of art, contributed by 13 creatives in the central Virginia area, serve as proof of a community that is as diverse as it is underappreciated. The works vary widely in subject matter, but have similar levels of intensity and urgency: an anonymous essay about a ride-along with a Charlottesville cop, a handwritten consideration of St. Lucy, stark black-and-white depictions of some of C’ville’s still-standing monuments.

Kodakalla considers Mala Leche’s diversity one of the publication’s most important features. “The thing about Mala Leche is that it creates this space for all those different viewpoints to exist in one zine,” she says. The goal, both she and Martinez agree, is to create a product that’s “relevant to every person.”

Along with co-editing Mala Leche, Kodakalla and Martinez are also the acting co-directors of the Feminist Union of Charlottes­ville Creatives. FUCC got its start as a Facebook group in 2017, Martinez says, and has only been an “official” organization since it recently received fiscal sponsorship from the Bridge PAI.

One tradition that has been around since the start is FUCC’s annual art show. “It’s really powerful to have a show of all women, non-binary, and genderqueer artists,” Martinez says. “You have to wonder how many genderqueer, non-binary artists have work hanging in the museums of New York right now.”

Mala Leche was created largely to give a different platform to those same artists. Martinez says she had been talking about her dream of such a zine for months before Kodakalla suggested they start it through FUCC. “It just made so much sense because it’s tapping into a network of artists and writers who already have a lot to share.”

Martinez says about half the work in Mala Leche’s first issue was submitted by artists already involved with FUCC, while the other 50 percent came from outside contributors, such as Meesha Goldberg, a painter and writer whose poem “Casualties of the Anthropocene” is one of the issue’s most memorable pieces. “The Earth is made of food / We are one another’s harvest,” Goldberg writes, invoking images of a “shroud of vultures” and deer “strewn & supine” on the highway.

Kodakalla and Martinez had interacted with Goldberg in other capacities—Kodakalla oversaw a 96-foot mural recently completed by Goldberg for the McGuffey Art Center, while Martinez enlisted Goldberg’s help to relocate a stray rooster that had wandered onto her property (the rooster now resides on Goldberg’s farm somewhere “in a secluded valley”). Both were so impressed by the variety and power of Goldberg’s work that they invited her to guest edit Mala Leche’s second issue.

Titled “Fever Dreams of Mother Earth,” its themes hew closely to Goldberg’s poetry and visual work. The issue, which is accepting submissions through February 26, will tackle the “delirium of [Mother Earth’s] dark nights…Mala Leche is conjuring the medicine of Art that we may one morning sweat out our fever and wake from this collective nightmare. Let us lucid dream again!”

Goldberg says she was drawn to the zine for its “strong, perverse tension” and the ways it’s positioned to highlight “sickness in society.” And nothing is sicker in society right now, she argues, than Mother Earth. “So many of our social problems come from cultural disconnection with the land.”

An important aspect of Mala Leche that its creators want to emphasize is that the zine is in black-and-white, so those interested in submitting should plan their artwork accordingly. It imposes a limit when printing visual content—Goldberg herself boasts many vivid, hyperrealistic paintings in her body of work, and to reprint them on such a scale wouldn’t do them justice—but Kodakalla and Martinez maintain that the very existence of Mala Leche is cause for celebration: In addition to giving deserving artists a platform, it pays them too, thanks to the Bridge PAI’s fiscal sponsorship.

The editors are excited about the radical and sometimes revolutionary submissions received by Mala Leche. They’re never sure what to expect, and both agree that the unknown is part of the appeal.
“We’re not really looking for any one particular vision,” Kodakalla says.

“Right now is the time to dream the new world up,” Martinez agrees. “There isn’t one answer as to what that world should look like.”

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Arts Culture

Rad space: The Bridge PAI finds new ways to connect by dreaming big

The Bridge has kept art opportunities flowing by sharing creative print content, including zines, pamphlets, stickers, and buttons in its Rad Press distribution boxes. Courtesy of the Bridge PAI

How does a community arts organization react to an ongoing pandemic that requires the restriction of in-person gatherings? It gets creative.

“We’re still dreaming big,” says Alan Goffinski, director of The Bridge Progressive Arts Initiative. “One thing that I think we’ve always prided ourselves on as an organization is our ability to shift gears, respond to the creative impulses of our community, and be that resource for artists and culture shapers to plug in and make something happen.”

Programming committee member Federico Cuatlacuatl says, “We’re in the time where community programs have to constantly reinvent ourselves and how we engage, which is challenging and overwhelming, but, at the same time, exciting because we get to pave that path. We get to throw out these ideas and exciting new possibilities.”

One of those exciting new possibilities is Rad Press, a collection of newsstands in front of the Bridge gallery space at 209 Monticello Rd., which offers a way to connect the community and elevates the voices of Charlottesville artists. They’re not traditional newspaper boxes in appearance or content. On the outside, they are vibrant works of art thanks to The Bridge PAI programming committee members Cuatlacuatl, Karina Monroy, and Daisa Granger Pascall, and Feminist Union of Charlottes- ville Creatives members Heather Owens and Miranda Elliott Rader. On the inside, they contain a variety of print content, including zines, pamphlets, stickers, and buttons, exploring themes of “revolution, resistance, decolonization, and witchcraft,” according to Cuatlacuatl.

This effort “was a direct response to the Black Lives Matter movement,” Cuatlacuatl says. “It was also a response to the tension our communities are feeling under a pandemic. It was at the same time a response to keep the Bridge going in terms of programming, being active, and responding in regard to all of these phenomena. We’re always keeping in mind, ‘how do we keep artists and communities engaged?’ It was a perfect way to keep everyone involved and tuned in.”

In this time of prolonged isolation, The Bridge PAI recognized the importance of tangible communication. “You’re literally holding the opinions, ideas, and values of your community in your hand,” says Goffinski. “Having that experience of engaging multiple senses in that process of intaking someone else’s ideas is a really valuable and beautiful thing.”

The Bridge PAI reached out to local artists already making print materials related to subjects like anti-racism and anti- fascism, and asked them to participate. Goffinski says the goal is to amplify those artists’ ideas, imagery, and literature.

Lydia Moyer, an artist and UVA associate professor, is a big believer in independent and artist publications, as well as DIY distribution, and says she contributed posters and prints to support and encourage radical thought in Charlottesville.

The Bridge PAI hopes to make Rad Press a permanent fixture. “Radical literature is timeless,” Goffinski says. “There are so many conversations that need to be had about so many things. Every week, something new is in the foreground…we want Rad Press to…be able to shift and morph to include new things as they pop up.”

While Rad Press keeps the conversation going outside, the Bridge’s gallery space has become active again through the STUDI0.00 initiative, which offers free, short-term studio use to artists displaced by the pandemic virus or reckoning with the pandemic of systemic racism, according to Goffinski.

“This is a very basic effort to say to our creative community that we exist for you,” he says. “In a town where space is increasingly more difficult to come by and more expensive, we just never lose sight of the fact that our space is a valuable resource and we don’t want it to sit dormant just because we can’t do what we normally do in it.”

Programming committee member Katie Schetlick says the benefits reach beyond the individual artists themselves. “That space has those huge windows, so it also provides the opportunity to be reminded that people are still making art, which is a hopeful visual.” The initiative has also uncovered new talent. “Some of the artists who have requested space, I’d never seen their work before,” says Schetlick. “It’s been nice to actually learn about these hidden gems that are right here in Charlottesville.”

Genevieve Story took advantage of the empty gallery, using it for leather pyrography, fulfilling orders and preparing offerings for the holiday season. Hoping to have a larger space of her own but unable to acquire it due to economic impacts of the coronavirus, Story had been doing work at her kitchen table. “The offer from the Bridge could not have come at a better time,” she says.   

The space continues to be available on a first come, first served basis, and Schetlick encourages others to make a request. “Don’t feel shy about it, even if you just want to go inside and wiggle around and make some funny noises,” she says. “The space is there.”

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Culture

Into the mystic: Leslie Scott-Jones guides a navigation of the tarot

Leslie Scott-Jones says the tarot can tell us what we need to know. Learn how to listen by taking her online course, Demystify Tarot, beginning on May 20. For more information, go to thebridgepai.org.

A few years ago, Leslie Scott-Jones was wandering around the Aquarian Bookshop on West Main Street in Richmond, looking for lavender incense. Walking by a table of tarot card decks, she received a message from one of her maternal great-grandmothers: “That one.”

Scott-Jones stopped—she’d learned to listen to these messages when she received them—looked at the table, and asked, “Which one?” 

“That one, down there.” On the bottom shelf were two decks, and Scott-Jones felt guided to one of them, the Dreams of Gaia deck.

She’d felt a connection to spirits since she started having déjà vu when she was about 6 years old, but this was her first tarot deck, and the timing seemed appropriate—she’d recently begun hearing from more and more of her ancestors and had started consciously tuning in to this aspect of herself. Tarot was another way she could focus on those messages.

For those who are curious about their own connections to spirits, Scott-Jones leads a Demystify Tarot course online via The Bridge Progressive Arts Initiative that includes four two-hour sessions, held on consecutive Wednesdays. Courses start on May 20, June 17, and July 15.

Leslie Scott-Jones is an intuitive reader, which means she uses her mediumship when she reads tarot cards for herself and others. Photo by Sanjay Suchak

Scott-Jones is perhaps best known in town as an activist, a theater artist, and a musician (she’s artistic director of the Charlottesville Players Guild and sings in the Eugene Martin Band, among other groups), but she’s also a reader and a medium who has studied Spiritualism and psychic sciences at Arthur Findlay College in England.

But those who sign up for the course don’t need to have any sort of pre-existing (or rather, pre-acknowledged) connection to the metaphysical. “Anyone can learn to read tarot,” says Scott-Jones. “If you feel yourself called to do it, you can do it.”

While tarot reading is sometimes treated like hokum, or a magic trick, akin to gazing into a crystal ball to tell the future, Scott-Jones says the practice is just another way of accessing spirituality, like prayer or meditation. “People think about metaphysical things as ‘other,’” she says. “They think about it as something that they can’t do, or [that] they have to be initiated into. The truth is that everyone has it. Some people might call it something different, but every one of us has a connection to spirit, and it’s up to us how well we work that muscle. That’s really all it is—it’s working the muscle, it’s learning how they [the spirits] communicate with you, what it means when they show you certain things, and learning to listen to that still, quiet voice. Along that journey, you discover things that you never would have known,” including how many other people have their own highly personal connections to the metaphysical, whether it’s through religion or other belief systems.

“Whatever you believe about ‘the other side,’ let’s call it, tarot is a way to connect to those energies,” says Scott-Jones, and understanding the tarot deck—where it comes from, what each card means, and how to follow one’s intuition during a reading—is the warm-up to the exercise. 

Much like the four-suited standard decks currently used to play poker, spades, bridge, and other games, tarot cards were originally used for parlor games, specifically, a bridge-like game called tarocchi, which was popular among Italian nobles (who had leisure time) in the late 14th and early 15th centuries. Variations of the game and its cards spread throughout Europe over the next few centuries, and by the late 18th century, when Spiritualism became trendy in western Europe and the United States, people were using tarot cards—which are full of imagery and symbolism—in cartomancy, or divination via cards, a practice much, much older than the tarot deck itself.

Interest in the metaphysical, in astrology and in tarot in particular, is again on the rise, says Scott-Jones, and as a result, artists and readers are creating all sorts of tarot decks. While each deck differs slightly in design and outlook, most are based on the 78-card Rider-Waite deck, initially available in 1909 and mass-produced in the U.S. throughout the 20th century. (This is the one you likely see in your mind’s eye when envisioning tarot cards.)

Like the Rider-Waite, most modern tarot decks include a major arcana (trump cards like The Fool, The Magician, Death, etc.), and a minor arcana comprised of four suits (such as pentacles, wands, swords, cups) of numbered cards. Each trump card, each suit, each number, has its own meaning, and Scott-Jones will spend the first three classes explaining them. The fourth week is reserved for the court cards, which can be a bit more difficult to read because their specificity offers up a lot of room for interpretation, and that can be intimidating for a beginning reader.

When individual cards are pulled together in a reading, they take on new meaning, and learning to decipher the combination of cards that comes up in each unique reading takes not just the knowledge Scott-Jones hopes to impart, but time, practice, and courage. 

“You need to be open to ingesting the information, and you have to be brave enough to share the insights” gathered from the cards, she says, and that’s especially challenging when the cards are telling you something you don’t want to hear. “The cards are there to tell you what you need to know.” 

“It’s not magic. There is no right or wrong. There is no good or bad. It is what it is. It’s a tool to use to navigate your life.”

“If a reader is doing it right, it should feel like a therapy session,” says Scott-Jones, who emphasizes that interpreting cards is always a very personal thing, and folks must learn to read for themselves before reading for others. “It should feel like you’re getting some sort of insight into who you are, who you want to be.”

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Culture

Seeing it through: Art Apart initiative offers a window to connection

Rainbow drawings by brothers Henry, age 5, and Sam, age 3, are part of the Art Apart initiative. Henry says that rainbows make him feel “happy!," and he wanted to share his drawing “to make people happy.” Sam thinks that rainbows are “pretty,” so he also contributed a rainbow “for friends to see.” Staff photo

Art in all its forms accomplishes many things. It can entertain. It can teach us something new about ourselves, or others. It can keep us company, keep us busy, keep us calm. It can inspire. It can comfort. At its core, art is about shared humanity. 

With that in mind, The Bridge Progressive Arts Initiative and Charlottesville Safe Routes to School have partnered on Art Apart: A City Wide Gallery, which is meant to keep us connected creatively as we separate physically during the threat of the COVID-19 virus.

The idea: Make or find a piece of artwork. Display it in a front window, on a door, or on a porch, so that it can be seen from the sidewalk or street. 

The goal: To brighten the day of those passing by. “To give or find ways to stay connected and inspired, and bring a little bit of beauty into the world. To put it out there in spite of all this fear and uncertainty,” says Alan Goffinski, director of The Bridge PAI.

A few different things inspired Art Apart.

With schools closed until August, Kyle Rodland, Safe Routes to School coordinator for the City of Charlottesville, and his colleagues sought to set up some family-oriented activities that could continue the pedestrian safety skills kids typically learn in school—safely crossing the street at a four-way stop, building bike-riding confidence—at home. “Of course, we want people to be safe in the middle of a pandemic,” says Rodland, but people are going to go out. They’re going to take walks, drive or bike to the store.

Another “Art Apart” contribution. Staff photo

“If we can find something that has artistic value, and physical value, as far as getting some exercise and getting out and moving—it’s kind of a wholesome thing,” says Rodland, who called Goffinski to brainstorm.

Goffinski was moved by a recent post in the Charlottesville Mutual Aid Infrastructure Facebook group: A mother posted a picture of her young son sitting by the window overlooking the parking

lot of their apartment building. She explained that all day, the boy called a friendly “hello!” to folks (all adults) in the parking lot, looking for some sort of human connection as he sat cooped up in the house. Not a single person acknowledged him.

“We can do better than this,” Goffinski thought. He hopes Art Apart might help.

“It doesn’t necessarily have to be a drawing or a painting or an artwork that you’ve made yourself” to foster that connection, says Goffinski. “It can be one that someone else made that you love, that you want to stick in the window for everyone else to see.

Participants can submit their art to The Bridge’s map of places where artworks can be seen around town. 

“All of these arts organizations in town are doing a Hail Mary, trying to figure out how [we] can be helpful, and be impactful,” Goffinski says. “It’s interesting to see people like Kyle, and all these other arts organizations in town not throwing in the towel, but really fighting to make sure that they’re continuing to do good things.”

 

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Culture

In sharp relief: Supporting artists through COVID-19

Rapper LaQuinn is one of the local artists who has received aid from the Charlottesville Emergency Relief Fund for Artists, set up to help artists who have lost gigs, gallery shows, and more due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Photo by Amy and Jackson Smith

In an effort to help artists facing financial hardship because of venue closures and event cancellations due to COVID-19, The Bridge PAI and New City Arts Initiative launched the Charlottesville Emergency Relief Fund for Artists on March 20. Artists can apply to receive up to $300; all they need to show is “proof of practice,” says Bridge Director Alan Goffinski. “Proof of a canceled gig, book tour, art show, etc.,” he adds. “The quality of the work will not be judged. We just need to see proof that artists are artists.”

Andrew Stronge requested funds to recoup a fraction of the contract work he lost due to the cancellation of various regional comic-cons. A graphic designer and screen printer who creates posters, shirts, hats, and more, he relies on those events for a significant chunk of his income. He used his relief fund allocation to buy groceries for himself and his wife, who is pregnant with their first child.

Rapper LaQuinn Gilmore (you’ve seen his posters) will use his allotment to stay afloat, even if it’s for a short time—his live gigs were canceled and in-studio recording sessions are not social-distancing friendly, so he can’t record new stuff to sell. And his restaurant job’s gone to boot. Even before the pandemic, he says he was struggling to find affordable housing for himself and his daughter.  

As of March 25, 61 artists had applied for $15,700 in funding, says New City Arts Executive Director Maureen Brondyke. The initial $10,000 raised has already been dispersed, and they hope donations will continue to come in to cover new requests.

“Many of these artists carefully plan from month to month, juggling [multiple] jobs on top of their creative practice in order to pay the bills,” says Brondyke about the need for immediate help. “We’re all acutely aware right now of how difficult it is to not connect with others in person, and artists are often the ones either on stage or behind the scenes creating these opportunities—at performances, at markets or fairs, in restaurants, at school, in galleries and theaters—work that often goes undervalued until it’s gone.”

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Culture

State of the art: How COVID-19 is affecting Charlottesville’s arts community

Devon Sproule is one of the Front Porch music teachers offering online lessons for her students. It’s helped her maintain some sense of routine and personal connection in this very uncertain, socially distant time, and she hopes it’s doing this same for her students. Photo by Paul Curreri

 

As we adjust to life amid the COVID-19 pandemic, we’ll likely turn to the arts—a favorite poem, a beloved album, a treasured painting—over and over in search of comfort and relief. Art, in all its forms, is a vital part not just of our personal lives but of our community. Social distancing measures and the resulting venue closures have turned the local creative world upside down, both for individual artists and the organizations that support them. Here’s what some of those folks are saying about the state of the arts in Charlottesville, and what might come next.

St. Patrick’s Day was supposed to be Matthew O’Donnell’s busiest day of the entire year. A multi-instrumentalist who specializes in Irish music, he was booked for 15 hours of serenading audiences, from senior center residents to late-night beer-swigging revelers.

But this year, his St. Paddy’s calendar was wide open. As the COVID-19 pandemic spreads throughout the United States, Virginia governor Ralph Northam has banned all nonessential gatherings of more than 10 people. In response, local venues that support the arts—concert halls, theaters, galleries, bookshops, libraries, restaurant-bars, you name it—have shuttered their doors for an undetermined amount of time.

This leaves O’Donnell and many other artists in Charlottesville without physical places to share their work—not just for art’s sake, but for a living. It’s also worth noting that many local artists participate in the service industry and gig economy—they tend bar, wait tables, work retail, drive ride-shares, and more. And most of those jobs are gone, or paused until, well, who knows when.

O’Donnell makes his entire living from performances, and he looks forward to the month of March—in large part because of St. Patrick’s Day—when he can bring in twice what he makes in an average  month, to make up for the lean ones (namely January and February).

“I began to get concerned in late February,” as the senior communities closed their doors to visitors, says O’Donnell, and that concern grew as gigs canceled one by one during the first couple weeks of March. “I thought the worst-case scenario would be that everything would shut down, but I honestly didn’t think the worst-case scenario would come.”

Matthew O’Donnell, who has seen his gig calendar wiped clean by the threat of COVID-19, hosted a concert via Facebook Live on March 18. “It went astoundingly well,” he says. “A boatload of people tuned in, [made] lots of requests. People sent videos of them and their families dancing to the music. It was really beautiful.” Photo by Katie McCartney

At first, “it was a professional worry of realizing that all of my business is gone,” says O’Donnell, who hopes he can make some money by playing donation-based virtual concerts. But the worry, the sadness, has turned personal: “These people are my friends,” he says of his audiences, particularly those folks at the senior centers. When he sings with them, he says he “feels something profound. And [now] I can’t go see my friends. I do want to be looking forward to the next thing…but all I know is that the next thing I do is going to be very different from what I’ve been doing.”

Graphic novelist Laura Lee Gulledge knows that, too. “I’m friends with change and constant reinvention,” she says.  As a full-time artist Gulledge relies not just on book sales and illustration commissions but art teaching residencies. She says she often feels like she’ll “get by on the skin of my teeth, but [I] make it work.” Artists are always having to come up with new business models, she says. “It’s implode or evolve.”

Her new book, The Dark Matter of Mona Starr, is scheduled to be released on April 7, and she planned to launch it at last week’s Virginia Festival of the Book. But the festival was canceled due to the threat of COVID-19, as was the rest of her North American book tour.

In a way, the book is more relevant than Gulledge could have predicted, or ever wanted to imagine. The protagonist, Mona, is a sensitive and creative teen learning to live with anxiety and depression. In the back of the book, Gulledge includes a guide for creating a self-care plan for particularly dark and stressful times, and she shares her own.

“It’s like my masterpiece,” she says of The Dark Matter of Mona Starr. “I was finally mentally prepared to own it and step into it, and start conversations about mental health and not feel like a fraud.”

Rather than consider the whole thing a wash, Gulledge will do a virtual book tour via Facebook Live, where she’ll be talking about topics such as drawing through depression and cultivating healthy artistic practices.

The Front Porch roots music school is also pivoting to an online lessons model, to keep instructors paid and to keep students in practice. Songwriter Devon Sproule (who had to cancel her upcoming U.K. tour) usually teaches somewhere around 80 students a week between group classes and private lessons, and, so far, a handful of them have made the leap to live virtual lessons. Keeping the routine and personal connection of a lesson could be particularly important right now, says Sproule. She had to teach one young pupil how to tune a ukulele, a task Sproule had taken on in their in-person lessons. “I had no idea this kid could tune their own ukulele, and I don’t think they did either,” says Sproule. “I think it was empowering.”

The Charlottesville Players Guild, the city’s only black theater troupe, has postponed its run of August Wilson’s Radio Golf, originally scheduled to premiere at the Jefferson School African American Heritage Center April 16. The paid cast and crew were in the middle of rehearsals, and while they hope to be able to open the show on April 30, things are still very uncertain, says CPG artistic director Leslie Scott-Jones. “When you hear medical professionals say this might go through July or longer, it’s like, ‘What’ll we do?’”

Leslie Scott-Jones, a singer and theater artist who relies on performance for all of her income, is one of many Charlottesville artists left wondering what’s next, as venues have closed due to the threat of COVID-19. Publicity photo

The JSAAHC has also had to cancel two benefit concerts for Eko Ise, a music conservatory program for local black children, that the center hoped to launch later this year. Now, they’ll be months behind in that fundraising effort, says Scott-Jones.

The Bridge Progressive Arts Initiative, which provides not only a physical gallery space for visual and performance art, but funding for public art and after-school programs, has canceled all in-person events (though it is finding creative ways for people to participate from a distance, such as its virtual Quarantine Haiku video series). The Bridge has also postponed its annual Revel fundraiser, originally scheduled for May 2. Revel brings in between 20 and 30 percent of the organization’s operating budget for the year, says director Alan Goffinski,

Gulledge makes an excellent case for continued support of the arts as we face uncertainty: “This is the sort of moment where people will look to the creative thinkers to generate hope, and to generate positivity and be beacons of light in this moment of darkness. This is part of our purpose.”

The Bridge Progressive Arts Initiative and New City Arts announced Friday, March 20, that it has established the Charlottesville Emergency Relief Fund for Artists. We will have more information on that soon.

The Front Porch and WTJU 91.1 FM are also teaming up to broadcast live concerts Friday and Wednesday evenings. Follow us at @cville_culture on Twitter for regular updates about virtual arts events that will take place over the coming weeks.

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ARTS Pick: Company Aiello

At The Bridge Progressive Arts Initiative on Thursday, Company Aiello tells old stories in a new light through puppetry and musical accompaniment. Publicity photo

Handy advice: In the theatrical tradition of Italy’s commedia dell’arte, Company Aiello tells old stories in a new light through puppetry and musical accompaniment. Main character Spazzolino is a good-hearted prankster who only wants two things: “a mountain of beans to eat and justice for everyone.” Company founder Angelo Aiello is an inventive puppeteer who has performed around the globe, and cellist Rachel Icenogle’s experimental work adds a rich tonal backdrop.

Thursday, October 17. $8-10, 6:30pm. The Bridge Progressive Arts Initiative, 209 Monticello Rd. 218-2060.

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Articulating ‘Mexican Heaven’: Poet José Olivarez illuminates both bruises and bliss in Citizen Illegal

Openly exploring themes barred from traditional classrooms, like spirituality and sexuality, taught José Olivarez more about life’s possibilities than all assemblies combined. Publicity photo

Most people avert their eyes when the world gets messy: they scrunch uncooperative hair into the safety of ballcaps, kick dust bunnies conveniently under couches, and dunk ugly memories into their mental trashbins. It’s unusual to meet someone who sits down with disorder, shakes its hand, and engages it in honest conversation. José Olivarez is one such rarity—an artist who detects music amidst the chaos and spins unlikely rhythms into poetry.

The son of Mexican immigrants, Olivarez is an expert at manning the spaces in between. His work not only names the linguistic, generational, and cultural gaps in the first-gen Mexican-American experience, but it gives a body to each divide. Citizen Illegal—Olivarez’s first full-length collection—is an articulation of the Latinx experience in modern America that’s both gut-wrenching and musically immaculate. Each page is a testament to the “messiness…[of a] wound reopening at a moment’s notice and then being swallowed up again.”

A Chicago native, Olivarez will return to Charlottesville next week (he was on a Virginia Festival of the Book panel last March). He’ll set up shop at the Bridge Progressive Arts Initiative, leading a community artist talk on September 11 and a youth poetry residency the next day. These events will kickstart Social Justice Through Creative Practice—a series of workshops and talks crafted by Creciendo Juntos, an organization leveraging resources and connections to serve local Latino families.

Olivarez completely reframed his relationship with literature when he joined his high school poetry club, which in turn introduced him to a citywide program known as Louder Than a Bomb. This tournament-style showcase and workshop series enabled him to unlock achingly authentic language, in contrast to the lofty, inspirational jargon pumped out at schoolwide gatherings. Olivarez recalls listening to adults preach about the promise of students’ futures, then heading to the cafeteria to bump into military recruiters where college ambassadors should’ve stood.

At poetry club meetings, he saw, for the first time, “adults being quiet and allowing teenagers to speak for themselves.” Openly exploring themes barred from traditional classrooms, like spirituality and sexuality, taught him more about life’s possibilities than all assemblies combined. The universe opened up when he realized he could command literature instead of passively participating as a reader. Over time, the network he found through Louder Than A Bomb expanded as he met key players at Youth Chicago Authors, the foundation responsible for organizing the festival.

He went on to Harvard, and though his initial plan after graduation was to teach high school English, YCA’s unofficial motto kept pulsing in his head: “It’s your responsibility once you learn the [poetic] craft to pass it on to somebody else.” He eventually wound up back at YCA, working as a teaching artist.

To Olivarez, poetry’s strength lies in its accessibility (“In 45 minutes, [you can] have the draft of a poem.”) and its limitlessness: “You never stop learning as a student of poetry; there’s always more,” he says. And when it comes to conversations of equity and justice, Olivarez believes crafting lyrics is a powerful means of polishing a subject’s emotional core. “Oftentimes, we don’t have time or space to delve into” weighty topics, he says, “[but poetry] allows us to put some of that messiness next to each other and see what feels true to us.”

Olivarez also makes sure to emerge from the messiness with fistfuls of joy: fingers—drenched in “golden goo,” reaching for more cheese fries; glimmering red lipstick applied by a mother before a night out dancing; and ’90s pop wafting through a favorite restaurant. He even pens odes to Cal City basement parties and Scottie Pippen. His words reverberate with the influence of great poets like Natalie Díaz, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Ada Limón. A self-proclaimed amateur rapper who sometimes pins down a poem’s rhythm before its words, Olivarez additionally points to his musical influences throughout Citizen Illegal, ranging from 2pac and Kanye to Selena and the Backstreet Boys.

Perhaps the ultimate strength of Olivarez’s collection lies in the community ties that bind it. Not only do his parents, partners, and friends fold into the pages, but the structure of the text is the reflection of deeply loyal and deeply rooted relationships: All eight poems titled “Mexican Heaven” are evidence of a close acquaintance helping him split up one long piece the night before the manuscript was turned in.

Olivarez is at work editing the fourth volume of The BreakBeat Poets (forthcoming, March 2020), a multi-installment anthology highlighting “work that brings the hip-hop aesthetic to the page.” Meanwhile, he’s just starting to jot down “little pieces of languages,” progressing toward his next collection. Looking back at the art he’s already shared, Olivarez’s takeaway remains the same: “Individually, it’s very hard to progress. If you’re working communally and are really there for one another, I think that makes the journey a lot easier and a lot more rewarding, too.”

José Olivarez appears at The Bridge PAI, where he will host a community artist talk on September 11 and a youth poetry residency on September 12.

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ARTS Pick: Telemetry Music Series

Ghost Trees play off their new LP, The Fascination, at The Bridge on Wednesday. Publicity photo

Wild sax: Musical wilderness is the running theme as the Telemetry Music Series highlights free jazz with the “ferocious, sorcerous, and way out there” improv of Charlotte, North Carolina’s Ghost Trees sharing the bill with Space-Saver’s drum and sax-tinged combos of doom metal/acid techno/minimal synth. Guitarist, electronic musician, composer, and educator Kittie Cooper amps up the crowd with explorations that traverse the spectrum between silliness and seriousness.

Wednesday 6/12. No cover, 8pm. The Bridge PAI, 209 Monticello Rd. 984-5669.