Tag: The Fralin Museum of Art at UVA

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Arts Culture

Essential to the soul

On view through July 14, “Madayin: Eight Decades of Aboriginal Australian Bark Painting from Yirrkala” features over 50 works of ochre painting on eucalyptus bark. View the exhibition experience online at madayin.kluge-ruhe.org. Supplied photo.

“They’re more than art—they’re like the Bible, Google Maps, and ancestry.com all rolled into one,” says Henry Skerritt, curator of the Indigenous Arts of Australia at University of Virginia’s Kluge-Ruhe Aboriginal Art Collection. Skerritt is describing what bark paintings represent to the Yolŋu people of Arnhem Land in the Northern Territory of Australia. It’s an apt description to keep in mind when viewing “Madayin: Eight Decades of Aboriginal Australian Bark Painting from Yirrkala” at The Fralin Museum.

The exhibition, which is the largest showing of bark paintings ever presented in the Western Hemisphere, took seven years to produce—a remarkable endeavor given the scope of the exhibition and the challenges along the way, including a global pandemic and legislative changes governing the export of Australian cultural heritage objects.

“Madayin” is a collaboration with the Hood Museum of Art at Dartmouth College, but it was in Charlottesville, in 2015, that the idea for this exhibition took root. Djambawa Marawili, Chairman of the Buku-Larrŋgay Mulka Centre, was at the Kluge-Ruhe Collection on an Australia Council for the Arts artist residency. Astonished at the number of bark paintings in the collection—many containing stories he recognized—he became intent on producing a show that would tell the history of Yolŋu bark paintings.

Bark painting is a relatively new innovation in an artistic continuum that stretches back at least 50,000 years. But it wasn’t until the 1930s that the Yolŋu began painting their artwork on large expanses of flattened eucalyptus bark. Prior to this, they placed their symbols and figures on the body or ceremonial objects, or they incorporated them into sand-sculptures. 

Works on view in “Madayin: Eight Decades of Aboriginal Australian Bark Painting from Yirrkala.” View the exhibition experience online at madayin.kluge-ruhe.org.
Supplied photo.

Aboriginal artwork is centered on storytelling passed down through generations, and Aboriginal artists cannot paint stories that do not belong to them through their clan. Songlines are walking routes which traverse the country with important stops like water holes and sacred sites denoted along the way and are essential to the storytelling. Each songline is specific to a certain Aboriginal clan and is memorized and sung. 

As an opening and closing practice, a song is sung to include the spirit. “Every one of those paintings has an accompanying song and an accompanying dance,” says Skerritt. “It records these epic ancestral stories and also testifies to the type of ownership of those places. ‘This is my mother’s brother’s land, so I can camp here and I can use the natural resources here,’ and the people living there say, ‘Well, okay, sure. Do you know the song or dance that goes with this place?’ And if they don’t know the right song and dance, they don’t have a right to be there.”

Yirrkala and its bark paintings played a central role in establishing Indigenous land rights. When a section of the Arnhem Land Reserve was opened to bauxite mining in 1963, clan elders responded by producing petitions on bark that presented their claim to the land. The petitions featured text in both Gupapuyŋu and English surrounded by sacred clan designs. The effort to stop the mining failed, but the petitions were significant in establishing indigenous ownership in the Northern Territory Land Rights Act of 1976 and the 2008 Sea Rights case.

“Madayin” is curated by the artists themselves and the late Wukun Wanambi, to whom the exhibition and catalog are dedicated. They know how the work relates, its purpose and its meaning, which paintings go together and which must be kept separate, and which should be removed from public view altogether. Designed to be as accessible as possible to the Yolŋu back home, the extensive 348-page catalog is bilingual and the show is online.

Works on view in “Madayin: Eight Decades of Aboriginal Australian Bark Painting from Yirrkala.” View the exhibition experience online at madayin.kluge-ruhe.org.
Supplied photo.

The Yolŋu people divide everything into either Dhuwa or Yirritja moieties, separate groups that operate collaboratively. Ceremonies always include both Yirritja and Dhuwa, and members of one group can only marry someone from the opposite moiety. These principles, central to how the Yolŋu people live, also guided how they chose to arrange the exhibition.

It was important to the curators to hang old paintings alongside contemporary works to show the continued vitality of the Yolŋu artistic and spiritual traditions. “Whether I see an old painting or a new one, it’s no different,” says Wanambi. “The pathway is the same. The songline. The pattern. The story. The place. The wäŋa (homeland)—the place where it came from. It’s all the same.” 

The works feature an earthy palette of red—ranging from dark brick to pink—black, tan, white, and mustard, and distinctive Yolŋu marks like cross-hatching, diamonds, and dots. Viewers can spot animals, plants, and people in the older works, but other references to topography, cosmology, and spirituality are beyond our understanding. The newer pieces read like abstract paintings but are composed of patterns, sometimes made up of recognizable objects like fish, and, in some cases, the designs are placed over figurative imagery, obscuring it.

From the Aboriginal perspective, “Madayin” is far more profound than an art exhibition. The word itself means sacred and sublime, and the Yolŋu, in addition to sharing their ancestral knowledge, are showcasing a different way of seeing and understanding. 

The Yolŋu spirit of collaboration extends to their artwork, which represents a relationship between the Yolŋu and the land. You see this in a small way with the pigments they use, which are derived from natural ochre and iron clay, but as Marawili explains, it’s far more profound than that: “The land has everything it needs, but it could not speak. It could not express itself, tell its identity, so it grew a tongue. That is the Yolŋu. That is me. We are the tongue. Grown by the land so it can sing who it is. We exist so we can paint the land. That is our job. Paint and sing and dance so that the land can feel good and express its true identity. Without us, it cannot talk, but it is still there. Only silent.”

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Arts Culture

What art can be

Visitors to The Fralin are greeted by “Structures and Open Window: Emilio Sanchez on Paper.” Supplied photo

By Matt Dhillon

Since The Fralin Museum of Art at UVA was built in 1935, it’s had to close its doors a few times—once during World War II and again in the ’60s when the space was requisitioned for classrooms. In 2020, the growing pandemic shut the museum down for a third time.

“There’s certainly nothing in anyone’s living memory that could have prepared us or given us a guidebook on how to deal with a global pandemic, as a museum or any kind of institution,” says Matthew McLendon, the museum’s director and chief curator.

When The Fralin reopened its physical galleries on August 28, 2021, it was a changed world, and the museum found itself changed within it. “What we take from art depends on where we are in our own lives and what we need from it,” McLendon says. Art can be a source of change, a source of defiance, a source of beauty, or a source of renewal. 

For 17 months, the physical space had been closed as the world sat in quarantine, and as the building underwent renovations. During that time, The Fralin continued in virtual space, working to develop online programming, lectures, and video tours to adapt to the new environment.

That transition was eye-opening in its own way, particularly in the matter of improving accessibility. “Immediately, on social media, we got reactions from the disabled community and people with physical disabilities saying, ‘For the first time ever, this museum is accessible to me in a much more meaningful, easier way,’ and ‘Please don’t stop this programming once open again,’” says McLendon.

That period also marked a shift in how the museum thought about its responsibilities, he says. After the murder of George Floyd and the rise of the social justice movement around the world, the museum put work into the changes it wanted to make as an institution, including a greater focus on its diversity, equity, accessibility, and inclusion work, and centering traditionally marginalized voices, not only on its walls, but also in the way the institution operates.

One responsibility is thinking critically about holding objects in public trust, and how to engage the cultures these objects belong to. “One of the things we’ve already talked about is we have these incredible objects of history from what is today Afghanistan and Pakistan, and we have communities in Charlottesville from Afghanistan and Pakistan—so how do we bring them in to talk about this [Gandharan] show or react to this show,” McLendon says. 

Curators Laura Minton, Adriana Greci Green, and Hannah Cattarin worked with McLendon to offer a strong comeback for the museum as it emerged from its pandemic lockdown. A new round of exhibitions were installed on February 6, giving five of the museum’s seven galleries fresh shows.

On the first floor, visitors are greeted with the geometries of the built environment, and invited to consider how the things around us are constructed in “Structures and Open Window: Emilio Sanchez on Paper.” Some of the constructs the exhibition asks us to think about are race, social and institutional power, and, more abstractly, the duality of design and nature.

Immediately behind that, the visitor is confronted with the nude human body in “Focus On: Laura Aguilar.”

“These are so powerful to me in how they speak to the new femme throughout history and moving into photography,” says Cattarin. “There’s a way that all of the myriad implications that she embodies, a fat, queer, Chicana, nuero-divergent, individual, was, in these spaces, pushing back against this history of the new femme in the landscape.” 

Upstairs, in the main gallery, “Alternative Futures” plays on loop, a video-based social critique spanning four works visualizing a more equitable world with the understanding that imagination leads to creation. 

Adjoining the main gallery, visitors can meander through a variety of themes. “Gandharan Sculpture” reflects on the Gandharan region of what is now northwest Pakistan and eastern Afghanistan, which was famed for its artistic achievement; “Beyond Pictorialism” frames the history of photography in its transition from a documentary tool to an artistic medium; “Nostalgia U.S.A.,” curated by the university’s students, examines how we remember the past and sometimes construct the past.

Under McLendon’s leadership, The Fralin has also strengthened its ties to UVA’s Kluge-Ruhe collection. Kluge-Ruhe curator Henry Skerritt gives credit to McLendon for his commitment to diversity in what The Fralin presents. 

“It’s been an amazing experience working with an institution that recognizes that contemporary art today is global, and that artists in remote parts of Australia have as much right to be shown in museums as any artist,” Skerritt said. 

The Kluge-Ruhe collection begins a national tour on September 4 at the Hood Museum of Art at Dartmouth College with “Madayin,” an exhibition that includes some of Australia’s most iconic works of art.

“What makes this exhibition really special is that it has been curated by Yolngu Aboriginal people from the community, so rather than seeing this history from the perspective of a white art historian, you’re going to see it from the perspective of the people who made it,” Skerritt says. “For a white art historian, like myself, that’s really exciting, to be able to see how another culture understands their art.”

Art has always had a place in connecting cultures and rediscovering history, but recent social isolation and unrest make it more crucial than ever as a key to learning from each other.

“Right now, because of the last few years of the pandemic, people are looking for a space of beauty, a space of fun, a place where they can be restored,” says McLendon. “I worked with an artist years ago who, I will never forget, just said so simply, ‘We ask so much of art,’ and it’s true, we ask so much of art, and art gives us so much.”

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Culture

Reach for the sky

The Fralin Museum’s visual history of skyscrapers includes Joseph Pennell’s etching “The Woolworth through the Arch.” Image courtesy of the Fralin Museum of Art.

Skyscrapers, in our modern imagination, are glitzy glass needles. It wasn’t always that way. The nation’s first towers were ornate and detailed. Intrinsically American, the designs embodied the qualities we like to associate with our national image: We’re can-do, bold, strong, technologically advanced, and audacious.

The Fralin Museum’s new show, “Skyscraper Gothic,” explores the history of these early skyscrapers. The curators, Lisa Reilly from UVA and Kevin Murphy from Vanderbilt, have brought together a wonderfully comprehensive assortment of prints, drawings, photographs, paintings, sculptures, furniture, textiles, toys, models, illustrations and decorative arts to showcase the prevalence of both the Gothic style and the skyscraper motif in contemporaneous culture.

In the early 20th century, Gothic style was seen as enduring, with the authority of time and religion backing it up. The architects most certainly saw a connection between the lofty towers of the office buildings they were designing and the soaring quality of medieval cathedrals. They also must have felt a strong connection to the medieval builders who, like them, were engaged in engineering innovations, building their structures as high as possible, minimizing load on walls with flying buttresses and, in the case of the late Gothic, reducing masonry to the barest minimum to allow for large expanses of stained glass.

At the same time, early skyscrapers were shaped by less idealistic forces, like municipal regulations: One of the signature features of the original skyscrapers is the step-like setback profile. Those setbacks were incorporated to conform to a 1916 New York City zoning ordinance requiring light and air to reach the sidewalks. This distinctive design element was absorbed into skyscraper iconography and widely replicated. 

Several works in the show highlight the vital role of the construction workers who put the buildings together. The structures on which they toiled captured the public’s imagination, and so did the workers themselves. The metalworkers’ feats of strength and derring-do—balanced on girders hundreds of feet up—were the stuff of legend, embodying the distinct male energy and bravado of the skyscrapers themselves. 

Louis Lozowick’s “Above the City” and Harry Sternberg’s “Riveter” both position their subjects on girders at dizzying heights. In the latter, a red girder juts dramatically out toward the viewer, enhancing the tension and force within the composition. You can feel the effort the figure is expending with his machine. It’s a theatrical image, rendered in highly-keyed yellow, scarlet, and blue. The man’s face is obscured by the riveter, and he is positioned in a monumentalized fashion against the city—an everyman worker and symbol of masculine power. 

Charles Turzak’s “The Driller” captures the subject’s strength and determination. Jangled buildings in the background and a cartoonish halo of wobbly lines surrounding the figure convey the teeth-jarring vibration of the drill with droll humor.

The selection of prints, drawings, paintings, and photographs provide just the right backdrop, orienting us in the environment of these early 20th century cities. In several, artists use steam to convey the furious activity of the industry that built and sustained these great metropolises. Examples include Thomas Hart Benton’s “Construction,” Henry Reuterdahl’s “Commerce and Seapower,” Sears Gallagher’s “Manhattan Skyline,” and Samuel L. Margolies’ “Babylon.” 

The first modern art movement in America, Precisionism, which celebrated man-made objects and technologies, is well represented in the exhibition as well. You can see the cool hard-edged detachment characteristic of the Precisionist School in Clare Leighton’s “Breadline, New York,” Louis Lozowick’s “Above the City,” Zama Vanessa Helder’s “34th Street Skyline,” Jon Whitcomb’s “Urban Landscape” Howard Norton Cook’s “Chrysler Building,” and Leo Rabkin’s “Untitled (Spirit of Progress, Skyscrapers and liners).” 

With their velvety blacks and subtle light effects, Samuel Gottscho’s “Radiator Tower (at Night)” and Russ Marshall’s “Penobscot Noir” are gorgeous, lush photographic images that evoke a moody, brooding city. Don Walker’s “Downtown Detroit Enveloped in Fog” uses atmosphere conditions for dramatic effect, too.

Other photographs provide more visual information about the buildings and their settings. Samuel Kravitt’s “Aerial View of the Empire State Building” and Ilse Bing’s “View of Lower Manhattan” give us a sense of what New York looked like and the scale of the skyscrapers in relation to their surroundings.

The everyday objects on display reveal how skyscrapers functioned as icons. The buildings’ influence seeped into nearly every corner of American culture. Among the treasures on display are a flapper’s beaded purse with skyscraper motif, a number of children’s toys, from board games to building blocks, and a dazzling chrome weight and height scale and maple bookshelf that both ape the skyscraper form. 

A great deal of thought has been put into the exhibition design. Handsome banners of the Chrysler Building, the Empire State Building, and the Woolworth Building hang above the stairs in the foyer to greet visitors. The banners work with the steel gray color used on the walls to set the tone for the rooms. The pedestal for “Chrysler Building Souvenir Building” is cut to resemble the building’s shape, and vintage postcards of famous skyscrapers are positioned on an outline of the United States, helping visitors visualize where the buildings are located. Even the elevator doors and interior are sheathed in an intricate Art Deco motif, which also makes an appearance on one gallery wall. All this produces an ambience that replicates, with great élan, the cool elegance of the iconic structures themselves.

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Training ground: Maria Varela captures a life of activism in ‘Time to Get Ready: fotografía social’ at The Fralin

Social justice activist Maria Varela’s “Time to Get Ready: fotografía social” is at The Fralin Museum of Art through January 5. Varela’s backstory is essential to understanding and appreciating her work, and her photography is a means to an end, a way of creating images of resistance for the resisters. © Maria Varela. Image courtesy of the National Museum of Mexican Art. Exhibition organized by the National Museum of Mexican Art, Chicago. Sponsors: Chicago Park District, Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events, Illinois Arts Council Agency and Southwest Airlines.

By Ramona Martinez

In “Time to Get Ready: fotografía social,” a National Museum of Mexican Art exhibit on view at The Fralin Museum of Art, you will find all the classic elements one expects in a “good” photography show. Maria Varela’s photographs are compositionally sophisticated and emotionally intimate. They are candids, yet they look like movie stills. They look like they were taken by someone who is very serious about all the aesthetic choices that make up the art of photography.

But Varela is quick to note that she is not an artist, nor is she a journalist. One of the few Latinx activists involved in the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s, Varela was an organizer who started taking photographs for the educational materials she was producing for black workers in the South. Like Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. and other leaders in the movement, she was motivated by her religious beliefs to take an active role in dismantling white supremacy.

She began her career organizing for the Young Christian Students, a progressive Catholic advocacy group informed by liberation theology. “Which holds,” Varela said at a recent talk at The Fralin, “that as Christians, our vocation is to be actively engaged in dismantling racism, economic injustice, anti-democratic forces, and unjust wars.”

Through this work, she met members of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. SNCC was black-led, but it welcomed any activist who was “willing to face the dangers.” The largely Baptist committee wanted Varela to go to Selma, where a Catholic priest was leading voter registration efforts. She balked.

“Me to Selma, that has a nutso sheriff that would just as soon kill a movement worker as to go through the paperwork to put him in jail? I did not want to do this,” says Varela. But the leadership and mission of SNCC inspired her. “I didn’t want to make a fool of myself and reveal what a chicken I was to these veterans of several dangerous campaigns.” She agreed to go.

When Varela arrived in the fall of 1963, activists were focused on teaching black adults how to read. Literacy tests had been devised to keep them from voting in Alabama, and so Varela was tasked with developing an adult literacy program to be run out of the St. Elizabeth Parish. The reading materials that existed for adult learners were insulting on many levels. Primarily they were about middle-class white people going through their embarrassingly bourgeois day, and the plots (if you could call them that) were juvenile. The books were illustrated and made people feel like they were reading children’s books.

Varela wanted to create materials that were appropriate and motivating. While organizing in Alabama and Mississippi, she’d learned that people were hungry for information on how to better their lives. In addition to voting, they wanted to know about housing cooperatives and agriculture. The Civil Rights Act’s passage in 1964 did away with literacy tests, so Varela proposed to SNCC leadership that she make educational and training materials about people who had organized successful community projects. She wanted to showcase everyday black leaders making social or economic change.

The story of how a group of okra farmers formed their own agricultural co-op in Batesville, Mississippi, formed the basis of Something Of Our Own, Varela’s first self-published book. It gave readers an idea of what went into starting a co-op, as well as the racism they might encounter while trying to create a black-run business. Illustrated with photographs from the field, it was such a big hit that leaders at mass meetings begged organizers not to pass them out too early, or else they’d lose the attention of their audience.

As she continued to publish, she recruited other SNCC photographers to take images for her pamphlets. But they got sick of doing her favors, and suggested she learn to take pictures herself. She trained with Matt Heron, who ran the Southern Documentary Project in New Orleans. There Varela discovered the work of Walker Evans and Dorothea Lange, who photographed migrants and workers in the 1930s.

“I never thought of myself as capable of creating such compelling images,” she says. “I just wanted to be able to make practical photos, useful to movement organizers. But the Lange and Evans images were ever-present ghosts in the darkroom, challenging me to see differently.”

From that point on, Varela would organize and take pictures. She photographed several marches, including the 1966 Meredith March against Fear, where the term “Black Power” was first heard. She documented some truly significant moments, all while being targeted by sheriffs and the Ku Klux Klan. Later, she worked with Reies López Tijerina and the Land Grant movement in New Mexico, and spent 45 years helping southwestern Latinx communities establish sustainable farms. Photos of this work can also be seen at The Fralin.

It’s hard to get the full story of Varela’s life from panels on museum walls. Her backstory is essential to understanding and appreciating her work, and her photography is a means to an end, a way of creating images of resistance for the resisters. With that in mind, the beauty of Varela’s images seems like an unexpected blessing. But maybe it’s not so unexpected: The goal of a life spent in service is to leave the world more beautiful than it was before. “Time to Get Ready: fotografía social” is evidence that Maria Varela did just that.

Social justice activist Maria Varela’s “Time to Get Ready: fotografía social” is at The Fralin Museum of Art through January 5.

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A body of art: UVA marks Merce Cunningham’s centennial with special screenings

To participate in the global celebration of the late choreographer Merce Cunningham’s 100th birthday, see Merce Cunningham: A Lifetime of Dance at Violet Crown on April 17, or catch an episode of “Mondays with Merce” at the Ruth Caplin Theatre through April 25. Photo by Annie Liebovitz

Over the course of her six years teaching dance in UVA’s drama department, lecturer and faculty member Katie Schetlick has noticed a shift in her students. More and more, she’s seeing students connect with the influential work of choreographer Merce Cunningham.

“A large body of his work is from the 1960s, ’70s, and ’80s. But in some way, Merce’s work now relates more to the fragmentation of how we receive information,” Schetlick says. “There are fewer questions about how Merce’s work qualifies as dance. A few years ago, there was much more confusion about his work and what it was supposed to ‘mean’.”

It’s timely too, as 2019 marks the 100th anniversary of the late American artist’s birth. From London to Lyon, and from Charlottesville to Los Angeles, universities, dance companies, and artists around the world are commemorating the occasion. Schetlick and Kim Brooks Mata, director of UVA’s dance program, organized weekly screenings of the documentary mini-series “Mondays with Merce,” airing from 9am to 5:30pm in the lobby of the Ruth Caplin Theatre—on Mondays.

In the 16-part series, Schetlick says “you can see how hungry Merce is for the art form of dance, even after 70 years. You can see his childlike approach.” She points to the final installation of the series, which was the last interview the choreographer gave before he died. The 90-year-old Cunningham’s passion and reverence for dance is tangible. He simultaneously reflects on his legacy while embracing a rapidly changing future of art, and challenges the interviewer’s use of words like “good” and “lifelike” to describe art—as so many did during Cunningham’s lifetime.

“Art is full of life,” Cunningham says, laughing. “All kinds of art.”

Schetlick says, “you can see his endless curiosity about what movement is and what foregrounding movement is in dance. It’s not dance as a means for something. It’s movement in dance in and of itself.”

And Cunningham did start a movement. He shared a lifelong personal and professional relationship with composer John Cage, and collaborated with visual artists such as Andy Warhol, Robert Rauschenberg, and Charles Atlas. Schetlick says she’s been enamored by Cunningham’s “RainForest” since she saw it as a student in her first dance history class 12 years ago. The piece features a set with helium-filled mylar balloons designed by Warhol, and dancers with flesh-colored leotards that Jasper Johns slashed with a razor blade.

“The mylar balloons became another kinetic force in the piece and animated some of the ways that Cunningham was thinking about chance,” Schetlick observes. “You couldn’t predict what those balloons were going to do, so they became a force of change in the piece. …It stuck with me.”

Through Cunningham’s artistic collaborations and explorations, Schetlick says, he challenged what dance could be. He investigated the form of the body—asking questions about it from the early 1950s until his death in 2009. Cunningham’s focus on movement in its purest form is what Schetlick highlights for her students.

“He wasn’t interested in stories or messages through dance,” says Schetlick. “He let the movement guide understanding, rather than play in to concept or feeling—as if the body itself could speak. What we’re trying to impart on our students is the importance of dance. It’s the least supported art form in many different ways, but it carries so much weight.”

UVA’s drama department, The Fralin Museum of Art, and Violet Crown give the public another chance to join in the global commemoration with a screening of Atlas’ documentary Merce Cunningham: A Lifetime of Dance. The film explores the trajectory of Cunningham’s career through the lens of his close collaborator—from early footage of his dances to recent productions using choreography computer software.

“Even when he could no longer move,” says Schetlick, “he was still choreographing.”

To participate in the global celebration of the late choreographer Merce Cunningham’s 100th birthday, see Merce Cunningham: A Lifetime of Dance at Violet Crown on April 17, or catch an episode of “Mondays with Merce” at the Ruth Caplin Theatre through April 25.

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Restorative justice: Vanessa German’s art celebrates black lives

“There’s an incredible well of creativity that it takes to endure your humanity when it feels like you’re not in the right skin.” Vanessa German in Avery Court, Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, CT, 2016. Photo: Allen Phillips / Wadsworth Atheneum.

Vanessa German grew up in Los Angeles in a creative household, wearing clothes her artist mother made, writing stories, and crafting creations from the scrap materials her mom laid out on the dining room table for her and her siblings.

“We were makers as a way of life,” says German, the 2018 recipient of the $200,000 Don Tyson Prize, which recognizes “significant achievements in the field of American art.”

“My earliest memories of joy and knowing and understanding a sense of euphoria in being alive was through making things—the joy of gluing lace to cardboard and realizing I could make a separate reality in a story different than what existed in living reality. That is the way we came to know ourselves.”

She speaks on the phone from an artist residency in Mexico, where she is preparing a new body of work for a solo show, opening in Los Angeles in March. This new work is her special baby, she says, because it will be installed in the city “where I came to love the feeling of making art, the process of being in materials—being in a relationship with them and activating that relationship with intention.”

The as-yet-untitled new work is a series of sculptures and wall works constructed inside the frames of tennis rackets. “There is a point of classical mechanics,” German says, “that talks about the moment of inertia, the torque that it takes to bring something back to center.” The tennis rackets represent her experience of growing up black in L.A. “when hip-hop became hip-hop and AIDS became AIDS,” she says. Like her previous work, it reckons with mortality. But it also explores what it meant “to be alive in a culture of celebrity,” she says, in which Leonardo DiCaprio and other child stars were among her classmates and she learned to play tennis in Compton where Venus and Serena Williams practiced.

It’s about “what it was to be black in that environment and creative and sort of wild…how you make yourself as a black person…and what that is to find your center, the force of motion.”

After her exhibition opens in Los Angeles, German will come to Charlottesville for a week-long residency at The Fralin Museum of Art at UVA, where her sculpture and sound installation, “sometimes.we.cannot.be.with.our.bodies,” opens this week.

She created this work, which premiered in 2017 at the Mattress Factory in Pittsburgh—where she has lived since 2001 —in response to the “ongoing deaths” and unsolved murders of black women and girls in Pittsburgh.

“I think of it as an act of restorative justice, a healing ceremony by sight,” she says.

Some of the sculptures in the installation are heads without bodies, solemn faces, and closed eyes, adorned with headpieces made of found objects, from tree branches to ceramic figurines. Other sculptures are vivaciously dressed bodies without heads, their expressive fingers pointing, flipping the bird, or forming fists.

She found some of the materials that compose the sculptures in her neighborhood of Homewood—in the alleyway near her house, on the street, in dumpsters—and some items people left on her porch. Once, a person left an entire box of shoes—large, glittery, funny, and beautiful shoes, she says, that were likely used in a drag performance.

She is particularly moved by the lives of black transgender women, and notes the prevalence of violence against them. “There’s an incredible well of creativity that it takes to endure your humanity when it feels like you’re not in the right skin,” German says.

Vanessa German, American, b. 1976. “sometimes.we.cannot.be.with.our.bodies.”, 2017. Mixed-media installation. Image courtesy of the Mattress Factory, Pittsburgh, PA. Photographed by Tom Little.

“sometimes.we.cannot.be.with.our.bodies” can be read in two ways. The first is the experience of someone whose loved one has been murdered in the street and she cannot go to her because the body is cordoned off by police tape. The second is the interiority of trauma itself and the dissociation a person may experience from her own body in order to survive the experience.

“As a descendant of enslaved Africans,” German says, “the soul of my culture, the soul of my people, is you attend to a body in a very special way in the space they have died. The ways bodies are tended to in a Western capitalist, patriarchal culture contributes to the trauma.”

She recalls how the body of Michael Brown, an unarmed teenager shot by a police officer in Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014, lay uncovered in the street. “This continued the horror, for his body to be treated like he wasn’t a person, like he wasn’t a boy just an hour before,” she says.

Yet there is something of triumph and celebration in her installation. With its vibrant colors and the sound of dance music and uplifting voices mixed among whispers, it is, German says, “a force that can galvanize the sense of terror and tragedy and simultaneously connect that tragedy with the beauty and miracle it was that our people lived and were whole, miraculous, stunning human beings.”

“sometimes.we.cannot.be.with.our.bodies” will be on view at The Fralin February 22-July 7. Vanessa German will be in residence at the museum March 25-29, and will give a public talk on March 28.

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Arts

Voices coming through: The Fralin’s ‘Reflections’ connects artists across centuries

Teri Greeves (left) is one of four contemporary artists who helped Adriana Greci Green (right) curate “Reflections: Native Art Across Generations,” on view at The Fralin Museum of Art through late January. Photo by Eze Amos

With an open palm, Teri Greeves gestures to a handful of small, intricately beaded Kiowa Indian cradleboards lined up inside a glass display case.

Kiowa Indians are known for their abstract beadwork motifs, she tells the small crowd that’s gathered to hear her speak at The Fralin Museum of Art at the University of Virginia. And while these cradleboards were made in the 19th century, likely for dolls, they’re not unlike the one that swaddled Greeves, a member of the Kiowa Indian Tribe of Oklahoma, when she was a newborn on Wyoming’s Wind River Indian Reservation in the 1970s.

“I came home in a fully beaded cradleboard. From the moment I was born, I was encased in glass beads,” she says. Her Italian father made the wooden spines to anchor and support the swaddling sack, and he, together with Greeves’ Kiowa and Comanche mother, designed the beadwork. A Shoshone Indian woman, a mother figure to Greeves’ mother, beaded the design to the sack. It likely required hundreds of hours of work, says Greeves, and it makes her feel extraordinarily loved.

She talks about the diaper bag her “fashionista” mother had beaded to match, and how, after substantial begging from a very young Greeves, her Shoshone “aunt” showed her how to bead a pair of shoes.

“I’m rambling on about my family life, but I want to give you some background on how I exist here, standing in front of you,” says Greeves. She wants to explain how she and her beadwork came to be at The Fralin, among these older pieces created in her medium, by her people, who endured physical and emotional brutality, poverty, racism, disenfranchisement, and other horrors, so that Greeves could tell her stories, and their stories, with beads.

“History…informs content,” says Greeves. “The more you know about a particular people, the more you will understand what you’re looking at.”

The exhibition, “Reflections: Native Art Across Generations,” is the first show that Adriana Greci Green, curator of the indigenous arts of the Americas, has curated at The Fralin since her arrival in 2016. For the exhibition, she considered the strengths of The Fralin’s collection and the relevance of these pieces to Native American people, particularly to contemporary Native American artists working in the same or a similar medium.

“It’s really about their voices coming through for us” as viewers of their art, she says.

Greci Green collaborated with four prominent contemporary Native American women artists to select pieces for the exhibition: Greeves, known for her beadwork; Wendy Red Star, an Apsáalooke (Crow) multimedia artist known for her photography; Lily Hope, a Tlingit weaver who is one of few living practitioners of Chilkat weaving; and Kay WalkingStick, a Cherokee landscape painter.

Each artist chose from pieces in The Fralin’s collection to show in conversation with her own work, and wrote a wall panel describing the selections.

Most of The Fralin’s Native American art collection has never been on display. The museum received its first gift of such work from Lady Nancy Astor in 1937—a crate of pieces that late 19th and early 20th century anthropologists collected rather dubiously (i.e., stole) from various tribes and pinned to the wall of the American Indian-themed grill house restaurant in the extravagant Hotel Astor in New York City. The crate sat, unopened, until the 1970s. From that collection, Hope chose a woven Chilkat robe to face opposite a child-size mannequin wearing her woven “Little Watchman” ensemble.

The Fralin has about 700 Native American and around 2,000 pre-Columbian objects in its collection, thanks to various gifts over the years. Someone whose uncle owned a trading post gave the beaded Kiowa items, says Greci Green, and the jacket that Red Star chose to show with her “Medicine Crow & The 1880 Crow Peace Delegation” annotated photography series are from yet another gift.

Greci Green recently (responsibly and ethically) acquired for the museum some contemporary Native American artists’ works, like Rick Bartow’s “Salmon Boy” drawing, exhibited alongside WalkingStick’s “Bear Paw Battlefield #2.”

The artists help Greci Green research the collection as well. Greeves grew up in her mother’s trading post full of artwork from many different Native American tribes, can discern, often via beadwork motifs and materials, the origin of cradleboards, moccasins, beaded bags, and other clothing. She can tell what tribe, or combination of tribes, the artist belonged to or grew up around. And if she doesn’t know, she likely knows someone who does.

“I always appreciate seeing the historic stuff,” Greeves says in the museum, taking a long look at a pair of beaded and extravagantly fringed Kiowa men’s moccasins; they weren’t likely meant for walking through dirt, mud, or grass, she explains, but for showing off while riding a horse.

“The historic stuff is the foundation for what I do; I couldn’t work without it,” Greeves adds as she shifts her gaze to a nearby pair of equally impractical footwear: high-heeled, lace-up, high-top sneakers covered in glossy pink beads. Greeves calls them “Rez Pride/Rez Girls,” and she beaded them as an ode to the girls she grew up with who were at once talented athletes earning basketball scholarships to college so that they might leave the reservation, and brilliant jingle dress dancers too proud of their Native American identities and traditions to abandon them entirely.

“More than anything, I’m a storyteller,” says Greeves as she looks from shoe to moccasin to cradleboard to tapestry, and to the other works in the show, stringing them together with her glance, each one linking the past to the present to the future. “I just use beads as my medium.”

Wendy Red Star, an Apsáalooke (Crow) multimedia artist known for her photography and her annotations of C.M. Bell’s late-19th-century anthropological photographs of a Crow delegation to Washington, D.C., will be in town to discuss her work on November 13 at 6:30pm in Campbell Hall. The Fralin Museum will stay open late that day so those wishing to attend Red Star’s talk can view “Reflections” beforehand.

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Matters of the art: Going behind the scenes of local galleries and museums

Henry Skerritt, curator of the Kluge-Ruhe Aboriginal Art Collection, takes a look at one of the museums pieces.
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‘Feminine Likeness’ explores two sides of the canvas

Paul Trebilcock’s “Mia Sposa, 1929” is on exhibit in “Feminine Likeness: Portraits of Women by American Artists, 1809-1950” at The Fralin Museum of Art through April 29. Courtesy of The Fralin Museum of Art

Standing in The Fralin Museum of Art at UVA, surrounded by paintings from across the 19th and 20th centuries, you notice something about the passage of time in the museum’s current exhibition, “Feminine Likeness: Portraits of Women by American Artists, 1809-1950.” There’s a subtle shift as years slip by, a transformation in the representation of femininity and codes of womanhood.

But if the work makes it seem that artists do the representing, you’re only seeing half the story. “It was always a give and take between artists and the people being painted,” says curator Jennifer Camp. “A lot of these portraits reflect the self-representation of the sitter as much as the representation or painting by the artist.”

In other words, the faces of women on display don’t belong exclusively to those who wield the brush. It’s a dialogue that echoes changing norms on both sides of the canvas.

Camp, who is the Barringer-Lindner Curatorial Fellow at The Fralin and a Ph.D. candidate in history of American art and architecture at UVA, sees the collection as an opportunity for viewers to consider how they present themselves to the world “via imagery, or art, or even something as silly as the selfie,” she says.

Camp has long been fascinated by 20th- century American art, which stands at the nexus of social and visual experimentation.

“When you study American art, one of the first things you learn about is the Armory Show, which was a huge exhibition in New York that upended the art world and created all sorts of scandals,” she says. “It was where people were first introduced to cubism as well as other avant-garde movements.”

Camp’s interest in the shifts of social and cultural expectations, as well as visual language used by artists, led to the concept of “Feminine Likeness.”

As part of her fellowship, Camp was tasked with putting together an exhibition that draws from The Fralin’s collection. Under the mentorship of former curator Rebecca Schoenthal, she developed a show that features portrait painters such as Thomas Sully, Rembrandt Peale, George Luks and others. Through changes in fashion, accessories, facial expression and pose, the images on view reveal changes in expectations for women themselves.

“In the 19th century, only the very wealthiest people could typically afford [portraits],” says Camp. “Portraiture was very much about the accurate likeness, about conveying status and wealth. …Mather Brown shows a woman holding a letter. Letter writing was a sign of decorum as well as education.

“In the 20th century, you see a shift towards a brighter pallet, looser brush strokes, some more inventive posing. Henry Glintenkamp, the 1920s artist who has the final portrait of the show, depicts an older woman sort of staring off into the distance, surrounded by these small vignettes that seem to be depicting scenes from her life. It’s done in the very sort of cubist manner, with jagged lines, harsh angles, deep shadows and kind of distorted proportions. He’s less interested in straightforward naturalism and more interested in the inner character of this woman, in her feelings and emotions.”

Camp sees this shift as a response not only to the growing accessibility of photography, which rendered exact likenesses with ease, but women’s changing status in society. In the 1920s, she points out, women had recently gained the right to vote, and flappers were considered much more liberated than their mothers and grandmothers.

“The audience response to art can tell you a lot about whether the culture at large is ready for that idea,” Camp says. “It’s interesting to think about whether or not art can actually be a vehicle for social change. Why or why not?”

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The Fralin recollects the influence of Samuel Kootz

“Dealer’s Choice: The Samuel Kootz Gallery 1945-1966,” is on view at The Fralin Museum through December 17. Courtesy of The Fralin Museum at UVA

It’s a bit chilly in the air-conditioned exhibition room at The Fralin Museum of Art at UVA, but the temperature isn’t what’s giving Rebecca Schoenthal goosebumps. It’s the art.

Specifically, it’s William Baziotes’ cool-toned, blue-hued “Night Form” and Adolph Gottlieb’s earth-toned pictograph, “The Sorceress,” hanging on a Fralin gallery wall, together for the first time since 1947. “Individually, they’re phenomenal works,” says Schoenthal, a mid-century American art expert and curator of exhibitions at The Fralin, explaining that Gottlieb’s pictograph series in particular was crucial to the advent of the Abstract Expressionist movement, which put American art on the map in the 20th century.

Together, the two works open a portal to the past, to September 1947, when UVA alumnus and lawyer-turned-crime-novelist-turned-art-critic-turned-art-dealer Samuel Kootz mounted an exhibition titled “Women” at his eponymous art gallery. “Women” was revolutionary in many ways, from the show’s subject matter to its catalog, for which Kootz enlisted writers like William Carlos Williams and Charles Baudelaire to respond to the paintings on view.

Samuel Kootz. Courtesy of The Fralin Museum at UVA

Much of what Kootz did throughout his career was revolutionary, and “Dealer’s Choice: The Samuel Kootz Gallery 1945-1966,” the exhibition currently on view at The Fralin through December 17, aims to shake up the art historical narrative by showing how art dealers—not just artists and critics—influence the art world.

“Dealer’s Choice” is largely based on a set of paintings that Kootz gave to The Fralin in the mid-1970s. Schoenthal’s curatorial challenge was figuring out how to present the scope of Kootz’s life’s work as an art dealer and writer in The Fralin’s space, via a narrative that viewers could absorb.

She decided to show only artists that Kootz himself exhibited and represented, like Pablo Picasso (yes, the Picasso), Robert Motherwell, Hans Hoffman and others (though there are a couple of exceptions to that rule), and to show only pieces that can be traced back directly to Kootz’s own hands, from the first painting he ever sold (Stuart Davis’ “Barber Shop,” bought by Roy Neuberger in 1942) to the Baziotes and Gottliebs that hung in Kootz’s gallery and eventually ended up in world-class museums. “Every picture that is in those rooms, I can tell you exactly when and why [Kootz] had it,” Schoenthal says.

After World War II destroyed many European cultural centers, American artists were poised to fill the void left in the art world, and Kootz enabled them to do so both intellectually and financially. He encouraged artists to explore and challenge abstraction and expressionism in the vein of the pre-war European De Stijl and Surrealist movements, respectively, and offered the artists signed to his gallery a monthly stipend in exchange for a certain number of pieces.

This gave Kootz Gallery artists like Gottlieb, Baziotes, Motherwell and others the chance to explore psychic automatism—an expression of an unfettered thought through painting or drawing—as a mode of creation that could lead to the exploration of new forms. These artists, along with like-minded artists Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko, cultivated the Abstract Expressionist movement.

Dealers like Kootz are often left out of the art historical narrative, Schoenthal says, and Kootz had a long career that hasn’t been very well-studied. She hopes “Dealer’s Choice” will prompt scholars to study not just Kootz, but the dealer-artist relationship, says Schoenthal. “I want future scholars to see this and come up with all the millions of exhibitions that could spin off…to run with all the work that can be done, because it’s so rich.”

A dealer can “sometimes give collectors this nudge, and the collector becomes so important that it has this whole aftereffect,” Schoenthal says.

Take, for example, the painting that started it all: Davis’ “Barber Shop.” Neuberger, a stockbroker and art collector with bold taste, bought it from Kootz in 1942 for $250. Neuberger liked the piece and bought another piece from Kootz, then another and another, eventually amassing one of the largest, most significant modern American art collections —with Kootz’s help. Neuberger later left his collection to the State University of New York at Purchase to establish the Neuberger Museum of Art, the 10th-largest university art museum in the United States. Visitors to the museum—artists, art history students and scholars—find inspiration in the art, which then shows up in their own paintings or scholarly papers. The Kootz effect is tangible.

“I know we’ve had some pretty amazing things in the past,” Schoenthal says of The Fralin’s exhibitions, but not since the museum exhibited Bartolo di Fredi’s “The Adoration of the Magi,” a 14th-century Sienese altarpiece, in 2012 has Schoenthal been truly in awe of an exhibition. World-class institutions like the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Museum of Modern Art lent “really significant” works to The Fralin for this show, Schoenthal says, and Kootz’s wife even loaned some from her own collection.

“I am still dumbfounded that these paintings are here,” Schoenthal says, slowly shaking her head and looking at the Gottlieb and Baziotes with wide eyes, as though the paintings will disappear if she blinks. “It blows my mind.”