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Arts Culture

JSAAHC adds highly detailed Black spaces exhibition to its permanent collection

Through deep examination of documents, oral histories, and extensive research, “Toward a Lineage of Self” offers a detailed, interactive look at the prosperity, vibrancy, segregation, and discrimination of Charlottesville’s Black community. Image courtesy of Jordy Yager.

“Toward a Lineage of Self” is the latest addition to the “Pride Overcomes Prejudice” permanent exhibition at the Jefferson School African American Heritage Center. Featuring an interactive digital map, the exhibition uses deed records, oral histories, documents, and photographs to show how Charlottesville’s historically Black neighborhoods came to be, the struggles they faced when confronted with racist civic policy, and the community’s response.

With photographs and descriptions, the map breathes life into the past, enlivening the facts it lays bare. The map has three categories: community, civil rights, and discrimination—and what emerges is a picture of a vibrant, well-organized, and prosperous community that supported its members, and when discriminatory practices were introduced, joined the fight for civil rights. 

“They structured their lives within this space of legalized apartheid. There’s no other way to describe it,” says JSAAHC Executive Director Dr. Andrea Douglas. “It says in the minutes of the City of Charlottesville … ‘This will accomplish racial segregation in our city.’ You can’t get past those documents and those are the things that are important as we start to think about what is equitable.”

“The minute that African American people leave enslavement, they begin to shape Charlottesville,” says Douglas. “They begin to purchase property, they begin to create their home places, and they begin to build around those places the ancillary needs—the grocery store, churches, and community aid societies … and they’re doing it in the built landscape and they’re doing it at a rapid rate, facilitating this ascendancy for each other—that is what ‘Toward a Lineage of Self’ really articulates.”

One example is John West, a successful barber and the first Black man elected to Charlottesville’s Town Council. He was responsible for more than 600 property transactions between 1870 and 1927. As a landlord, he offered reasonable rates and made home-buying possible for many African Americans. 

Similarly, the Piedmont Industrial Land Improvement Company was formed by nine residents, who pooled funds to buy more than 50 properties in its 26-year history, providing both affordable housing and economic returns to its investors. And the fact that Charlottesville’s Black community managed to build seven churches between 1864 and 1919 is a testament not just to its faith, but also to its prosperity.

“The whole of Charlottesville’s center was Black-owned,” says JSAAHC Director of Digital Humanities Jordy Yager. ”This had never been articulated before. We talked about all these different neighborhood pockets like Vinegar Hill, Fifeville, etc., but once you look at it in its entirety, you really start to see how large the center of Charlottesville is as a Black space.” The area totaled some 800 acres.

Yager, a journalist and Charlottesville native who’s written about Vinegar Hill and the gentrification of the 10th and Page neighborhood for this publication, has accumulated hours of taped recollections for C-VILLE Weekly stories, which he offered to JSAAHC for its oral histories archive. Out of this came an initiative, supported by a grant from the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities, to collect interviews about what it was like growing up Black in Charlottesville. 

An offshoot of this, Mapping Cville, began around the same time as the Unite the Right rally in August 2017. “After that we had a reckoning in Charlottesville in terms of [the city’s]  history,” says Yager. “It was then we realized, we really didn’t know that history. We knew that racist housing policies were enacted, but we didn’t know where and we didn’t know how.”

Armed with a Charlottesville Area Community Foundation grant and with the cooperation of city and county clerks, JSAAHC digitized an astounding 300,000 pages of property records. Then, using optical character recognition software, the racial covenants were extracted.

More than 2,000 community members helped log the information to create what Yager says is  “The first complete database of every single racially restricted property in Charlottesville that’s ever existed.” 

“Toward a Lineage of Self” spells out the retaliatory discriminatory practices—land seizures, racial covenants on deeds, intentional lack of city services, like water and sewage, that were instituted by local and state governments alarmed or offended by the progress—their affluence and their successful voter campaigns, which, among other things, helped elect James T.S. Taylor to the Constitutional Convention of 1868—made by Black residents.

The uncomfortable truths revealed by the research must be dealt with. These truths are not lodged in the distant remove of ancient history; you only have to look around Charlottesville to see the fallout of this civic-endorsed inequity. 

“Toward a Lineage of Self” operates on both a micro and macro level, providing a vivid road map for descendants of the people who formed Charlottesville’s Black community, while at the same time revealing the larger ramifications of systemic racism and inequality.

“We can give people their histories, but we can also engage in a conversation about repairs,” says Douglas. “We can also engage in a conversation about present-day housing practice. In this age when the truth is contestable, the forensics are not, the paper trail is not contested.”

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Arts Culture

Jefferson School spotlights sculptor who carved out a remarkable legacy

“Beyond Boundaries: The Sculpture of Alice Wesley Ivory” is on view at the Jefferson School African American Heritage Center through December 14. Photo by Eze Amos.

The story of sculptor Alice Ivory is a story of triumph against adversity, and the power of the creative drive. It is also an American tragedy of sorts, highlighting the dearth of opportunities afforded people outside the white, predominantly male, status quo. In “Beyond Boundaries: The Sculpture of Alice Wesley Ivory,” the Jefferson School African American Heritage Center highlights the work and life story of the under-celebrated artist.

Ivory was born in Albemarle County in 1931. From the start, she faced challenges as a poor, Black female in segregated Virginia. But Ivory had a few things going for her. Her parents, Warner Wesley and Gladys Frye Wesley, owned their own farm in White Hall, and though neither one had attended school, they were literate.

As a child, Ivory attended White Hall Colored School, a two-mile walk each day. She completed her secondary education at Albemarle Training School on Hydraulic Road—at the time, it was the only school in the surrounding five-county area to offer Black kids an education beyond the seventh grade. Ivory went on to Virginia State College (now University) in Petersburg, where she earned a degree in art education. She taught at Jackson P. Burley High School for seven years before applying to graduate school at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. (The University of Virginia was out of the question, as it was still segregated.) 

Accepted provisionally at first because her undergraduate degree was from a Southern Black institution, Ivory satisfied UWM’s requirements, gained full admission, and received her M.S. in art education in 1962. It was at UWM that she discovered her lifelong passion for welding, a highly unusual choice for a woman at the time. Her interest was not lost on Fred Ivory, who presented his bride with an oxo-acetylene torch when they married. She would use that equipment for the rest of her life. In 1970, she became the first Black teacher hired by the Blue Ridge School, and taught there until retiring in 1990.

Ivory received some artistic acclaim during her lifetime, garnering certificates of distinction from the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts for her sculptures “Crow,” “Wild Boar,” and “Eagle”—the latter created in response to JFK’s assassination. She was also the subject of a one-woman show at the VMFA, which also subsequently commissioned “Kangaroo” for its 1980 “Fantasies,” a touchable exhibition designed for people with visual impairments. Ivory’s work has been exhibited at McGuffey Art Center, and a painted portrait of Ivory by Frances Brand was part of the “Firsts” exhibition. But these acknowledgments are not commensurate with her talent.

The sensitivity, compassion, and humor with which Ivory’s animals and insects are rendered reflect her rural upbringing. Michael R. Taylor, artistic director and chief curator at the VMFA has an interesting take on her work. 

“In a way, Alice Ivory’s marvelous welded metal sculptures are all self-portraits,” says Taylor. “She’s in them. She is the fierce junkyard dog, she is the beautiful crow, and she‘s the kangaroo protecting her young. I think that’s all of her rolled into one.”

Ivory used both naturalism and caricature to capture her subjects. Her chickens possess a hand-wrought honesty and humor reminiscent of some of Alexander Calder’s animals. Even though they are abstracted versions, Ivory nails the posture, stance, and movement—in essence, their chickenness. 

Generally, she didn’t bother with surface details, placing emphasis on form and gesture. In a very modern way, Ivory acknowledged the materiality of the work, with unadorned metal and exposed welding seams and brazing marks. Other animals in this vein are the attenuated Alberto Giacometti-like “Heron” and the menacing, yet funny, piranha whose teeth are made from nails. 

Ivory’s “Bull’ is a study of compressed energy. The bull seems to be gathering itself in preparation for charging. To emphasize the animal’s power, she exaggerates the hooves, attaches the plates of metal so the seams accentuate the animal’s musculature and adds a tail that seems charged with electricity. Her magnificent, oversized “Crow” gets the bird’s attitude exactly right, with a cocked head that conveys curiosity and intelligence.

The majority of Ivory’s sculptures were made (using scrap metal her husband collected for her) between 1960 and 1970, while she was taking a break from teaching to care for her two young children. It wasn’t easy, as Ivory herself wrote: “…other sculptures have been made at home when I had managed to get the baby quiet, the dishes washed, the laundry hung out to dry and another of hundreds of huge meals prepared.”

In spite of these domestic burdens, she produced, by her estimation, 100 sculptures. By way of comparison, American sculptor David Smith, who died 10 years younger than Ivory, produced well over 500 sculptures.

Ivory made the best of it, producing extraordinarily sympathetic work. She unquestionably had the talent to scale the heights of the art world, yet she lived out her days in relative obscurity, raising children, keeping house, and supporting herself as an art teacher. When she died in 1991, Ivory left behind a body of superlative work that speaks not only to what she achieved but also to how she triumphed in a world of exclusion. Looking at it, one can’t help but feel that she, and (to a far lesser degree) we, were cheated out of a more fully realized career.

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Arts Culture

Peace by piece

The Charlottesville Area Quilters Guild Biennial Quilt Show features 180 quilts at Tandem Friends School on April 9 and 10. Supplied photo.

It goes without saying that a quilting judge must have a sharp eye for details, but there’s more to it than that. Sure, “things like originality, consistency in the length of quilting stitches, square corners, levelness in hanging, and matching points (joints of fabric) play into awards,” says Linda Boone, chair of the Charlottesville Area Quilters Guild Biennial Quilt Show. But it’s the ability to find the “final spark,” an understanding of the quilters’ approach and how they take on a challenge, that shows a mastery of the craft. 

The CAQG biennial marks 50 years for the organization, and though it is not judged professionally, it is an opportunity for locals to view and vote on the work from four area chapters: Crozet Quilters, Moonlighters, Tuesday Morning Quilts, and Nelson Quilters. 

Whether piecing a nap or throw quilt, creating a modern pattern, or designing an art quilt to hang on the wall, quilters face crucial decisions at every stage in sewing, beginning with the selection of a style, which may include appliqué, art/innovative, pieced (small), pieced (medium), pieced (large), or challenge.

“Some quilters find choosing fabrics harder than the piecing,” says Boone. “Some find quilting the layers…curves…small pieces challenging.  Some find it most challenging to make a quilt a certain size and color (boundaries can be challenging!).” 

Then begins a journey of dedication, precision, and incredible patience. The 2019 Best of Show winner Julie Davis’ current entry is a work of stars, dedicated to pandemic frontline workers, that includes 620,680 stitches. 

Beyond their utility and beauty, quilts can also tell stories, and in some cases pass down history—a tangible artifact that holds a social and economic origin story through its fiber and composition.

Antique, new, decorative, or traditional, “each quilt made is a learning experience…quilters never stop learning,” says Boone. The mostly female group (at press time, the CAQG counted one man among the four chapters) supports each other by sharing tips, patterns, and lighthearted banter to keep everyone stitching in stitches.  “Finished is better than perfect!” says Boone. “There is no such thing as the quilt police.” 

Decoding quilters

Sewing circles are no joke, but their members do have a sense of humor when communicating about the status of their work. Here’s a glossary:

WIP: Work in Progress

UFO: Unfinished Object

PHDs: Projects Half Done

PIGs: Projects in Grocery Bags

WOMBAT: Waste of Material, Batting, and Time

NESTY: Not Even Started Yet

PFC: Professional Fabric Collector

STABLE: Stash Accumulation Beyond Life Expectancy

WITHWIT: What In The Heck Was I Thinking?

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Arts Culture

Figuring it out

Saul Kaplan began his professional artmaking in 1948 at the prestigious Hans Hofmann School of Fine Arts, where he studied drawing under Hofmann, who was a contemporary of Henri Matisse. Photo: Eze Amos

By Matt Dhillon

In February, Saul Kaplan marked both his 93rd birthday and the release of a new book of artwork. The self-published Sketches: Faces of Life & Love highlights what is perhaps the artist’s most discreet and most intimate medium, his drawings.

Having retired to an apartment in Martha Jefferson House, the ceramics and painting that were the priority of Kaplan’s artistic career became more difficult. But Kaplan cannot sit down with a pen without coming away with a drawing. It’s a habit he’s developed from over 60 years of practicing.

“Drawing is a muscle memory, eye muscle coordination,” Kaplan says. The memory that keeps returning to the muscles of his fingers, wrist, and arm is the memory of human faces.

Over the years, Kaplan has drawn thousands of human faces, and on every page his book is populated with that most familiar of images.

“The human face expresses everything,” he says.

Kaplan’s simple lines craft expressions on the shifting array of faces, digging for the bare-bones of emotion buried there. We see eyes meet, or downcast, or slitted, eyes tired, or gentle, or cunning. Lips are curled, puckered, pouting, or tense. Noses sharp and soft, cheeks broad and narrow.

Kaplan released his third book, Sketches: Faces of Life & Love, just before his 93rd birthday. Image courtesy of the artist.

Perhaps it is this simplicity of bare lines that makes drawing, as Kaplan says in the book’s prologue, “the most intimate and direct form of visual communication.” While intricacy serves to expand and amplify, the simplicity of the line drawings in Faces of Life & Love go in the opposite direction, seeking to distill the essence of an eyebrow, or a lip, and identify the essential lines that carry emotion. In the most minimalist renderings, Kaplan refines a somber face into just a handful of lines.

Kaplan also alludes to ancient Egyptian drawings. “The style of the Egyptian eye has been repeated over history,” he writes. “The eye I draw, like Picasso did, had its beginning in Egypt.”

That eye—drawn over and over for centuries—mirrors Kaplan’s endless creation of faces throughout the years. In this obsessive repetition and focus on the geometry of shape, Kaplan’s drawings search for something basic about the human face, its composition, and its familiarity. As the Egyptians did, Kaplan attempts to use the very specific and precise lines of a face to strike a resounding chord.

In this collection, we see the warm human population that Kaplan has created as a result of that repetition. Most of them are not alone, drawings occupied by two or more figures in some form of relationship to each other. Often, their bodies overlap or blend so that we see two faces that share one eye, or three heads that share one torso. In these fusions there is a sense of togetherness, of something shared that merges the characters in a visceral way. 

Each drawing, he says, is a kind of personal signature. “[As artists] we are making our mark some way or another. It’s a kind of waving and saying, ‘I’m here.’”

Kaplan, like his characters, tries to merge with something bigger than himself, participating in the collective story. “That’s what an artist really does,” Kaplan says. “He tries to use the medium he’s in to express something—it could be anything—but it is now part of history, a part of mankind.”

In the same way that the thousands of Egyptian eyes are actually one eye, iterations of the same form, Kaplan’s endless faces resolve into one face, waving at the world.

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Arts Culture

Color rush

Charlottesville’s Priscilla Whitlock and Richmond-based artist Mary Holland complement each other’s work in a dual exhibition at Quirk Gallery. Photo courtesy of the artists

As daily temps start to climb, and we await the vibrant colors of spring, Quirk Gallery offers a visually stunning show celebrating the work of two artists, Priscilla Whitlock and Mary Holland, whose work is guaranteed to lift winter’s gray grip. 

Whether producing vignettes of her garden, open meadows, or mountain vistas, Whitlock’s “Eden” conveys with paint the essence of a place—not just its physical manifestation, but also the experience of being there. She clearly revels in depicting nature, and her manipulation of paint and her lively gestural style expose a deep appreciation for the purely visual aspects of painting, too.

The trio “Spring, Greens,” “Goldenrod Thistles” and “Wild Field, Mustard” are heady depictions of a world in full bloom. The paintings buzz with life. Whitlock captures the effects of nature—wind, shifting light and shadow, and the sense of ever-present insects—to reflect this bombinating sensation, but her painterly approach infuses the works with vitality. With “Spring, Greens,” Whitlock zooms in beyond the vegetation depicted in the other two works and emphasizes the riotous sensual quality of the place as a whole.

“Dogwoods, Spring Mountain” has an entirely different mood. Its muted colors suggest dawn or dusk, a quieter, more somber time. In the work, a vista of mountains rises above a grove of dogwood trees. The mountains are rendered in broad mauve and blue brushstrokes. Whitlock uses jagged lines to describe variations in the terrain, but for the most part this area has a distinct serenity as compared to the foreground. Visually, this situates the mountains in the distance, but it also fittingly depicts their grandeur and permanence. In front, the trees of the title are animated with wind and light. They seem to bend and twist before our eyes, brought to life by Whitlock’s adept handling of the paint. 

Photo courtesy of the artists

With the showy “Bee Balm, My Garden” and “Blues, Pinks, Whites, My Garden,” Whitlock ventures closer to the world of abstract painting. Yes, these works are representations of plants in the patch of earth by her studio, but how she arranges her composition and the way she applies paint demonstrate an emphasis on the formal aspects of painting. Just look at the riotous blobs of pigment in “Blues, Pinks, Whites,” and the daubs of scarlet, green, and blue overlaid with the scrawl of oil stick in “Bee Balm.” 

Like her paintings, Whitlock’s monotypes (unique images printed from a plate that has been painted by the artist) are about putting pigment down on a flat surface. These delightful, small-scale works possess a thrilling freshness and dynamism that holds its own against the larger works. “Flow,” “Spring, Peaches” and “Orchard, Spring” are visually striking examples, but I was particularly taken with the perfectly balanced “Water, Blues” and “My Garden.”

Whitlock has been producing monotypes for years. “I’ve stayed with it so long because it’s like playing another instrument,” she says. “You see something new that you wouldn’t have if you just stuck to your primary medium.”

At the other end of the gallery hangs Holland’s “Compositions in Blue: Cyanotype.” Cyanotype is a photographic printing process discovered in the mid-19th century that uses paper coated with a photo-sensitive solution and sunlight to produce an image of a stencil or object. The indigo hue produced by the cyanotype process has profound emotional resonance. Whether it strikes primordial chords within our subconscious, referencing natural phenomena like the night sky or deep water, this bold yet quiet color has an undeniably mysterious and romantic quality.

In 14 works, Holland takes full advantage of this. The reduced palette of blue and white sets off her striking arrangements of both natural and manufactured objects. Some of these she leaves as is. With others, she introduces collage and watercolor, occasionally adding the bling of silver foil to augment the white.

Holland’s assortments of leaves lend themselves well to the cyanotype technique. The veiny beech frond skeletons of “Forest Bathing,” the silvery disks of “Money Plant,” and the graphic power of the fan-shaped leaf blades in “Gingko Pattern,” all present a different kind of foliage. Holland’s approach reveals an affinity for the individual qualities of each specimen. With the first two, she employs collage to enhance the basic thrust of the work, adding silver to underscore the mica-like money plant pods and inserting silver hands in the allegorical “Forest Bathing.” When it comes to the distinctive gingko leaves, she adds nothing, deeming the rhythm of their silhouette powerful enough. 

In other pieces, Holland turns to the world of handicrafts, using antique lace doilies, placemats, and embroidered handkerchiefs as her subjects. These are poetic works that highlight the intricacy of needlework and the filmy quality of fabric. Against the blue field, these stark white pieces are transformed to reveal works of intricate design and superb workmanship. One can’t help thinking about the anonymous creators of these bits of needlework. 

“I think women’s work is undervalued,” says Holland. “Especially old crochet, and lace, and all these things women did. You can pick them up at junk shops and vintage places for very little, which is amazing when you think how beautiful they are and the amount of time that was put into them.” Holland gives these pieces a second chance and shines new light into their origins.