Tag: water

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Arts Culture

Letting it flow

Bolanle Adeboye’s “Rain Dancer” is part of “Water: The Agony and Ecstasy of the Black Experience,” which features work by 25 Black artists from across Virginia. The exhibition is on display at McGuffey Art Center through March 28. Photo courtesy of the artist

By Alana Bittner

When writer and photographer Kori Price agreed to be part of the curation committee for a Black artists’ exhibition at McGuffey Art Center, water was not on her mind. It didn’t come up until someone asked how they wanted viewers to move through the gallery. Price recalls discussing ways to make viewers feel like they were underwater: “How did we want them to feel? Should they follow a specific route through the space? How should they flow through?”

Those questions evoked sobering scenes for Price. Water signified the Middle Passage, the expanse of ocean that was used for trans-Atlantic slave trade, into which an unknown number of Africans jumped rather than endure bondage.

But water is also present in moments of joy and release, strength and protest. Price says the committee, which also includes Derrick Waller, Sahara Clemons, Dena Jennings, Jae Johnson, Tobiah Mundt, and Lillie Williams, soon realized it was the perfect metaphor for framing such a broad topic, and agreed on “Water: The Agony and Ecstasy of the Black Experience” for the show’s title.

The group intentionally kept the requirements for the participating artists simple, asking only for interpretations on the theme. The results are wide-ranging and surprising. The show features painting, photography, and film, plus banjos carved from dipping gourds. In the films of Ellis Finney, water symbolizes the flow of time and memory. For painter Clinton Helms, the theme manifests as a powerful thunderstorm, while Bolanle Adeboye captures the joy of a young girl playing in the rain. Yet despite the range of subjects, Price marvels at how “each individual piece flowed together as a cohesive unit in the show.”

Waller, a photographer, says that initially, he had no idea where to begin in creating his art for the show. The challenge encouraged him to step out of his comfort zone and pick up a paint brush. The discussions involving the trans-Atlantic slave trade had imprinted one quote in particular on his mind. In Black Panther, Michael B. Jordan’s character Killmonger says, “Nah… Just bury me in the ocean…with my ancestors that jumped from the ship…cuz they knew death was better than bondage.” Waller’s resulting work, “Death Was Better Than Bondage,” is a haunting tribute to those who jumped. Black pins are scattered across a background as blue as the sea, marking the lives lost to the waves.

When Price discovered that the first slave ship to the mainland colonies, the White Lion, landed in present-day Hampton, Virginia, she grabbed her camera and drove down to visit. The experience was moving, and resurfaced questions about her own past. “Like many Black Americans, there’s likely not a record of who my enslaved ancestors were or when they gained their freedom,” Price says. “Though I don’t know them by name, I think about them…and wonder who the more than 20 Africans were that walked off the White Lion and became our legacy.” Price’s “Shadow of 20. and Odd Negroes” shows ethereal shadows cast upon a deserted beach, stretching almost to the ocean beyond.

As submissions came in, the McGuffey committee noticed that many of the participating artists were showing work for the first time. Waller says that in talking with the artists it became clear that opportunities for Black artists to show their work were limited. For Waller, this affirmed a troubling trend. In his experience, it’s been “very rare to attend an art show that is totally focused on celebrating the talents of Black artists.”

During the curation process, the committee members began to discuss the role they could play in helping Black artists get connected with opportunities to show their work, and eventually decided to present the show as the product of a new organization: the Charlottesville Black Arts Collective. Waller says that “helping Black artists gain exposure will be at the core” of CBAC’s mission.

“Water” shows just how valuable that exposure is. By featuring a variety of Black voices, the exhibit captures the nuances and multiplicities of the Black experience, something missing from white-domintated art spaces.

“I think that people can make a mistake in interpreting the Black experience as a singular and stereotyped experience,” says Price. She hopes viewers can “leave with a better understanding of our complexities.”

For Waller, “Water” touches on something fundamental. “I think the show will make people feel,” he says, “whatever that emotion may be…joy, sadness, anger, peace. I want people to feel. And then I hope these feelings spark good conversation and dialogue.”

Categories
Arts

Ripple effect: Environmental action motivates a water-focused show at IX gallery

Portland, Oregon, artist Thea Gahr’s Risograph print is part of “Wellspring: A Portfolio of Prints Celebrating Water,” on display at The Gallery at Studio IX through September 1. Image courtesy artist

A little boy stares into a river while ghostly shadows move through the current. The long, lithe bodies could be lost souls or river spirits, past lives or unspoken dreams, but whatever life force they represent, they’re rushing onward away from the boy—and away from you, the passive observer. The headline reads, “What we do to water, we do to ourselves.”

The image is one of 13 Risograph prints that comprise “Wellspring: A Portfolio of Prints Celebrating Water,” at The Gallery at Studio IX. Created by artists from the Justseeds Artists’ Cooperative and curated by Sarah Lawson, the show features work that asks viewers to do more than sit idly by. Rather, it asks us to reflect on our own relationships to water, consider the critical role it plays in our lives, and hold the baton of preservation, prevention, or management in a rapidly changing world.

“For me, engaging with others’ art is a way to grapple with issues that are sometimes too complex to try to address head-on,” Lawson says in an email interview with C-VILLE. That same spirit moves Justseeds, the collective of 29 artists across the U.S., Canada, and Mexico, who work together to produce collective portfolios and other creative responses to contemporary struggles for justice, from environmental and racial equity to migrant issues and the prison-industrial complex.

Molly Fair

“For this exhibit specifically, I hope that people find the art interesting to look at and engaging to think about, but that it’s also a chance to get your feet wet and hopefully become motivated to take some sort of environmental action,” Lawson says. Though she recommends simple shifts like reducing water waste through more efficient appliances, donating to non-profits, or calling representatives about water-related issues like pipelines, the exhibit itself stops short of prescriptions.

According to the artists’ statement for Wellspring, “These graphic tools are for you, as a human that recognizes that you need clean water to continue to be. The messages can be used for uniting, inspiring, warning, inciting, animating, empowering, invigorating.” Rather than focus on specific struggles over water—such as contamination in Flint, droughts in California, or the Pacific Garbage Patch, among other issues mentioned in the statement—each print leaves room for personal interpretation.

The final exhibition offers a broad swath of creative concepts to generate viewer inquiry and impact. In response to the water theme, each artist created a unique visual they rendered via Risograph, a printing process akin to automated screen printing. By pressing single shades of vibrant ink onto paper, then layering new colors and images on top, the artists developed multi-dimensional work with a vintage feel.

Each piece takes a different approach to the topic of water. In one, two frigate birds swan dive alongside a polar bear poised atop a towering iceberg; the root of the ice feeds choppy blue waves through which jellyfish glide. In another, neon pink and blue raindrops scatter across the word “commonwealth,” simultaneously conjuring visions of Virginia and the universal wealth water provides.

Roger Peet

Calls for change range from literal, like Colin Mathes’ doodles and handwritten list of improvised water filters; to pointed, like Erik Ruin’s whale emerging from a whirlpool of trash; to abstract, like Josh MacPhee’s graphic blue-and-green grid embedded with the words “aqua para todos!” In the gallery itself, art pieces are punctuated by quotes from scientific and political commentaries on the contemporary state of water in our world.

Regardless of the clarity or obfuscation of storytelling, the overall message of the exhibit is clear: There are as many ways of approaching and working with contemporary water issues as there are voices communicating what’s possible.

Lawson says this diverse artistic conversation seeks to soothe viewers and would-be activists rather than overwhelm them. Given the scope of issues like climate change and global water pollution, “it can be really difficult to focus on [these problems] in any meaningful or sustained way without feeling like we’re doomed,” she says. “This exhibit attempts to create small moments of engagement with the issues, through each interaction with one of the prints, in order to foster awareness and concern but in a way that doesn’t make change seem impossible.”

In this way, an exhibition like “Wellspring” can become “a useful buoy in a sea of bad news,” as the artists say in their statement. Like the little boy watching spirits of past and future flow beneath the surface, we have the chance to reflect on what is, in order to change what could be.

“Wellspring: A Portfolio of Prints Celebrating Water” is on view at The Gallery at Studio IX through September 1.

Categories
News

Know your water: Recent rainstorm boosts levels

As part of a national campaign called Imagine a Day Without Water, members from the Rivanna Water and Sewer Authority, Albemarle County Service Authority and City of Charlottesville set up booths last week on the Downtown Mall and asked passersby to describe the many ways they use water. Making tea, brushing teeth, filling water balloons and fighting fires made the list, but how much do locals really know about H20?

The Rivanna Water and Sewer Authority, a water wholesaler for the city and county, serves about 120,000 people. Though its maximum daily demand this year was 12.2 million gallons of water on September 8, RWSA usually provides about 9.6 million gallons each day—that’s a lot of water balloons.

RWSA also treats more than 10 million gallons of wastewater each day and returns it to the Rivanna River.

RWSA’s water supply benefited immensely from the recent rainstorm, the company’s executive director Tom Frederick says—during the week of the storm rain meters showed between five and six-and-a-half inches of collected rain, whereas around four inches are usually measured each month. In the reservoirs, 81.2 percent of storage capacity was met on October 6, while only 64.2 percent was full on September 29, just one week before the storm.

The Rivanna water authority has the capacity to store 2.6 billion gallons of untreated water in its five reservoirs: Sugar Hollow, South Fork Rivanna, Totier Creek, Beaver Creek and Ragged Mountain, the latter a controversial mega dam that was completed in July 2014 and dedicated that September. When it was proposed, some locals thought the environmental damages of building it outweighed its purpose, however Frederick says it’s now only 9.4 feet lower than the primary spillway, whereas the water level was 43 feet below the primary spillway when it was built. More than 10 gallons of treated water are stored in separate storage tanks connected directly to the piping system.

“It’s the world under our feet that we forget,” says Teri Kent, the RWSA’s communications manager. Of the 67 miles of water lines RWSA supports, some of the Charlottesville pipes are more than 100 years old.

Improving infrastructure might be inconvenient for people living in the city, admits Lauren Hildebrand, director of the city’s utilities, but she says Charlottesville is about halfway through 48 separate replacement projects, which aim to improve water quality and replace aging pipes. With long-term plans in place and a plentiful water supply to serve many generations, she says local water authorities are ahead of the game.

“I would’ve said five years ago that we were behind other places in the state,” Frederick says, adding that state and federal law does not allow any utilities to plan their future water supply for longer than 50 years, and the project completed at Ragged Mountain was based on a 50-year plan. “For that reason, I believe we are now ahead of most utilities in Virginia in providing for future water needs.”

Vice Mayor Dede Smith, who was part of a citizen group that opposed creating the Ragged Mountain reservoir, agrees that the current water status in Charlottesville and Albemarle is good, but attributes it to successful conservation efforts and says water usage has dropped about 30 percent since 2000.

When it comes to the Ragged Mountain reservoir, though, “the things that we said would go wrong did,” Smith says. “We predicted that the ecological value of the natural area would be compromised and it has.” Birds frequent the spot less often and more than 100 acres have been clear cut, she adds. Her group feared the reservoir would be filled from the Moormans River and it was, she says, after people from RWSA “turned on the spigot full blast” and the Virginia Department of Environmental Quality intervened. The Moormans is now in critical condition, she says.

Clarification: During the 50-year water supply plan process the RWSA secured a permit from the Virginia Department of Environmental Quality that allows it to release water into the Moormans River to mimic the natural inflows to that water system. It monitors both the dam and downstream water levels in relation to the Moormans.

Correction: This article was changed at 3:44pm October 16 to reflect the correct name of the Virginia Department of Environmental Quality.