on art
Rising above: New Sahara Clemons mural depicts the strength of Black women
C-VILLE Weekly, June 2020
On the afternoon of the year’s hottest day so far, Sahara Clemons stands at a concrete wall about three times her height, a roll of masking tape around her wrist, a brush in the other hand, cans of paint and a cup of melting bubble tea at her feet.
As she puts the finishing touches on her mural for the Charlottesville Mural Project, Clemons, who grew up in the city and recently finished her first year at the Rhode Island School of Design, periodically steps back to consider her work.
A larger-than-life Black woman reclines across the full width of the wall, her face illuminated by the warm, intense, orange-pink light radiating from a lightning bolt she holds above her. She has the air of a goddess, powerful and at rest.
Clemons found inspiration for the piece in her mother, Eboni Bugg. Bugg, who currently serves as director of programs for the Charlottesville Area Community Foundation, is a licensed clinical social worker, a family reunification advocate, and a yoga instructor who has worked to make mental health resources more available and accessible to women of color in the area.
Dog tales: Mysterious public art series uses frankfurters to make a point
C-VILLE Weekly, January 2020
They appeared over the summer, three identical wheatpaste posters of anthropomorphic hot dogs in buns, wearing sneakers and pedaling unicycles as they exclaimed in speech bubbles, “Hot dog!”
One, pasted to the side of the raised parking lot between Market and South Streets, was gone after about a week, but the others—on Cherry Avenue and West Main Street, stuck around. And then more started to pop up.
“A hard rain’s gonna fall,” warns a hot dog holding an umbrella on the Dewberry hotel skeleton. “Lockheed Martin stock increased 3.6% today,” its twin hollers from the side of another downtown building. “Rise up,” insists one standing atop a pair of stilts. “Shred the gnar,” “no war but class war,” say two others on skateboards.
A few weeks ago, the images appeared on Instagram under the handle @stilts_walker, and this reporter saw it as an opportunity to catch up with the artist, Charlottesville’s hot dog Banksy, if you will.
I slid into @stilts_walker’s DMs, expecting the wurst (“no way, you weenie”). But the artist agreed to an interview on three conditions: One, that we link up in the old Chili’s parking lot. Two, that I mention the location of our meeting in this story. And three, that their identity remain anonymous.
Birds of a feather: Barkindji artist Kent Morris looks to his past on Australian rooftops
C-VILLE Weekly, April 2019
Kent Morris stands in the lobby of the Kluge-Ruhe Aboriginal Art Collection with a big grin on his face. He’s just in from a birding excursion through Charlottesville-area marshes, and swiping through photos on his phone: here’s a few of a bald eagle, and a few of its nest. Here’s one of a native bird perched in a budding tree, and one of Morris himself, standing in shin-deep water, his digital camera slung over his shoulder.
Morris, a Barkindji artist who lives and works in St. Kilda, an inner suburb of Melbourne, Australia, is in town for his photography exhibition “Unvanished,” on view at the Kluge-Ruhe through May 5. It’s his first full exhibition outside of Australia, and after showing a few more photos, he slips his phone into his pocket and heads into the gallery room.
Standing in the middle of the room, surrounded by colorful, geometric, symmetrical images, he asks if I know what I’m looking at. I do not.
“Birds on roofs!” he exclaims, his laughter echoing out of the gallery.
When I see it, I almost feel silly for not noticing it before—it’s right there.
Real connection: The extraordinary works of Megan Elizabeth Read
C-VILLE Weekly, May 2018
[…] What Read chooses to leave out is as significant as what she chooses to include, begging a close look at the subject while also denying the viewer ultimate closeness. Her paintings balance on the precipice of extraordinary intimacy, stopping just shy of the kind of closeness that makes Read—and most of us—uncomfortable. They represent, Read says, both a craving for and fear of vulnerability and being seen.
Read painted a number of objects for the McGuffey show as well—the many-layered, bitter onion that the woman holds in “Becoming” swathed in the fabric from “Furling”; a tiny, delicate indigo bunting bird and a subsequent painting of its severed wings and twine; the aubergine robe; her own baby cup—that possess the same amount of intimacy as her paintings of people. Everyone has an item they’d carry across the country and back, the items they’d be heartbroken to lose. These are Read’s, and they conjure the viewer’s own.
In plain sight: Artist Frank Walker captures the value of human life
C-VILLE Weekly, June 2018
[…] Dressed in brown slip-on shoes, relaxed fit jeans, a short-sleeved chambray shirt and a dark blue Kangol cap, local artist and lifelong Charlottesville resident Frank Walker can’t take two steps without someone congratulating him on his newest paintings and drawings.
As individual conversations quiet before his “Frank Walker: New Work” artist talk begins, Walker bends down and picks up a sizable wooden disc that’s been sitting on the floor at the gallery entrance.
A painted brown eye peers through a rectangle cut out of the center of the disc. Around the rectangle, an outline of the continental United States burned into the wood, surrounded by barbed wire and a hangman’s noose. “I Seen What U Done” is burned in above it all. Walker hoists it up and hangs it around his neck, letting it dangle near his abdomen from a rope.
“This is my wearable art,” Walker announces to the group, grinning. Andrea Douglas, director of the Jefferson School African American Heritage Center and the show’s curator, wouldn’t let him put it in the show so he’s wearing it instead. The crowd of a few dozen laughs at his act of loose defiance and Walker looks pleased.
America relishes a taste of living Aboriginal traditions: Recovery of a stitch in time reflects a rich cultural history
The Australian, August 2018
Regina Pilawuk Wilson’s ancestors had many traditions. Among them was hand-stitching fishing nets, and each community had its own special stitch passed down from generation to generation. As white people arrived from Europe and began to colonise the land now called Australia—including the Ngan’gikurrunggurr people’s land in the Daly River region of the Northern Territory— they forced Aboriginal people to live on missions with strict rules that in many cases dissolved Indigenous cultures and traditions. And so, many of those fishnet stitches were lost.
This is the story that Wilson told curators and enthusiasts in the US earlier this year during a 32,000 km round trip to America. She told herder story in the small city of Charlottesville, Virginia, and in Washington, DC, where her work was exhibited in two shows (she helped curate a third).