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Painting The Streets Of Jackson Ward

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Where West Marshall meets Brook Road, a new pedestrian plaza is coming — and with local organizations like Gallery5, Venture Richmond, Big Secret, and more behind it, it’s set to brighten up the intersection through art. 

The already-colorful City of Richmond is about to get another rainbow upgrade, thanks to a grant from the Bloomberg Philanthropies Asphalt Art Initiative. After 200 cities applied for the grant, one of the sixteen $25,000 grants was jointly awarded to both Venture Richmond and City of Richmond Public Art Commission. The grant supports cities that use art to improve community safety, and creates further public engagement.

PHOTO: Site plan for the upcoming project funded by Bloomberg’s Asphalt Art Initiative in Richmond, via Venture Richmond.

Richmond’s newest project will include the intersection of West Marshall Street and Brook Road in the Arts District/Jackson Ward neighborhood. The grant will help fund a new pedestrian plaza, a parklet, and an intersection mural. The list of partners on the project is still growing, but so far includes the City of Richmond, Gallery5, Venture Richmond, Big Secret, ART 180, Vanderbilt Properties, and Walter Parks Architects. ART 180 is in charge of coordinating the public art components of the project, and Walter Parks Architects is responsible for providing in-kind design services.

“Collectively, these elements build upon the momentum of the neighborhood as the nexus of the Arts District, and enhance the route into Jackson Ward anchored by the Maggie Lena Walker Memorial Plaza a block away,” said Susan Glasser, Public Art Coordinator for the City of Richmond. “On a practical level, the project aspires to increase pedestrian traffic by enhancing safety and street life, to create a revitalized and beautified environment in an underutilized public space, and to promote civic engagement in the neighborhood.”

Venture Richmond is also donating $5,000 to the project that will come from the organization’s event Park(ing) Day design/build competition, hosted last September. Venture Richmond’s overall mission is to ensure that the City of Richmond focuses on enhanced vitality of Richmond, the downtown area, and Riverfront, along with enhancing property management services. Together with the city’s Public Art Commission, which invests in local artists to improve economic and cultural identity growth, the organization hopes to create a new destination from an existing intersection. It will not only brighten the busy section, but enhance its functionality.

PHOTO: Butterfly mural in Asheville, NC, by Sound Mind Creative. Photo by Justin Mitchell.

“It’s really exciting to see a lot of hard work by the community rewarded by a grant from Bloomberg Philanthropies, to make changes to that intersection that make it safer and more attractive to the residents and businesses in the area,” said Max Hepp-Buchanan, Director of Riverfront and Downtown Placemaking for Venture Richmond. “In the age of Covid-19, it’s more important than ever that we design public spaces like this for people to safely gather and make social connections.”

Bloomberg Philanthropies’ main initiative is to invest in cities around the world, ensuring that there is a good focus on the arts, education, public health, and government innovation among other areas. In 2019, Michael R. Bloomberg’s Bloomberg Philanthropies — which includes all of his giving along with personal philanthropy, foundation, and Bloomberg Associates — donated $3.3 billion.

The City of Richmond is eager to hear what the public and Richmond locals want out of this project, and have made a survey for volunteers to record their opinions. The City hopes to start off its public engagement process with a bang, ensuring that the voices of locals are heard, and that the project will not impinge too much on the lives of those living around the intersection. Community members are highly encouraged to take the survey, if possible, so city officials can gather as much information as possible for a swift, smooth project timeline.

PHOTO: Underground at Ink Block in Boston, MA. Mural by Silvia López Chavez. Photo by @Rediovision.

Richmond’s newest project of the three conceptual elements hopes to further engage the community in local art, and will create a more functional intersection within the popular public intersection. 

To learn more about the initiative and follow updates, visit Venture Richmond’s website and take the community survey.

On Park(ing) Day, Celebrating Art Is a Walk In the Park(ing Space)

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If you noticed something different about your usual parking space last weekend, you weren’t alone.

Last Friday, your favorite parking spot in the city might have been occupied — not by another driver who found it quicker than you did, but by public art spaces created by Richmond-area design, architecture, and creative firms as well as artists.

Photo by Owen FitzGerald

Park(ing) Day began in San Francisco in 2005 and has evolved into a global event. It is an annual celebration of public space, in which designers and artists turn public parking spaces into temporary public parks, art installations, or other creative artistic spaces.

This year’s event was coordinated by community partner organization Venture Richmond. 20 pop-up parks were created downtown, around Carytown, the Fan, and Scott’s Addition, and on the campus of Virginia Commonwealth University. The organization jumped at the opportunity to head up this year’s celebration.

“For us, the opportunity to activate our downtown streets with mini-parks for the day while simultaneously raising awareness of, and promoting, the City of Richmond’s parklet program was something we just couldn’t pass up,” said Max Hepp-Buchanan, Venture Richmond’s director of riverfront and downtown placemaking.

Photo by Owen FitzGerald

For Venture Richmond, hosting this year’s event also created an opportunity to keep some of the contest-winning parklets around for the long haul.

“We look forward to working with the City of Richmond and some of our participants in the near future to install permanent parklets, adding more public space to our increasingly vibrant downtown streets,” Hepp-Buchanan said.

Park spaces opened to the public Friday morning at 9 a.m. and remained open until 4 p.m. that afternoon. The winners of the contest were announced at a happy hour at Bar Solita downtown’s arts district that evening. This year’s winners were: 

Photo by Owen FitzGerald

ART 180 has been in Richmond for 21 years, working with underprivileged and underrepresented youth, giving them a safe space to express their creativity.  They offer a number of after-school programs for kids in the city’s public schools and community centers, as well as classes for incarcerated teens. 

ART 180’s Community Program Manager, Dr. Vaughn Garland, said his organization was approached about creating a park in front of their building in Jackson Ward. 

“We love the idea,” Garland said.  “So we built a creative space. This is a space for creatives to come in and express their own interest.” 

Top Photo by Owen FitzGerald

The Art Of Richmond’s Youth

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Art 180’s annual Really Big Show will turn art by the river city’s young people into a celebratory block party on First Friday.

Art 180 will be hosting their 15th annual Really Big Show this Friday, June 7th, as part of June’s First Friday festivities. The beloved non-profit will be taking up their entire block in Jackson Ward to display and present a semester’s worth of colorful creative works by Richmond’s youth.

“Having 183 of our program participants come together in one space is pretty exciting,” said Community Program Manager Vaughn Garland. “This is a moment in which we’re not only showcasing our youth’s work, but we’re also pulling people together… We’ll be able to get the youth up onstage in front of a crowd to ask them questions, and have them tell the community about their art, and, oh, they will tell definitely tell you.”

During the event there will be lots of art to see and plenty of activities to enjoy, as well as the staged presentations of each students artwork. There will be displays both inside and outside of the Art 180 building, with more permanent installations housed inside and various student projects outside, coupled with activities centered around those project topics.

“[With] one group, we had worked on weaving with natural materials, so there will be a station set up with something that will give people a chance to experience what that looks like,” said Program Director Taekia Glass.

Each semester, the focus of the classes changes, depending on the artists who are available to teach. As artists come to Art 180 to volunteer their time and serve as program assistants and leaders, they bring with them their own talents and specialties, so during different semesters there may be visual artists, musicians, or performance artists — but there’s always something new for the students to learn about.

For Garland, the volunteers who show up year after year for Art 180’s students demonstrate the best of what Richmond has to offer. “When push comes to shove we as a city always seem to help each other out,” said Garland. “When questioned if something is going to work, the city has a philosophy that, ‘yes, it will always work.’”

This year at the Really Big Show, a class called “Cut, Copy, Paste: Assembling Identity” will be presenting collages and other works that focus on the recognition of self identity through different mediums and experiences. Program Leader Raven Mata and Program Assistant Maurice Singleton created a space at Elkhardt-Thompson Middle School where kids can let their minds run wild and learn to safely express themselves and develop their identities in a creative setting.

For Mata, creating this space was a way to reach out to Richmond youth who might be in the same position she once was herself. “When I was growing up I had problems of not having a lot of people around to help me or my community, and seeing people forget about the kids in my community. When I finally got a chance to go to college, I realized ‘wow, I can be an artist. I didn’t know artists looked like me,’” said Mata. “While you’re out here working on galleries and sets, it’s one thing, but I felt like I needed to do more for my community. I just needed to give it back to the kids around me.”

For Singleton, it was about replicating a mentoring experience he had as a child for the next generation. “When I was a kid my mom put me in the Big Brothers/Big Sisters program,” said Singleton. “It opened my horizons. My ‘Big Brother’ changed my life and I learned a lot from him, so I’d love to do that in return to whoever I meet.”

Aside from the work these artists join with Art 180 to do in the middle and high school setting, they are also involved in teaching at the local juvenile detention centers. Mata and Singleton both have worked with students in these settings and couldn’t be happier that they chose to do this.

“You’re in the detention center with all these ‘grown men’ who are actually young kids, and kids at heart. The kids lose faith — they’re in the system, and they don’t see a way out,” said Singleton. “Being someone who was incarcerated and got back out and had to start over, it was one of those things that stood out. Sitting in a cell thinking, ‘I don’t know what tomorrow will look like,’ and ‘I don’t think I have a future,’ and then to be able to get out of that and come back to show those kids I was in the same situation, got my mind right and got to move past that.”

“The idea that people have of the kids in the detention centers being these bad kids is wrong,” said Mata. “There really isn’t much of a difference, they’re all loud and have something to say, but they’re all great kids who just want to have someone look out for them and talk to them. It’s about being able to go into these spaces and showing these majority black and brown kids that artists can look like them and there’s nothing stopping them from doing what they want to do and exploring those concepts.”

Students from the “Cut, Copy, Paste: Assembling Identity” class will be presenting works with a wide range of influence at the Really Big Show. Some students have focused their projects on their dreams of their future careers as bakers, astronauts, and celebrities, while others have used their work to express what it means to them to be a woman in the modern world, or how important it is to protect our planet.

Through this work, these students have learned that they can express themselves in safe ways that can influence others, and that even when things don’t go to plan, you can always find a new road to get where you want to go.

“The reformative nature of art is what we’re all about,” said Mata. “Giving kids some control at a time in their lives where this might be their only avenue of control. Their art can give them the power of self esteem, and they love it — regardless of the mess-ups and challenges.”

This is what the Art 180 program is all about — showing marginalized kids that they matter and that they can be a positive force in society through creative self expression.

“We start with 4th graders, give them a creative and safe space. And then they can join us in middle school and stick around through high school,” said Garland. “We see them for 10 years. In that way we can officially measure what it means to actually change direction 180 degrees. Even though we see change happen in 10 months, 10 years has a really clear marking point for change.”

“To me, Art 180 means family,” said Glass.

Come out to the streets surrounding the Atlas Gallery at 114 W. Marshall Street this Friday, June 7th, from 4 to 9 PM and experience the heartbeat of Richmond’s creative youth at work, and learn more about Art 180’s amazing work in the community. For more info, click here.

Photos courtesy Art 180

The Power Of The Simplest Of Actions

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This weekend, I attended Art 180, Performing Statistics, and RISE for Youth’s joint event, the Juvenile Justice Parade. It was organized by black and brown youth, all of whom have faced personal discrimination and many of whom have been personally sent through the school-to-prison-pipeline.

Chants spanned from “Fund education, not incarceration, invest in us, invest in us,” to as simple as, “Prisons don’t work!” As we marched, we each were holding at least one piece of artwork from formerly incarcerated youth, organized by Art 180, and we took their art to the streets with a moving march, literally and figuratively.

We started at a community center and ended at a park, marching through backstreets and backstreets only. I felt weird about being guided by the police car and chanting these things in the first person, but I had to set my awkwardness aside to focus on the bigger picture– the mobilization and the movement.

At the beginning and end we heard speeches (one by my friend Stephanie), songs, raps, poetry, and freestyle dances, all of which went to support a bigger cause. In the park there was an open mic after all of the scheduled speakers had gone, and I shared my poem, “Do Nothing,” with a feeling of hope.

It was absolutely essential that people would show up at this event, to participate, to engage, to learn. Despite my obvious suburban-whiteness, I was one of those people, and it mattered. Everyone who came made a difference at the event in one way or another.

Based on the title of this post, you may think my point will be that showing up is all you have to do, or that it is the simplest of actions, but neither are correct. To truly make a difference, you not only have to show up, you have to show up again, and again, and again, for whatever cause matters to you.

This seems like a lot, but it really isn’t. The simplest of actions, I will argue, is even simpler than attending an event. What can you do that will help you show up, get involved, and most importantly, spread your voice? Talking, listening, discussing. Its as simple as that. No matter who you are or what you do, you cannot change the world alone. But with a group, you can.

It recently came to my attention that we all, introverts and extroverts alike, need groups to thrive in activism, even if they’re just three other people. So, a whole year ago, I made an after-school club called TCLU (or the ACLU of Tuckahoe Middle School) and went through the bi-weekly craziness for a year (kudos to Ms McNew and Hayes). In the summer, it continued as the Teen Advocacy Group of Richmond, TAGRVA. It was a rocky rollercoaster, and not much of one at that, but eventually, through simply showing up again and again, it stabilized.

We have five people in total, and it doesn’t seem like much, but it is. My point is anyone can go anywhere if they continue to show up for and with other people. “Anyone” in that sentence is the word I had forgotten about for so long, but then we had an idea.

We decided we could expand TAG, so anyone could make their own. All they’d need is people, a time-frame, and a venue. Ours are: friends who live nearby, Wednesday evenings, and my house. It’s that simple, yet that important, to talk to other people with other backgrounds and ideas. If you are a teenager or know one who may be interested in forming a group, you can learn more at www.tagrva.com.

My point here is that even something as simple as frequently brainstorming actions with friends, or attending an event, really matters — your first step is to show up.

What I Think I See: Art 180 Teens Explore Identity and Mental Health

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Using poetry, drawing, and video work, Richmond teens in Art 180’s Atlas program delved into mental health care, wellness, and identity in their latest exhibit, “What I Think I See,” which opened earlier this month.

Featuring blind contour and gesture artwork created using observational drawing techniques, alongside poetry and video of step show performance art, the program aims to allow teens to express how they feel or struggles they are going through, serving as a creative outlet for them. 

The piece is a culmination of Art 180’s winter program with inspirations from the various classes they offer.

“There’s one class called the self-care step dance class where they talk about self-care and learn the art of step dancing,” Atlas Program Manager Michael Zetlan said. “And then there’s a poetry and painting class, then a drawing class.”

Zetlan said in the poetry and painting class, the kids wrote self-reflective poems about themselves and transcribed it into drawings in their class, whereas in the self-care step dance class, they explored  healthy living and what healthcare looks like between medication, being kind to yourself, and wellness, and then turned it into a video with the help of Jasmine Coles.

Zetlan said he hopes the kids build confidence through the program, and believes these teens, through the art, are getting to know their true selves.  

“We did have one teen who used the forum to come out to their parents, which was really moving for me,” he said. “They knew that he is gay, but they didn’t know he was trans,” he said. 

The poetry, according to Zetlan, is the most moving because there is so much passion revealed through the writing prompts. Whether it’s going to be on display for people or not, he said it’s crucial for these students to get their feelings out and be heard.  

“I can feel the kids getting more connected to themselves when I look at and read their poetry,” he said. “Especially when you see some of the separate fields and you think, oh, he’s not even paying attention, then you read the poem and realize they’re really paying attention. “That is touching to us as an organization and to me as a person.”

“What I Think I See” will be on display at ART 180, located at 114 W. Marshall St., through June 25.

 

 

VCU Sculpture Department, ICA, & Art 180 Collaborate to Create ‘Future Studio’ Program for Local Teens

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For the past 10 weeks, a group of Richmond high schoolers spent their Saturdays in VCU’s Sculpture Department doing everything from woodworking to welding. They are the first generation of Future Studio, a free semester-long program aimed at giving Richmond teens hands-on experience creating art with the department.

Future Studio is a partnership between VCU’s Department of Sculpture + Extended Media, VCU’s Institute for Contemporary Art (ICA) and Art 180, a Richmond based non-profit that provides art-related programs to young people living in challenging circumstances. The semester culminated in an art exhibition at Art 180’s gallery, a showcase made exclusively of student work.

Matt King, Chair of the VCU Sculpture Department, has been dreaming of this project for years. After receiving a grant from the VCU Division of Community Engagement, along with additional funding from the VCUart’s Dean’s Office, the project became a reality.

“This was conceived of as a way to reach out into the community and give back, to open our doors up to young artists who otherwise might not have a chance to work with the types of tools and materials we have here in the sculpture department,” King said.  

Some art programs in area high schools do not have many opportunities to experiment with sculpture, let alone resources as high-grade as the VCU facilities.

“Most high schools don’t offer any kind of strong program in three-dimensional art making, and this is true across the country,” King said. “Shop classes don’t exist so much in schools anymore, art classes rarely offer anything other than a perfunctory lesson on making something three-dimensional.”

Meanwhile, VCU has the number one ranked sculpture program in the country, and facilities that include a highly functioning woodshop, metal fabrication shop and a host of digital equipment.

The program is not limited exclusively to Richmond Public School students, instead, the applications are open to high school students from anywhere in the Richmond community. Ultimately, Future Studio accepted 15 students from 13 different high schools for this semester.

“It becomes this kind of melting pot for the city, for teens,” King said. “You have a student from St. Catherine’s working with a student from Meadowbrook and TJ. Having those students working together encourages a kind of dialogue that otherwise we wouldn’t be able to have.”

The Future Studio students do not require any prior experience, just a willingness to learn.

“We weren’t looking for students who had already studied sculpture or who had building skills or experience, we were really looking to hear their story, to find out who they were, with the idea that once they got here we would be starting from the ground up and they would learn together,” King said.

The students were given instruction on workshop safety and the intricacies of using hulking, intimidating equipment from the moving blades of a band saw to a plasma cutting torch. They watched demos in the wood shop with Leigh Cole, VCU instructor and shop technician, and were shown bending steel and welding by Abigail Lucien, adjunct VCU faculty, and metal tech.

Ian Gerson, a second-year MFA student in the VCU Sculpture Department, was the graduate TA for the program and spent his Saturdays these last few weeks with the students in the workshop.

“The kids got really excited about welding,” Gerson said. “Pretty much everybody’s project included some of the steel rod. They were just like lined up to weld, they were so hyped on that.”  

Without access to these resources and equipment at their high schools, its an exciting first-time opportunity for a lot of the students.

“There’s something exciting about the first time you build something that is stronger than you are,” King said.

But the program eclipses simply learning about tools and materials and physically making objects. The students participated in activities that helped to develop their sense of creative self.

“It goes much beyond building things. It really is a program that’s designed to inspire them to try to understand themselves and what’s important to them as young artists,” King said.

The head classroom instructor of the program and assistant professor in the VCU Sculpture + Extended Media department, Guadalupe Maravilla, brought in a variety of performance artists and undergraduate VCUarts students to teach activities to the high schoolers.

Gerson said these creative interludes were some of the most fun aspects of the program. One undergrad mentor entered the room on a skateboard. He left that way too, but not before leading the students in a raucous performance of a vocal symphony, where he played the conductor.

Mike Zetlan is the program manager for Atlas teen programs at Art 180, as well as the gallery manager. He calls the program a rousing success. “Trying to get that many kids to consistently show up on a Saturday is pretty hard,” he said.

Zetlan helped with the recruitment process, as well as eventually housing the exhibit in the Art 180 gallery space,  and said he was shocked at the turnout: 56 applicants for the 15 spot program.

He said that one of the most important aspects of the aptly named Future Studio is the way it looks to the future for its high school participants. It gave them a taste of the college experience, a chance to experience a renowned arts program and campus life. After the program, several of the eligible high schoolers applied to the VCU Arts program for the next year.  

The Future Studio art exhibition opened at RVA’s First Fridays last week, where the students showed up with family and friends despite the weekend’s ice and snow.  

“Even the staff has been really overwhelmed by how good this show is,” Zetlan said.  “I’ve gotten more feedback on the show than I have in a while…it feels a little bit more like a traditional gallery.”

King said that the program’s biggest criticism is that the students wished it would last longer. In fact, next semester the Saturday sessions have been increased from four hours to five. Applications for the spring semester of Future Studio are open now and will be closing on Jan. 18. The program is open to current sophomore, junior, and senior high school students. 

A closing reception for the exhibit is set for Jan. 26 from 6-8 p.m. at the Art 180 gallery.

Top Photo Credit: VCU Sculpture & Extended Media