New City Arts

newcityarts.org

New City Arts is a community arts non-profit committed to cultivating new audiences for the arts, supporting the careers of local artists, and supporting creative placemaking in Charlottesville, VA. We do this through a number of arts and community programs including Welcome Gallery, an exhibition space on the downtown mall; classes, workshops, and artwork exchanges; an artist residency; and micro-grant programs. We also coordinate a creative placemaking initiative with The Haven (a day shelter and housing organization) and serve as a community partner for CreativeMornings, a monthly lecture series for the creative community.

In March of 2020, we closed our gallery doors for what we thought would be a long two weeks. We had a rough plan in place: organize some files, do a little deep clean, plan ahead for the year’s (totally normal) programming. As it became more clear that we were entering a pandemic and that it would have a lasting and significant impact on our community and world, we began to reschedule exhibitions and cancel events and shift our focus to thinking about what we could do. In June 2020, arts scholar Diane Ragsdale wrote to arts and culture organizations, encouraging them to reject an approach that led with scarcity. She said these organizations should approach this time with “deep listening and moral imagination” by working in “deep collaboration with artists, “since artists “provide us with the means to share with one another what it means to be human; they give us tools to create joy and make meaning; they create scaffolds of learning all manner of things including, and through, an artistic practice; and they are great cultural translators, facilitators, mediators, and guides.” At New City Arts, we have worked to prioritize operating with “deep listening and moral imagination,” empowering artists with the platform and funding they have told us is necessary to continue their creative practice.

On March 20, we partnered with The Bridge to co-found the C'ville Emergency Relief Fund for Artists with seed funding from The FUNd at CACF to immediately disburse $300 to 20 artists in need and redistribute 100% of any additional Emergency Fund donations received. Thanks to the generosity of the photographers (Ezé Amos, Sarah Cramer Shields, Kristen Finn, and John Robinson) behind the Cville Porchraits Project, community members, The Front Porch, and Sam Abell, we were able to distribute over $50,000 to over 170 Charlottesville-area artists who had lost income sources due to the pandemic,

SOUP: TV Dinner Edition

As the days turned into weeks and months, we followed the crowds to Zoom and were delighted to find that it is possible to cultivate community and welcome in a digital space. There were late evening chats between artists sharing about their work; multisession poetry workshops for teens facilitated by Iréne Mathieu and Valencia Robin; and monthly CreativeMornings events led by our new host, Kori Price. The 7th annual Artist Exchange went virtual with A.D. Carson, Brielle DuFlon, Christina Flowers, David Joo, Federico Cuatlacuatl, LaRissa Rogers, Liz Zhang, Marley Nichelle, Stacey Evans, and Vanthi Nguyen connecting via Zoom and exchanging work made for one another via contactless delivery and pick-up in January 2021. Even our public dinner series and grantmaking event went virtual. At Charlottesville SOUP: TV Dinner Edition, attendees picked up a Pearl Island dinner to enjoy at home and came together via Zoom to award Charlottesville poet Myra Anderson a $3,710 grant to self-publish a poetry book (Reclaimed Roots) about her enslaved ancestors at Monticello & the University of Virginia.

Not everything went digital, though. In the fall of 2020, our kid’s program, New City Arts & Crafts, returned...by mail! We launched a New City Arts Swap in September. In this one-to-one exchange, we paired 25 kids with 13 artists. Each artist made a drawing, painting, or collage inspired by each child's original artwork, and they sent the work to each other by mail.

The big question continued to be how we could use our space to safely support artists and make viewing artwork in-person accessible for the community. While Welcome Gallery was closed to the public from mid-March through July, we rescheduled previously planned exhibitions and invited Mara Sprafkin and Amdane Sanda to exhibit quarantine drawings and large paintings through our storefront window. In August, we re-opened to the public through private, in-person appointments (masks required) featuring month-long solo exhibitions by Tobiah Mundt, Carol Barber, Brielle DuFlon, and Isabella Whitfield.

We heard from artists three specific needs: financial support, studio space, and exhibition space. In Fall 2020, New City Arts announced a new fellowship for artists. Artists selected by a selection committee made up of Mauruce Wallace, Sarah Boyts Yoder, and Horace Ballard each received one month in 2021 to transform Welcome Gallery into their studio space as well as a $400 honorarium, a stocked pantry with favorite snacks, and an opportunity to engage the community with their work at the conclusion of their fellowship. Ashon Crawley, LaRissa Rogers, Somé Louis, Joumana Altallal, and Tobiah Mundt worked on projects related to the theme Next Breath: History, Hate, Possibility written by Maurice Wallace. This call for proposals invited artists working to address the ongoing impacts of systemic racism and the COVID-19 pandemic to propose creative projects that deeply and imaginatively related to breath as the essence of life and freedom.

In recent months, New City Arts has shifted back to monthly exhibitions and has even held a few (small) in-person events. If you were to come by Welcome Gallery on October 1, 2021, you would find an exhibit featuring sculpture by Marisa Williamson, Sandy Williams IV, and Patrick Costello. Maureen or Lindsey would greet you at the door and we would smile hard with our eyes over our masks. We would probably wave or elbow bump and keep some distance between us. And then we would talk about the artwork and about our families and our favorite new take-out spot.