Image courtesy of the artist
New City Arts presents fallow, the 2024 New City Arts Fellowship exhibition featuring work by Brielle DuFlon, Eboni Bugg, Elena Yu, and M. Pittman.
New City Arts' Welcome Gallery
114 3rd St. NE, Charlottesville, VA 22902
First Friday Opening Reception
September 6 from 5-7:30PM; Artist talk at 6PM.
Free and open to the public. All ages welcome. Exhibition opening sponsored by Oakencroft Farm & Winery.
Gallery Hours
Wednesday-Saturday from 10AM-5PM
Visitor Guide
As you open the door to the gallery, pass by a translucent curtain hanging in the window to the right of the door. Printed on the curtain, against a cream backdrop, are sections of a dust jacket weaving alongside text. In the front of the gallery, encounter work by Brielle DuFlon and Eboni Bugg. Along the wall to the right and in the middle of the wall to the left, Brielle’s natural pigment paintings are hung in light wood frames and installed alongside trifold paper enclosures with natural pigment paint elements and fabric tabs tucked into loops nailed to the wall. Open these enclosures to find poetry exploring Brielle’s relationship to motherhood and grief. On left wall, near the large window, find an installation by Eboni Bugg. Three small shelves are installed around a long, narrow blue and cream colored quilt. The shelves hold a bowl of black eye peas, a vibrant orange marigold, and dried okra. Further into the gallery, Elena Yu’s work is exhibited along the center right wall and on a mannequin in the middle of the space. Two vibrant dust jacket weavings are hung in light wood rectangular frames. A duster jacket, made from fabric with the same print on the curtain, is installed on the mannequin. Continuing to the back of the gallery, explore Eboni Bugg’s recipe- and poetry-filled zines, displayed on a small white shelf, and read her poetry, printed on a long narrow paper with a faint background of plants. M. Pittman’s work fills the back of the gallery. Self-portraits and writing are projected on the back wall. Two grey chairs invite you to sit, and an installation of furniture includes a green velvet chair with dried flowers and textile elements and a table covered with a striped fabric and deep yellow runner. Flowers lie beneath the table and a jar off dried roses sits on top.
Please note: This exhibition contains some interactive elements as well as work that should not be handled. Please accompany young visitors as they explore the exhibition as work is within their reach. Garments installed on mannequins, the quilt in the front of the gallery, and the installation in the back of the gallery should not be touched. Visitors are invited to gently open and close the poetry enclosures installed on the front walls of the gallery, to explore the zines displayed on the small wall-mounted shelf near the back of the gallery, and to sit in the grey chairs to view photography.
Listen to the Exhibition Playlist 🎧
Sponsors & Partners
The 2024 New City Arts Fellowship is made possible with support from anonymous donors, the Anne & Gene Worrell Foundation, the Community Endowment Fund at the Charlottesville Area Community Foundation, Pam Sutton-Wallace and Maurice Wallace, and a partnership with The Bridge Progressive Arts Initiative.
About the 2024 Fellowship & Theme
The 2024 New City Arts Fellowship invited a select group of artists to make work responding to the annual theme, fallow, written by Fellowship Guest Curator, MaKshya Tolbert. Following an open call and competitive application process, this year’s Artist Fellows were selected by a community panel.
During month-long Fellowships that included a studio space grant—located at The Underground (The Bridge Progressive Arts Initiative)—and a stipend, these four artists considered their “fallow places”.“Take us” MaKshya invited artists, “to your fallow place—that geographical, ecological, diasporic, and/or interior site where land, life, or living as you know it has folded, fallen apart, gone barren, turned over. This open residency call emerges from worn earth, the aftermath of tobacco and wheat, and the wake of plantation life across and beyond Central Virginia. What happens if we meet at our wounds? What do we make, when repair is our imperative?” (Read the full theme here.)
Exhibition Statement by MaKshya Tolbert (2024 Guest Curator)
“I could believe the earth itself”
—Reginald Shepherd
What I find most gratifying about fallow: our artists opening up a space for recognition, for praise, for appreciating the value of time, seasons, and one’s inner life. When New City Arts invited me to send out a fellowship call, I was chasing down a way to keep up with what was thinning and turning in my own life. I needed a method for living in a fragile time. I needed other people.
Brielle DuFlon, Eboni Bugg, Elena Yu, and M. Pittman turned their attention toward some folded-over place in their lives. These artists tended for a time to their most sacred relationships, to dust jackets found in forgotten files at the UC Santa Barbara Library, to their body and hair as sites of transition, and toward felt senses of who we are or are not—in the service of opening a space to make art and make practice. As one artist shared—“to listen to my instincts and push myself.”
Each maker followed a fallow of their own, turning and turning on their changing “field” in search of some interior pace to drive a season living and making. I’m drawn to how touchy their attention is: curtains and quilts to be made, cultivating natural pigments, zine-making, self-portraiture by way of photography, cooking food from one’s garden, installing a (literal) room of one’s own.
Thank you for entering the Welcome Gallery (our shared field, for today), and for gathering in the aftermath (etymologically, “a second crop of grass grown on the same land”) of each artists’ practice.
Brielle, Eboni, Elena, and M. —Thank you for your cuttings.
Soon,
MaKshya
Located at 114 3rd St. NE on Charlottesville’s downtown pedestrian mall, New City Arts’ Welcome Gallery supports artists who live in the Charlottesville area. Welcome Gallery exhibitions and programs are made possible by generous sponsors, donors, and grants. Interested in sponsoring an exhibition? Connect with us!