New City Arts presents through this, to that, the 2025 New City Arts Fellowship exhibition featuring work by Ava Burke, Ben Frye, I.F. Gonzales, and Sophia Chaudhry.
New City Arts' Welcome Gallery
114 3rd St. NE, Charlottesville, VA 22902
First Friday Opening Reception
September 5 from 5-7:30 PM
Free and open to the public. All ages welcome.
Gallery Hours
Wednesday-Saturday from 10AM-5PM
Sponsors & Partners
The Fellowship is supported by the Elizabeth Firestone Graham Foundation.
About the 2025 Fellowship & Theme
The 2025 New City Arts Fellowship invited a select group of artists to make work responding to the annual theme, through this, to that, written by Fellowship Guest Curator, Eboni Bugg (read the full theme below). Following an open call and competitive application process, this year’s Artist Fellows were selected by a community panel.
Inspired by water’s movement and transformation, these four artists considered their own movement “through this, to that” (as written by Lucille Clifton in her poem “blessing the boats”). During month-long Fellowships that included a studio space grant—located at Visible Records—and a stipend, Fellowship artists engaged with this theme through photography, interactive sculpture, installation, and assemblage touching upon themes of grief, joy, perpetual transformation, generative destruction, and displacement.
Fellowship Curatorial Theme by Eboni Bugg (2025 Guest Curator)
Water has been described as mother, matrix, and medium. It is our first home and our constant teacher. We are the miracle that exists because of its capacity to nourish and to heal. Its ebbs and flows remind us that change is inevitable and its surface holds a mirror to the truth of who we are. For many, water is a haven and the only container large enough to hold the accumulated weight of living. There is a reason water shapes our most sacred rites - it is the substrate of our tears and a source of deep solace.
And yet, for the first time in discernible history, human activity has altered the balance of how water flows on our planet. This continuous movement of moisture on, above, and below the earth’s surface connects every living thing and stretches across borders to link communities and nations. To be alive now is to know that any just and imaginable future depends on our capacity to move beyond our usual paths of comprehension toward new ways of being. It isn’t simply survival at stake, but the essence of how we orient ourselves to our bodies, relationships, and the natural world of which we are a part.
New City Arts invites artists of all mediums, practices, and ways of knowing to meet at the shore of our dawning awareness to contemplate how we move “through this to that.” I ask: Where are we going? What are the vessels and conveyances that will transport us? How will we know when we arrive? Taking cues from the movement of water, fellows are encouraged to reimagine and reinterpret the processes of evaporation, condensation, precipitation, and sublimation as embodied acts of radical transformation.
Read the Lucille Clifton poem, “blessing the boats,” here.
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!