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.
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.
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
Visitor Guide
Works by Sophia Chaudhry, Ben Fye, Ava Burke, and I.F. Gonzales are intermingled throughout the gallery space. At the front of the gallery, visitors find an installation by Sophia Chaudhry. A multi-channel film plays on five small, boxy TVs angled at varying heights in the gallery’s front right corner. In the film, Sophia undertakes the process of tanning an animal hide. The white dress Sophia wears in the film hangs from the ceiling in the center of the installation and animal hides are hung on a fleshing beam used during the tanning process. More of Sophia’s work—leather-wrapped door handles and photographs of their installation on doors around Charlottesville—are found on the left and right gallery walls. Along these walls, visitors also encounter Ben Frye’s framed black and white photographs. Displayed in handmade wood frames, the works vary in size and offer a glimpse into some of Charlottesville’s communal spaces—past and present, vacant and thriving. Ava Burke’s winding installation of grease pencil and oil pastel drawings runs through the center of the gallery space, inviting the viewer to meander through them. The drawings, which document a drive around Houston’s 610 Loop, are mounted on linked aluminum plates and suspended from the ceiling. At the back of the gallery’s left side, the drawings loop on the screen of a slide projector positioned on a white pedestal. On the gallery’s partial wall, to the right of the slide projector, hang two works by I.F. Gonzales. On the left, viewers see 2010 Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill footage printed on a partially melted polyester Pride flag. On the right, they see a polyester trans flag with layered watercolor portraits of Jennifer Laude, a transgender Filipina woman who was killed by an active-duty US Marine in 2014. Suspended from the ceiling in front of these works is another flag—comprised of acrylic, pride merchandise, mesh bags, and plastic ephemera covering a California state flag. An altar stands in front of the flag. On it, reproduction of a Molotov cocktail, brick, and water from the Christopher Street Piers are arranged with dried flowers and donated items atop lace draped over a white pedestal. Names sourced from the Remembering Our Dead/Transgender Day of Remembrance project are written on a flag spilling out of the glass bottle. At the foot of the altar, a small red suitcase stands open. Visitors are invited to provide an offering, to be burned after the exhibition’s closing.
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. Visitors are invited to gently touch the fur pelt at the front of the exhibition as well as the leather on the wall-mounted handles throughout the exhibition (please do not pull on the handles). Visitors are also encouraged to leave offerings in the red suitcase at the base of I.F. Gonzales’s altar. All other work in this exhibition should not be touched.
This exhibition explores themes of grief, joy, perpetual transformation, generative destruction, and displacement. References are made to the killing of transgender people and to environmental catastrophe. Footage of the animal hide tanning process is included in the film located at the front of the gallery.
Exhibition Statement by Eboni Bugg (2025 Guest Curator)
“You start out with one thing, end up with another
And nothing is like it used to be, not even the future”
-Rita Dove
When I first wrote the fellowship exhibition call, I felt the sensation of being on a precipice - individually and collectively. In times of uncertainty and change, I often seek solace in healing waters and rely on artists and their work for meaning-making. Through this, to that” was a primal call for wisdom, courage, and inquiry about what it means to be human in this moment and how we will arrive at the next. I recently spent time with colleagues engaging in deep discussion and embodied practices focused on radical imagination, ecological integrity, cultural renewal, and inner life. All upon a tiny island held in place by the safety and sanctity of the sea, where we reaffirmed the contours of our interconnectedness and interdependence.
Similarly, the artists in this exhibition have metabolized their questions, grief, rage, and joy in ways that hold a mirror to humanity without losing their particularity. What results is the sublimation of materiality: something transformed, but not lost. This is a compelling collection that invites engagement through multiple senses, yet also creates space for the lacunae, the absences that remind us of what is at stake, what is missing, and perhaps, what is to come. Like water taking the shape of its container, each of the works in the exhibition creates a tiny world in which to pour oneself and be reformed - at times in celebration, and others, a critique of the wider world around us.
A deep bow of gratitude to Ava, Ben, I.F., and Sophia for ushering us through this, to that.
Sponsors & Partners
The Fellowship is supported by the Elizabeth Firestone Graham Foundation.
Thank you to this year's generous Fellowship partners who provided artists with a Pro Camera discount, The Art Box & Creative Framing discount, a discounted Infinite Repeats membership, free membership to the Cville Tool Library, and free access to communal studios like a woodshop, darkroom, clay, and fiber spaces at VisArts.
This month’s exhibition opening is sponsored by William Taylor and the Taylor Group of Truist Investment Services.
Listen to the Exhibition Playlist 🎧
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!