Image courtesy of the artist
From August 4-24, New City Arts presents Shade is a place: relief is my form, a clearing with MaKshya Tolbert. The culmination of their Spring 2023 New City Arts Research Residency, this installation includes poetry and pottery, and extends beyond the gallery walls with ongoing Shade Walks.
New City Arts' Welcome Gallery
114 3rd St. NE, Charlottesville, VA 22902
First Fridays
August 4 from 5-7:30PM; Artist talk at 6PM.
Free and open to the public. All ages welcome. Treats generously sponsored by MarieBette Café and Bakery.
Gallery Hours
Wednesday-Saturday from 10AM-5PM
Exhibition Events
Shade Walk: a poem-tour and Downtown Mall tree walk with MaKshya Tolbert: Every Tuesday and Friday at 9AM from July 7-Aug 25
Covid-19 Visitor Policy
Please do not come to Welcome Gallery if you have been exposed to COVID-19, are experiencing symptoms of COVID-19, or have been advised to isolate or quarantine.
Listen to the Exhibition Playlist 🎧
About the Artist (courtesy of the artist)
MaKshya Tolbert recently found their way back to Virginia. She serves on the Charlottesville Tree Commission and is a 2022-23 Lead to Life Curatorial Fellow and New City Arts 2023 Spring Artist-in-Residence. She is currently an MFA Candidate in Creative Writing at the University of Virginia. In their free time, MaKshya is elsewhere— where Eddie S. Glaude, Jr. calls, 'that physical or metaphorical place that affords the space to breathe.'
Exhibition Statement (courtesy of the artist)
Dear all of us in need of relief:
Shade is a place: relief is my form is a dwelling, a provision of relief. A clearing-in-training, where gathering is our only charge. A rendering of ecological attention and poetics, with shade as my compass.
These poems and threads are the confluence of ecosocial attention and black interiority amid shifting climate and unsteady atmospheric ground that jumps the scales of our interior, communal, and state-sanctioned lives. The Mall’s trees and their conditions gave me a language to navigate shared livability and self-recovery in the wake of slavery and ecological disaster, anti-blackness, and extractive capitalism.
Shade is a place: relief is my form interrupts the duress at the pace of relief. Shade offers a place where I can try, a place to “begin again…to find out again where I am and what I must do. A place where I can stop and do nothing in order to start again.”(1) Poetry, pottery, shade walks, mutual relief. These are my instruments, my way of wearing both language and the ground.
At the root of the word ‘tree’ is *deru–, meaning solid, steadfast. Shade is a place: relief is my form gave me the time, space, and sociality to both build an intimacy with our city’s trees and seek poetic forms for my ecological practice, at a steady pace.
Our time here is made of material. Wood, bark, clay, fire, water, leaves, paper, ink. Language, relief, the time between us. My time with all of you, our shade walks, writing, coiling pots as a contemplative practice, rewriting, hand-tearing the paper for these poems, shading the gallery floor in English Ivy so we might wear our city for a while.
I wanted to put up a four-week tent, a green canopy that could hold us all as the trees turn and as we turn, too. A place to let life live. Two years trying to wear the ground and this is my note on method. (2)
Soon,
MaKshya L. Tolbert
—————
James Baldwin
Saidiya Hartman
Photos by Kristen Finn.
This exhibition is the culmination of a project of the New City Arts Research Residency Program. The New City Arts Spring Residency was supported by the Batten Family Fund at CACF, the Anne & Gene Worrell Foundation, and Lead To Life. The exhibition opening is sponsored by MarieBette Café and Bakery.
Thank you to Lead To Life, the Virginia Center for the Book, The Charlottesville Tree Commission, Steven Gaines and Charlottesville Parks & Recreation, Muddy Creek Pottery and the 2022 and 2023 woodfire crews, Garrett Queen, Kevin McFadden at Virginia Center for the Book, The School for Inclement Weather, Kiki Petrosino, Brian Teare, Lisa Russ Spaar, and Rita Dove of the UVA Creative Writing Department, UVA Sustainability, Chris Minot, Kendall Allison, Kristen Finn, Rachel McGinnis, Mary Miller, Kellyn Kusyk, Kalle Sparrman, Rowan Hollins, Drew Newitt, Madison Green and special thanks to the community and care at Petite Marie Bette and Jack Brown’s.
