New City Arts presents SHUCT, an exhibition of work made by students of April Fellow Dr. Lisa Woolfork and Tobiah Mundt at Welcome Gallery.
SHUCT class image courtesy of the artists
New City Arts' Welcome Gallery
114 3rd St. NE, Charlottesville, VA 22902
First Fridays
May 6, 5:00–7:30 PM
Free and open to the public. All ages welcome.
Gallery Hours
May 7, 10:00 AM–2:00 PM
Exhibition Events:
SHUCT students met weekly at Welcome Gallery for class
Covid-19 Visitor Policy
Masks are required at all times for all visitors, regardless of vaccination status. 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.
Sponsors
Lisa Woolfork's Fellowship is sponsored by Convoy. This program is supported by an Enriching Communities grant from the Charlottesville Area Community Foundation and Maurice Wallace and Pam Sutton-Wallace.
Exhibition Statement (courtesy of the artist)
Sally Hemings University Connecting Threads (SHUCT) is a community-engaged version of a previous incarnation, Sally Hemings University. SHUCT explores questions generated by re-framing the dominant narrative of “Mr. Jefferson’s University” (and universities generally) as primarily Jefferson’s property and by extension that of similarly entitled white men. Sally Hemings, an enslaved girl, exercised the full extent of her limited agency to craft a legacy of liberation for her descendants. Taking Hemings’ role as an enslaved seamstress seriously, Sally Hemings University Connecting Threads interrogates the ways in which aesthetic practices (art, craft gestures) can operate within and alongside liberatory strategies.
Through probing analysis of texts, cultural practices, and vernacular artifacts alongside art actions and craft gestures, SHUCT is a holistic course of study that continually asks questions about how modes of thought unfurl themselves to connect, build, and sever how we make meaning around education, art, learning, and liberation. We interrogate the boundaries between education and study, art and craft, cultural practices and cultural critique. SHUCT engages creative pedagogies to explore the curricular and cultural consequences of imagining the University (of Virginia, and others) through the lens of a marginalized enslaved Black woman. SHUCT collaborates with a variety of resources in the community, including Charlottesville Black Artist Collective, New City Arts, the Bridge PAI, and the Jefferson School African American Heritage center. SHUCT scrutinizes systems of dominance including overt and subtle forms of white supremacy, patriarchy, and capitalism.
Photo Credit: Derrick J. Waller
About the Artist (courtesy of the artist)
Lisa Woolfork (she/her) is a sewist, podcaster, community organizer and scholar. She is the founder of Black Women Stitch, the sewing group where Black Lives Matter. She is also the host/producer of Stitch Please, a weekly audio podcast that centers Black women, girls, and femmes in sewing. In the summer of 2017, she became a founding member of Black Lives Matter Charlottesville. This group protested against the white supremacist insurgency that had taken hold of the Virginia city. She organized in a variety of ways including nonviolent direct action, working with a bail fund for activists, sewing for a creative arts team, and co-founding a media collective. A fourth-generation sewing enthusiast, she has spoken about the connections between Black liberation and craft for the Smithsonian’s African American Craft Summit, the Modern Quilt Guild, the Center for Craft, Architectural Digest and more. Her work interrogates boundaries between art and craft, social justice and liberation. Practicing the unlikely but not unprecedented mix of needle arts and Black liberation, Woolfork’s sewing and quilting practice operates alongside her scholarly inquiry in the fields of Black literary and cultural studies.
As a creative arts practitioner, Woolfork is interested in the structural elements of stitching as a form meaning making and archiving the ephemera of Black aliveness (a la Kevin Quashie). Forecrafting is a new theory that she is currently working through. Inspired by and thinking alongside scholar-artists of radical possibility such as adrienne maree brown, Ashon Crawley, and Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Woolfork’s concept of “forecrafting” holds in tandem the simultaneity of the imminent future and the urgency of the now. Forecrafting is the process by which ancestral Black women needle/textile/fiber workers used their skills to create structures that would preserve (a measure) of freedom for their children and descendants, while serving as an archive of their own unfree experience. Forecrafting is a path towards liberation, a gesture executed in the meantime between now and eternity. Forecrafting is that which is created in crisis but also in faith that the future is broader and more open than the present or past.
Headshot courtesy of the artist.
Images by Derrick J. Waller Photography
