Arts This Week: MaKshya Tolbert and the 2024 New City Arts Fellowship Exhibition, fallow
By Sage Tanguay
The New City Arts 2024 Fellowship will present their exhibition fallow on Friday, September 6, at 5pm.
Sage Tanguay: For Arts This Week, we spoke to the Fellowship’s Guest Curator, MaKshya Tolbert.
MaKshya Tolbert: I am MaKshya Tolbert, and I’m a poet living in Charlottesville. At New City Arts, I am the guest curator for this year’s fellowship season. The fellowship here invites four artists to each spend a month in their creative practice. They have studio spaces at The Bridge, and the season culminates in a September group show. The show will go up on the 6th and will come down on the 25th. We have four artists, many who have more than one medium, and so what we see are a lot of artists working in both paper and poetry, or working in poetry and painting or photography and installation. So it’s a lot of material. It’s a lot of fiber and weaving and natural dye cultivation.
ST: I asked MaKshya to tell us more about this show’s theme of fallow.
MT: fallow is, in many ways, an agricultural term. You know, land that is turned, that is folded, that is plowed but not planted. I’m a poet. I was curious about if I invite you to find a place in your life that is plowed but not planted, what could that look like? And so you have four artists who found a place, whether it is Library Archives, whether that place is a relationship that is no longer, or is something ecological or material or relational, four different people followed their attempt to look at what has turned and make something.
I don’t think I understood how much potentiality the theme would come with. I really imagined the artists in this cohort letting go of something. I didn’t really imagine that there would be so much making, so much aliveness and that something that is fallow can actually allow for so much. You know, as a poet, my work is primarily about very stressed-out shade trees. To walk up and down the mall and to watch these trees that are kind of on their way out, you know, and to watch these trees come down. And what’s coming to mind is a quote by the biologist EO Wilson, who says, “every corpse is an ecosystem.” And so that kind of transition out that makes way for something livable is exactly what I was hoping fallow could be an invitation for too.
I’ve just been thinking a lot you know, about the fragility of things, and feeling so grateful that people wanted to gather and come to a place that is about acknowledging that transition. And I think you walk up and down the downtown mall where new City Arts is gallery space and studio is and you’re just watching things in the middle of themselves. And you’re watching trees turning. You’re watching businesses turning. You’re watching your own relationships changing, you know, and I think, to watch the four artists here build a formal language for what’s already happening around us, I think it’ll help us love each other. You know, I think a lot about maybe this kind of ecological and creative attention can actually just keep us connected as things change. I’m just most excited about the fact that rather than asking people to bring anything, I ask people to live their lives and share something from that. And I really can say with real gratitude that I don’t know what will be there.
More information about fallow and the New City Arts Fellowship can be found at newcityarts.org.
Arts This Week is supported by the UVA Arts Council and Piedmont Virginia Community College. PVCC Arts presents a rich array of dance music, theater and visual arts programming. Learn more at pvcc.edu
