A call went out from the Virginia Center for the Book in April of 2020, during the early horrors of COVID-19 and before a new tide of protest against racial injustice had launched. It was a call to writers and artists for print work responding to sexism, racism, and biases as seen and felt in our cultural landscape. This is an extension of Virginia Humanities work based on a two-year grant from the W.K. Kellogg Foundation to heighten Virginia’s efforts in Changing the Narrative with exhibition sets made possible with additional support from the Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation.
During this time, those markers of historical injustice in our cultural landscape became the focal points of protest and iconoclasm by far more than artists and writers, forcing an ongoing reconsideration of inclusion amidst the heroes and narratives we teach, encounter, and interpret in our public spaces. The rapid shift prompted changes in long-standing public words (such as institutional, memorial, and sports team names) and public spaces (statues and artworks).
These trends reframed the importance of this call to artists even while massive social changes were in progress. The work we received in response, consequently, marks the shift already underway and gives voice to the human encounters in the new work.
Art is a testing ground for complex feelings and experiences as they are first thought, shaped, and shared. As readers and viewers, we test our own experiences and biases against an artwork, in a characteristically human attempt to discern what is true. So we at Virginia Center for the Book offer these words and images as overlays to this cultural moment, as an opportunity for genuine seeing and listening to the ways our fellow Virginians are perceiving public spaces and public expression.
The title for this ongoing collection—Voice-Overs—offers in the artworks the opportunity to see the same spaces we inhabit through different eyes and to hear of them through voices and minds that may not resemble our own. Beyond this digital exhibit which all are welcome to visit and share, we anticipate the physical print works will be displayed and exhibited in venues throughout the Commonwealth at a time when gathering safely and the chance to see these works in person makes sense. We hope for the time being, viewers and listeners can enter this digital exhibit in the hope of a return to our living together in a revived public landscape, imbued with empathy and truth-telling.
All panels are labeled for the visually impaired, with full text added.
A limited number of additional copies of the following broadsides are available for purchase in support of the next public leg of this project in 2021:
• Allison Bell text “In this Shrine of the South”
• Rita Dove “Pedestrian Crossing, Charlottesville”
• Luisa A. Igloria “You Can’t Talk to Us Like That”
• Kevin McFadden “Often”
• Erika Meitner “I’ll Remember You As You Were Not As What You’ll Become”
• Kiki Petrosino “Essay in Architecture”
• Brian Teare “Of Feeling (Sonnet)”
• David Winship “Whitewashed”
To Purchase Broadsides Visit Virginia Center for the Book’s Online Storefront
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![IN THIS “SHRINE OF THE SOUTH,” with the meccas of Stonewall Jackson Memorial Cemetery* and Lee Chapel and Mausoleum, with seemingly every stretch of pavement named for white heroes – who were also slaveholders – Jefferson, Washington, Jackson, Lee – in a city that was designed as a white space and that has offered little harbor to African Americans, a small claim has been struck… UNKNOWN AFRICAN AMERICAN WOMAN DIED CA 1800’S EXHUMED DURING CONSTRUCTION OF ROCKBRIDGE COUNTY COURT HOUSE IN 2008 REINTERRED MAY 19, 2019 Her new gravesite asserts her humanity, encouraging us to envision not anonymous bones but – to paraphrase Ta-Nehisi Coates – … a particular, specific woman, whose mind was active as your own, whose range of feeling was as vast as your own; who may have preferred the way the light fell in one particular spot in the woods, who enjoyed fishing where the water eddies in a nearby stream, who loved her mother in her own complicated way, thought her sister talked too loud, had a favorite cousin, a favorite season, who exceled at dressmaking and knew, inside herself, that she was as intelligent and capable as anyone. [colophon] Text from Washington & Lee University Professor Alison Bell’s forthcoming book, The Vital Dead: Making Meaning, Identity, and Community through Cemeteries (University of Tennessee Press, 2021), reprinted with her permission. Text includes paraphrase of a quote from Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates (Spiegel & Grau, 2015). Digitally altered artwork by Orson Lowell (1896, in the public domain). Designed, letterpress printed and hand-colored by Bonnie Bernstein in a limited edition at Virginia Center for the Book in Charlottesville. November 2020. * In September 2020, Stonewall Jackson Memorial Cemetery was renamed Oak Grove Cemetery by the Lexington City Council.](https://vabookcenter.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/7/2020/11/VO-Bernstein-300-756x1024.jpg)
“IN THIS “SHRINE OF THE SOUTH,” Text by Allison Bell — Design by Bonnie Bernstein -
“Hot July” by Zyahna Bryant — Image by Hannah Thomas Clark -
“Pedestrian Crossing, Charlottesville” by Rita Dove – Design and Block Cut Illustration by Josef Beery -
“Passage,”– Poem and Design by Lyall Harris -
“You Can’t Talk to Us Like That” by Luisa A. Igloria – Image by Ramona Martinez -
“Mature Black Woman Seeks…” – Design & Artwork by Veronica Jackson – 1 of 3 -
“Mature Black Woman Seeks…” – Design & Artwork by Veronica Jackson – 2 of 3 -
“Mature Black Woman Seeks…” – Design & Artwork by Veronica Jackson – 3 of 3 -
“Pocahontas” – Desidn & Print by Aimee Joyaux -
Poem and Letterpress Block Print by Ramona Martinez -
“flash point” by Irene Mathieu—Image by Sam Gray -
“Mounted Soldiers, Washington DC” by Charlotte Matthews—Image by Liz Zhang -
![“Often” Poem and Design by Kevin McFadden Often Mind like a cellphone (often ON) (as often OFF), I like that spell means magic— like what that holds for spelling. Attention shoppers: what spell's binding? All along the grocery aisle lo means low, nu means new. Ol' (lo backwards) is old already but un- (nu backwards) is not. I've hit a nu lo. Often I sing (one lo from losing) one mind. Little poem, so easy on surfaces, tough as bronze, tell us, how did you know the moment? One nu from the monument. We need reminding occasionally [sweat the indefinite adverbs: always, never, rarely, sometimes, seldom, once in a while, constantly, typically, hardly ever...] —we need to be reminded. Not re as in "back" but re like "again"— we need to retrain our trains of thought, melt down that past ensemble cast—recast!— burn out the fine whites lines still stitched around the thin blue lines, the veiled red lines. And let’s call in art to jump-start the arson, we’ll need timelines with flex, some days to let our heaviest mental metals soften. Set that reminder. Flame me. Often. Take a monument apart: how memory proves malleable. Martyr. Myth. Some last, lost cause. Hero. Horse. Tenderhearted text upon the dead. Take a monument apart (uncapital, unmeld, unspell) and replay the ways men mount their monument—then where do we get off? That train ends at Nomentum, a town only found on antiquity’s map, now slang for “going nowhere.” But our cells know that track. Play it back, break it down: numen, nomen, omen, neon and noun and note and tome; so why not ring mom (or tone the tune you groove on?); not one nut out to mute (en un mot) but u and me together. That could spell nu moment.](https://vabookcenter.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/7/2020/11/VO-McFadden-300-755x1024.jpg)
“Often” – Poem and Design by Kevin McFadden -
“I’ll Remember You As You Were, Not As What You’ll Become” by Erika Meitner—Image by Michael Powers -
“Essay in Architecture” by Kiki Petrosino — Wood Engraving by Laura Pharis -
“Downtown Tour” by Gregory Orr—Image by Lana Lambert -
“Of feeling (sonnet)” by Brian Teare—Image by Kevin McFadden -
“Whitewashed” – Poem, Image and Printing by David Winship -
“(The Black Man) He put up the monument…”
Image by Sanjay Suchak – Design and hand printing by Sanjay Suchak and Garrett Queen -
“American Multitude” from the poetry collection Demos: An American Multitude by Benjamin Naka-Hasebe Kingsley – Art for the plate by Esther Hi’ilani Candari. -
“Georgia: Carr’s Beach” by Joanne V. Gabbin -
“Utopia/ Nowhere” by Danielle Beazer Oubrasky appears !n the poetry collection Drift Migration by Ashland Poetry Press (2021). -
the moon considers the body” – Aran Donovan – Images drawn for plate by Lana Lambert
![IN THIS “SHRINE OF THE SOUTH,” with the meccas of Stonewall Jackson Memorial Cemetery* and Lee Chapel and Mausoleum, with seemingly every stretch of pavement named for white heroes – who were also slaveholders – Jefferson, Washington, Jackson, Lee – in a city that was designed as a white space and that has offered little harbor to African Americans, a small claim has been struck… UNKNOWN AFRICAN AMERICAN WOMAN DIED CA 1800’S EXHUMED DURING CONSTRUCTION OF ROCKBRIDGE COUNTY COURT HOUSE IN 2008 REINTERRED MAY 19, 2019 Her new gravesite asserts her humanity, encouraging us to envision not anonymous bones but – to paraphrase Ta-Nehisi Coates – … a particular, specific woman, whose mind was active as your own, whose range of feeling was as vast as your own; who may have preferred the way the light fell in one particular spot in the woods, who enjoyed fishing where the water eddies in a nearby stream, who loved her mother in her own complicated way, thought her sister talked too loud, had a favorite cousin, a favorite season, who exceled at dressmaking and knew, inside herself, that she was as intelligent and capable as anyone. [colophon] Text from Washington & Lee University Professor Alison Bell’s forthcoming book, The Vital Dead: Making Meaning, Identity, and Community through Cemeteries (University of Tennessee Press, 2021), reprinted with her permission. Text includes paraphrase of a quote from Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates (Spiegel & Grau, 2015). Digitally altered artwork by Orson Lowell (1896, in the public domain). Designed, letterpress printed and hand-colored by Bonnie Bernstein in a limited edition at Virginia Center for the Book in Charlottesville. November 2020. * In September 2020, Stonewall Jackson Memorial Cemetery was renamed Oak Grove Cemetery by the Lexington City Council.](https://www.vabookcenter.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/7/2020/11/VO-Bernstein-300.jpg)
![“Often” Poem and Design by Kevin McFadden Often Mind like a cellphone (often ON) (as often OFF), I like that spell means magic— like what that holds for spelling. Attention shoppers: what spell's binding? All along the grocery aisle lo means low, nu means new. Ol' (lo backwards) is old already but un- (nu backwards) is not. I've hit a nu lo. Often I sing (one lo from losing) one mind. Little poem, so easy on surfaces, tough as bronze, tell us, how did you know the moment? One nu from the monument. We need reminding occasionally [sweat the indefinite adverbs: always, never, rarely, sometimes, seldom, once in a while, constantly, typically, hardly ever...] —we need to be reminded. Not re as in "back" but re like "again"— we need to retrain our trains of thought, melt down that past ensemble cast—recast!— burn out the fine whites lines still stitched around the thin blue lines, the veiled red lines. And let’s call in art to jump-start the arson, we’ll need timelines with flex, some days to let our heaviest mental metals soften. Set that reminder. Flame me. Often. Take a monument apart: how memory proves malleable. Martyr. Myth. Some last, lost cause. Hero. Horse. Tenderhearted text upon the dead. Take a monument apart (uncapital, unmeld, unspell) and replay the ways men mount their monument—then where do we get off? That train ends at Nomentum, a town only found on antiquity’s map, now slang for “going nowhere.” But our cells know that track. Play it back, break it down: numen, nomen, omen, neon and noun and note and tome; so why not ring mom (or tone the tune you groove on?); not one nut out to mute (en un mot) but u and me together. That could spell nu moment.](https://www.vabookcenter.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/7/2020/11/VO-McFadden-300.jpg)
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