COMMUNITY
OUTREACH
Our private donor and grant-funded education program, Community Outreach, allows us to partner with other area nonprofits to provide supplemental access to the arts within our community. We work with artists, musicians, and performers from the local area as well as artists from outside of our community to create specialized art experiences for our partners. We also provide additional free community workshops through our partnership with the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts.
Over the past 26 years, the Community Outreah program has served:
Orange County Public Library
Boys and Girls Club of Orange
Dogwood Village Senior Living
Dogwood Village Health and Rehab
Orange County Senior Center
Madison Senior Center
In addition to these, we also partner with Orange County Public Schools on educational opportunities that are connected to educational Standards of Learning and are both age-appropriate and content-relevant.
Is your nonprofit organization interested in working with us? Please submit an inquiry form.
OUTREACH
ARTISTS + ACTIVITIES
ALEX CATON
Alex made her home and spread her roots in Gordonsville, Virginia when she came to the University of Virginia to pursue a Doctorate in Anthropology. Her studies may have brought her to the Commonwealth, but it was the countryside and strong musical community that kept her here. Having lived, taught and performed in other centers for traditional music, including Upstate New York and Asheville, NC, Alex felt that the heartbeat of old time or Appalachian music (a direct descendent of Irish music which was an early passion of Alex’s) pulsed stronger in the foothills of Virginia than anywhere else. Within the first year of arriving in Central Virginia, Alex was an integral member of the traditional music community and also an ambassador and liaison between the worlds of Irish and Old Time music.
Alex provides music lessons and performances to senior centers throughout the region as part of her work with our Community Outreach program. She is also the mentor for our Spring 2024 Music Mentorship. For more information about the artist, visit http://alexcaton.com/
PAST PROJECTS
2020-PRESENT
CERAMICS STUDIO
RESIDENCY 2024
Abed Elmajid Shalabi (b. 1991) is a Palestinian Israeli artist living and working in Richmond, Virginia. During Spring 2024, he worked and maintained his studio at The Arts Center in Orange, creating new artworks for this exhibition and sharing his skills with community members. He recently completed an artist residency at the International Studio & Curatorial Program in New York City, and was awarded a Visual Arts Fellowship from the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts for 2024-2025. His residency culminated in an exhibition of new works entitled ‘When Tomorrow Arrives We Will Love Life’ at The Arts Center in Orange
Shalabi joined the Skowhegan School for Painting and Sculpture (2022); he holds an MFA in Sculpture from Virginia Commonwealth University (2021) and a BFA in Fine Arts from The Berlin University of Arts and Shenkar College in Tel Aviv (2019). Shalabi was awarded the Virginia Museum Of Fine Arts Graduate Fellowship (2020-2021), The Paul F. Miller Graduate Scholarship in Sculpture (2020). He was awarded grants from Artis, United States Artist, and the Robert Weil Family Foundation. Shalabi has exhibited work at Center for Contemporary Arts, Tel Aviv; Hamiltonian Artists, Washington DC; C24 Gallery, SARA’S Gallery, and NARS Foundation Gallery, all in New York; and Vox Populi, Philadelphia; OCCCA, California; and The Anderson, Virginia. For more information about the artist, visit https://abedelmajidshalabi.com/
‘TENDING TO LIFE’
LARISSA ROGERS
LaRissa Rogers was raised in Ruckersville, VA. She holds an MFA in New Genres from University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) and a BFA in Painting from Virginia Commonwealth University. Rogers has exhibited and performed internationally as institutions including Frieze Seoul (Korea), Documenta 15 (Germany), Fields Projects (NY), Super Dakota (Brussels), M+B Gallery (CA), 1708 Gallery (VA), Black Ground (Colombia), LACE (CA), Grand Central Art Center (CA), and the Museum of Contemporary Art (VA) among others. She received the Visual Arts fellowship at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts (2022), the Black Artists and Designers Guild Creative Futures Grant (2022), and The Fine Arts Work Center Fellowship (2023-2024). Rogers attended the BEMIS Center of Contemporary Art Residency (2022), Black Spatial Relics Residency (2022), and SOMA (2019), among others. She is the co-founder of the alternative monument and community gathering space "Operations of Care" located in Charlottesville, VA and will install a public sculpture with the Rose Kennedy Greenway in Boston, 2024. For more information about the artist, visit her website.
During her residency with The Arts Center, LaRissa Rogers met with community members from diverse backgrounds to discuss their family histories and connections to the region; explored her own family’s history and archives; and worked with three young women to create the sculptural forms installed in the meadow at Imani Works in November 2023.
VMFA
ON THE ROAD
VMFA on the Road: An Artmobile for the 21st Century visited Orange with their traveling exhibition, Revealing and Obscuring Identity: Portraits from the Permanent Collection. This exciting exhibition of paintings, photographs, and prints explores portraiture through a variety of periods, cultures, and styles. The exhibition featured diverse works by more than 10 artists, including Kitagawa Utamaro (Japan), Gordon Stettinius (American), Andre L'Hote (French), and S. Ross Browne (American).
In addition to the Virginia Museum of Fine Art’s state-fo-the-art display, local members of the community pitched in to provide balloon animals, face painting, create floral bouquets, and custom spring fairy wings.
PORTRAITS
OF A COMMUNITY
During his 3-week residency in Spring 2023, Bronx, NY-based artist Dennis RedMoon Darkeem visited Orange Elementary and Orange County High School to draw silhouette portraits reflecting the inner worlds of local students. He also completed portraits of community members who engaged with him during his open studio hours each week, thus creating a community portrait of the many creative folks who work, play, and create in Orange, VA!
At the end of his residency, Darkeem showcased the completed portraits and staged a performance informed by his time with the community here and inspired by his Indigenous Yamassee Yat’siminoli and African-American cultural heritage.
For more information about the artist, visit https://www.dennisredmoondarkeem.com
DOGWOOD VILLAGE
COMMUNITY QUILT
Amanda Wagstaff is a visual artist who uses sewing and a variety of textiles practices to extract meaning from ordinary objects, like clothing, dishtowels, notepaper, and receipts. Her fixation on everyday objects began at William & Mary where she studied observational painting, grew at UNC-Greensboro where she incorporated elements of time and tedious labor into her thesis work, and transformed during her research fellowship in Dublin, Ireland where she studied the history of writing, monastic practices, and pilgrimage. Amanda grew up on a dairy farm in Red Oak, Virginia and comes from a family of makers. Now, she maintains a studio in her home in rural Albemarle County.
September - December 2022, Dogwood Village residents met weekly with the artist to design, construct, and hand-stitch an art quilt using salvaged and hand-dyed fabrics. The goal of the project was to create a quilt representing the different personalities, styles, and influences of the Dogwood Village participants. This project was facilitated by Central Virginian artist Amanda Wagstaff. For more information about the artist, visit www.amandawagstaff.com
GATEWAYS
TO ORANGE
The Arts Center in Orange’s first major project for our community was the original Gateway Mural, which stood at the entrance to the Town of Orange and greeted visitors. Although that mural is now gone, we are continuing the tradition and looking ahead to another 25 years of bringing art to Orange.
In keeping with our commitment to bringing new art experiences to our community, three mural artists were selected to create murals for Orange via open call: Rick Nickel, Juan Pineda, and Kim Carlino. Each artist visited Orange and created their mural between June and September 2022, with the help of over 50 local volunteers.
THE FUXICO
PROJECT
Brazilian-born local artist Davi Leventhal worked with the local Boys and Girls Club of Orange to teach youth about a Brazilian textile craft called fuxico. Known in the USA as fabric yo-yos or suffolk puffs, these objects are often joined together to create unique designs on everyday objects such as quilts, tablecloths, pillows, and other home goods. Together, Leventhal and Boys and Girls Club members created a fuxico tapestry celebrating community pride.
Davi Leventhal was born in Rio de Janiero, Brazil and raised on Roosevelt Island in New York City. Now a resident of Orange, VA, he has previously taught classes at The Arts Center and shared his work with youth at the Boys and Girls Club. Davi's work has been exhibited in the United States and Brazil, at galleries and institutions including the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Plaxall Gallery, and with the Brazilian Consulate in New York City. He was chosen for the Queens Council on the Arts' Artport Residency at LaGuardia Airport in 2019, and has also previously participated in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Copyist Program, where he worked within the museum to copy famous artworks by Titian and Diego Velázquez. He studied under Frank Mason, who trained him in the historical techniques of the Old Masters.
He works in a range of media, often creating his inks and paints by hand and incorporating traditional Brazilian textile crafts into his paintings. He also leads community-focused workshops aimed at encouraging participants to celebrate their personal stories as a way of fostering community, and believes that art is the ultimate expression of the humanity we all share.
ART AT
HOME
In response to the coronavirus pandemic and closing of local schools in 2020, The Arts Center in Orange worked with local artists including Anna Marie DeMio Dowen, Julie Jackson, Thomas Marsh, Sally Mickley, and Alex Caton to produce ‘Art at Home’, a video series featuring a wide range of projects and concerts that could be easily to enjoy from the comfort of home.