What: “Rites: A public performance.”
When: 7-8 p.m. Saturday (Rain date is May 28).
Where: RiverLink Sculpture and Performance Plaza, 117 Riverside Drive.
Admission: Free, and be sure to bring blankets and chairs.
As you're speeding down the Smoky Park Bridge, I hope you've noticed the new, blushing beauty mark below in the River Arts District.
Local artist Molly Rose Freeman — who is a champion of the color that is her middle name — has been spending about the last month creating an amphitheater-shaped mural, blossoming with burst of pinks and reds, cooled by white accents, on Riverside Drive.
It's bright. It's bold, just like Freeman's idea, a vision she shares with Asheville dancer and choreographer Garth Grimball and musician Michael Libramento. This trio of talent is collaborating on “Rites: A public performance” 7-8 p.m. Saturday at the RiverLink Sculpture and Performance Plaza, 117 Riverside Drive.
Molly's mural will become the backdrop for a dance performance from Grimball, with the soundtrack provided live by Libramento.
The art event is really designed to be a community event, so naturally it's free. It's also a fitting price tag, since the $3,000 project was funded entirely by donations through a Kickstarter campaign online.
And Molly hopes it's really just the beginning of a series of free arts events from her and her artist colleagues.
“We have everything that we need to make these things happen,” Molly said Monday. “We need to have (art events) that are a free, or at least don't have a lot of commercial pressure and involvement, and utilize community resources, artists, businesses and ideas that are homegrown.”
This exaltation of collaboration, of community and public art reminds me of the role the Works Progress Administration played during this country's recovery from the Great Depression. Artists were funded by the government to produce projects, from murals to literature.
One of these artists was Jackson Pollock, the abstract expressionist painter credited with being one of the most electrifying artists of his generation.
Sorry to nerd out, but I have to prove to my parents that paying for an art history degree was not a complete waste (Hi, Mom!). Pollock and his fellow New York City game-changers are also credited with shifting the center of the art world to the United States, stealing the crown of contemporary art from our ancestors in the Old World.That's one of the reasons it's so disturbing that arts funding is being slashed during our modern economic troubles, still nowhere near the Great Depression's depths of unemployment.
If we don't support Asheville's next Pollock now, we will lose, practically speaking, a huge portion of our tourism appeal. And whimsically speaking, a pillar of our identity, culture and spirit.
“Rites,” a name identifying the event's spring theme, is a perfect name for the event and exactly the sort of thing that we have to continue to support, especially as Capitol Hill continues to eliminate important arts funding.
This is about something new, and it is a totally new use for the RiverLink park. A new, super-forward-thinking attraction to the River Arts District, an epicenter of the craft tradition of these mountains.
But it's ultimately a renewal and a reminder that public art is for the public, but it's a public that has to invest in the work and the artists to guarantee its survival.
This is the opinion of Citizen-Times staff writer Carol Motsinger, who writes an entertainment column every Friday for Take5. She can be reached at cmotsinger@CITIZEN-TIMES.com.![<span id='caption_start'><b>Electric, without electricity:</b> Mural artist Molly Rose Freeman, dancer Garth Grimball and composer Michael Libramento will create an</span><span id='caption-expand'>... [More]</span><span id='caption_end'> outdoor, public performance along the river. Photo by Jonathan Welch <span id='caption-collapse'>[Less]</span></span>](http://www.mountainx.com/images/2011/051811_138_AE.jpg)
Electric, without electricity: Mural artist Molly Rose Freeman, dancer Garth Grimball and composer Michael Libramento will create an outdoor, public performance along the river. Photo by Jonathan Welch
Molly Rose Freeman’s large-scale artwork is fanciful. It’s architectural. It’s intricate. It’s …. pink. And it’s on view this month in the River Arts District, alfresco, along Riverside Drive across from the Cotton Mill Studios.
Every day that the weather allows, Freeman is defining the space for a multimedia production called the Asheville Rites Project, an original dance and music event to be presented free to the public on May 21.
Freeman’s contribution to Rites is a performance in itself, which anyone can attend by just driving down Riverside Drive on a sunny day. Passers by may see Freeman on her ladder, putting the finishing touches on the tall panels that will provide a backdrop to the production.
In the open space along the French Broad River, which Riverlink has designated as a performance and sculpture plaza, her huge fantasy flowers and geometric shapes glow against the greenery. Each day something new appears: a petal, a cube, a swash of red. Her geometric flights of fancy also adorn the walls of her studio in the Roots building on West Haywood Street, in murals stretching from corner to corner and climbing toward the ceiling. Freeman’s work was also featured last December at Art Basel Miami Beach, an annual city-wide contemporary art exhibition.
For the Rites project, Freeman has teamed her talent in the visual arts with that of dancer/choreographer Garth Grimball and musician/composer Michael Libramento. Grimball has danced with the Asheville Ballet for five seasons, and in 2010 choreographed the full-length ballet Secrets, which was performed at the North Carolina Stage Company.
Freeman and Grimball developed the Rites concept together. “I was thinking a lot about the politics of space, and wanted to create a performance that would not be in a traditional theater venue, and would also be free — to make dance more accessible and inclusive,” Grimball says.
Inspired by the NYC Ballet’s film of Jerome Robbins’ NY Export: Opus Jazz, performed outdoors in various locations throughout New York City, Grimball imagined a similar experience in Asheville, “with dance, music and visual arts outside, working together to create a greater aesthetic.” His original choreography for the Rites five-part ballet is a fusion of modern and jazz dance, and will be performed by 10 dancers from studios throughout Asheville.
“With the last element, the music, we definitely knew we wanted Libramento,” Grimball says. Libramento is a vastly talented multi-instrumentalist who tours, records and performs with a variety of groups, both local and national. Recently he’s been traveling with indie-pop outfit Floating Action in support of its newest recording, Desert Etiquette.
Libramento is excited about the challenges of composing for the Rites Project: “The performance will not use electricity, which creates a unique opportunity to use drums and percussion as the main voices.” His inspirations for the work are spring and the river, as well as his ongoing fascination with Latin and African influences “from American jazz to traditional Cuban music to Congolese rhumba.”
Like Freeman’s flowers and streaming shapes, the collaborative work as a whole will be passionate, lively and complex, but unpretentious. “We wanted a project where life and art are inseparable,” Freeman says. “It’s not just me painting … it’s the cars that drive by and honk; it’s the bugs that fly into the canvas and get painted in.”
It’s also the dancers gracefully adapting to the uneven concrete on what was once the floor of an auto repair shop, and the musicians playing in the acoustic wonderland of the outdoors, letting the sound go where it will.
Says Freeman: “It’s just another way to integrate art into the everyday landscape of Asheville.”
— Lynn Smith Stanley can be reached at silverpoem@hotmail.com.
what: The Asheville Rites Project
what: Public performance in the River Arts District, featuring a mural by Molly Rose Freeman, original choreography by Garth Grimball and a score composed by Michael Libramento. RITES is a tribute to Springtime and a celebration of the vibrancy and freshness that come with the season. The performance is right on the banks of the French Broad River, in an outdoor space across from Cotton Mill Studios. Gates open an hour before showtime; bring chairs or blankets.
where: Riverlink Sculpture and Performance Plaza, 117 Riverside Drive
when: Saturday, May 21 (7 p.m. ashevilleritesproject.blogspot.com or mollyrosefreeman.com.)
by Ursula Gullow . photo by Matt Rose
Molly Rose Freeman has a thing for patterns. “There’s just something about committing yourself to creating a pattern,” says the 24-year-old, gesturing to the illustrations peppering her studio. She’s committed, all right. Her breezy space, located in the Roots Building of the River Arts District, is full of pattern-covered paintings, illustrations and other objects, including a mirage of pink plaid “crystals” painted directly onto her wall. That project looks quite modern, but it was inspired by a mosaic-tiled floor she saw in an Italian Cathedral.
Freeman is drawn to patterns found in other cultures, and she enjoys figuring out how to reproduce them. “Patterns can be really overwhelming when you first see them,” she says. She can spend hours or days translating and breaking down the small parts. For now, Freeman is using her wall space to get comfortable painting at a large scale for her upcoming Asheville Rites Project, a collaborative performance piece that comes together on May 21. The over-arching theme is springtime—playing on the concept of transitions, rituals and celebration.
For the next two weeks, she’ll be painting five 10’ x 10’ panels for the Rites project, to be installed in amphitheatre format at the RiverLink sculpture and performance plaza. The plaza is an outdoor venue at 117 Riverside Drive, across from Cotton Mill Studios and 12 Bones. In its entirety, the mural will be 500 square feet. To create it, Freeman plans to paint every day, since it takes a good bit of practice and muscle memory to paint on such a scale. Weather permitting, she paints outside. “I’m looking forward to working on my tan,” she jokes. The mural will be temporary, but before it comes down, she and fellow artists will celebrate its completion with a dance choreographed by Ashevillean Garth Grimball and a dozen contemporary dancers from troupes around town. To raise funds for the project, she and Grimball created a Kickstarter video in early March and reached their goal of $3,000 just 27 days after posting it online. The show on the 21st will start at dusk and last about 45 minutes, Freeman says.
Though she has experience painting murals, this is the first time Freeman has painted on such a large scale and in such a public way in Asheville. Last winter, she joined a team of artists to create a mural during the infamous Art Basel Art fair in Miami, Florida. For the mural, Freeman painted a large ambling mass of organic shapes that served as a backdrop to painters Dustin Spagnola and Ishmael, who painted images of gas cans and Frida Kahlo. “The greatest street artists [including Shepard Fairey, Swoon, and Barry McGee] were all in a three-block radius of each other,” Freeman says. “It was so amazing to not only learn about mural painting but to be in the company of these artists.”
Freeman was born in Durham, North Carolina, and then moved to Arkansas, then Memphis. In 2006, she enrolled at UNC-Asheville, intending to get an arts and foreign language degree, but took creative writing classes instead. She is still an avid writer. Her abstract painting style embodies the non-linear aspect of her creative self, she says, while her fictional writings employ a more literal form of expression.
At the moment, she’s stuck on pink. Freeman has boxes of Prismacolor and Coptic markers of every rosy hue imaginable. In the corner of her studio, an old palette of dried paint looks a Bazooka bubble gum explosion, with all its shades of reds and pinks. “I needed to give myself some boundaries, so I gave myself a limited color palette to work within,” she says, noting that she hated pink as a girl. “Maybe now I’m embracing my inner princess.”
So what’s in store for one of the River District’s rising stars? She’s going big. “My goal is to just make everything bigger,” says Freeman. “I want to focus on public art, murals, and having more interaction with the public.”
Watch Molly Rose Freeman at work on her mural in the River Arts District during daylight hours until May 15. Then, she and Garth Gimball’s Asheville Rites Project dance performance, with music by Michael Libramento, is set for May 21 at 117 Riverside Drive at dusk. (Rain date is May 28.) The project is supported by RiverLink, Arts2People, Asheville Mural Project and Asheville Ballet. To see more of Molly’s work, go to www.mollyrosefreeman.com.
