Image courtesy of the artist
From February 2-24, 2024, New City Arts presents Empire Is Over: The Lewis, Clark, & Sacajawea Cut-Ups, an exhibition by Meesha Goldberg. This exhibition is the culmination of her Fall 2023 New City Arts Research Residency. For the residency, Meesha proposed a confrontation with the vacant site of the Lewis, Clark, and Sacagawea monument, using performance, installation, and poetry to remix passages of the famous journals, to memorialize the brutality of empire, and express prophetic femme power and care.
New City Arts' Welcome Gallery
114 3rd St. NE, Charlottesville, VA 22902
First Fridays
February 2 from 5-7:30PM; Artist performance at 6PM.
Free and open to the public. All ages welcome. Refreshments provided.
Gallery Hours
Wednesday-Saturday from 10AM-5PM
Visitor Guide
Stepping into the gallery, visitors are met with an exhibition of photographs, drawings, and poetry in a vibrant color palette of blue, orange, gold, and brown. On two walls, you will encounter photographs of a performance held by Meesha Goldberg, Aidyn Mancenido, and Cheryl Robison atop the former Lewis, Clark, and Sacajawea monument. A ladder stands in the center of the gallery, and along the other walls, visitors find pencil drawings and cut-up poetry confronting subjects of white supremacy, colonialism, and patriarchy. Scissors are mounted above these works.
Please note: Close adult supervision will be necessary as much of the work is within reach of children (some mounted with nails), and the ladder is unsecured. The performance held on February 2 at 6PM will include a short walking parade to historical sites, the popping of champagne, loud music, and the cutting of cake with a machete, a culturally significant Korean tool. Feel free to reach out to staff with any questions.
Exhibition Events
February 17 | Visionary Remembering Symposium
A one-day symposium with local artists, community leaders, and the descendants of Sacajawea, inquiring into the ways we memorialize the past in service of social transformation in the wake of the 2021 removal of Charlottesville’s monuments.
Listen to the Exhibition Playlist 🎧
Exhibition Statement (courtesy of the artist)
Empire Is Over is an experimental creative expedition through the treacherous ideological terrain of the 1804-1806 Corps of Discovery journey, taken over five months as resident artist at New City Arts. The journey of these two sons of Albemarle County has been naively and dangerously decontextualized from its settler colonial mission and Jefferson’s “Empire of Liberty” whose imperial reach now overextends through 800+ military installations worldwide. This multimedia exhibit reckons with these ghosts of Charlottesville, deconstructing the historical record to invoke transformational mythologies.
The “cut up” technique is an artistic method pioneered by Brion Gysin and William Burroughs, in which subconscious voices may be unleashed in previously published writings or artworks through the cutting up and rearrangement of lines of text or image, breaking the stranglehold of linear narrative control. I used this technique on both The Lewis and Clark Journals and Their First View of the Pacific, the former Lewis, Clark, and Sacajawea monument, in search of a multiplicity of truths. By cutting in with the editorial critique of my Korean Diasporic consciousness, I claim entanglement with this difficult history, while broadening the lens with which we can look at its reverberations. The United States expanded so far west from Monticello along the 38th parallel, it cut my motherland in two along the DMZ.
Raised Up & All Embraced was a two-hour long hug performed atop the stone plinth of the former monument on November 18th, 2023, by Aidyn Mancenido, Cheryl Robinson, and myself, photographed by Kristen Finn. The 1919 Charles Keck monument, which depicted the Shoshone teenager, Sacajawea, in a demeaning stance below Lewis and Clark, was removed in 2021 along with Charlottesville’s Confederate monuments. The Lewis & Clark Journal cut ups are presented in the exhibition collaged onto white pencil drawings on stained paper sewn, printed, and burnt into illustrating our potential to edit collective understanding of the past, and imagine empire as over.
About the Artist (courtesy of the artist)
Meesha Goldberg is an artist and poet living in Charlottesville, Virginia. Her experiences journeying to sacred places, living off the land, and serving as an activist have made her a powerful advocate for the earth. Goldberg has exhibited in galleries across the country with solo shows in Portland, Los Angeles, Seattle, and Charlottesville. Her forthcoming poetry collection “The Seed Is Waiting In The Dark” (Finishing Line Press) will be published in 2024.
This exhibition is the culmination of a project of the New City Arts Research Residency Program. The New City Arts Fall Residency was supported by the Anne and Gene Worrell Foundation. This exhibition is supported by the Community Endowment Fund at the Charlottesville Area Community Foundation, the Bama Works Fund of Dave Matthews Band at the Charlottesville Area Community Foundation, and Lisa M. Draine.
Located at 114 3rd St. NE on Charlottesville’s downtown pedestrian mall, New City Arts’ Welcome Gallery supports artists who live in the Charlottesville area. Welcome Gallery exhibitions and programs are made possible by generous sponsors, donors, and grants.