21 years of Jumpin’ music to begin again in June 2010

I find it amazing that so many people still come up to me in the grocery store, the drugstore, clubs and restaurants to ask about Jumpin’ and when it’s coming back to the museum. I’m happy to learn that Richmonders have fond memories of VMFA’s outdoor, summer multicultural music series.

After 21 years of interesting esoteric roots music, Jumpin’ has been on hiatus since August 2004 due to our construction. The museum’s grand opening will be on May 1, 2010. Following that, Jumpin’ will find its way into our new Robins Sculpture Garden in June with acts that will totally reaffirm all the good press from past years. This first post-construction year will be a shortened season, or a “taste of things to come,” due to the fact that we will resume moving and arranging art into the garden in July.

When Jumpin started in 1984, it was an outdoor summer series featuring popular music. Multi-cultural roots music came into the mix via my first trip to the Jazz and Heritage Festival in New Orleans in 1987. Thereafter, the premise of the series changed to bringing national and international multicultural roots music that you wouldn’t ordinarily see in Richmond.

I remember that first year I went to the Jazz and Heritage Festival and what a cultural-gumbo pot that was. One, I might add, I was oh-so-willing to jump into. There I was in a city with great music, fabulous food, the lure of decadence, and the mystery of voodoo still apparent in the shadows of French Quarter alleys. On the way to the fairgrounds, we stopped on Bourbon Street to take a look around Chicken Man’s House of Voodoo – you never know when you might need a little mojo hand working for you in the city where Marie Laveau reined for a while, so long ago. And if that doesn’t work, there are always little mementoes to St. Jude all along Ramparts Street to fall back on if you need a back-up.

At the fairgrounds, I was lucky enough to be standing beside some people from Mississippi who came to Jazz Fest every year. They were well into their 20th or so beer by the time we got to talking music. At the first sound of a guitar chord from the stage, the foot stomping began and the dust from the ground started churning, sending up huge, choking clouds into the air. Wayne Toups and Zydecajun blew onto stage like a French hurricane hitting the delta with Toups leading the way punching the buttons on his diatonic accordion like he was working a rock-and-roll jackhammer. This was my first time to see live Cajun/zydeco music. After that very first moment, that was it for me. I was hooked!

Immediately after their set, I heard bluesy rock and roll coming from the gospel tent. It was John Mooney and Bluesiana backed by a full gospel choir with a sound so incredibly full that it threatened to blow the top off the tent. If you weren’t a believer in something going into that tent, you surely were one coming out.

All during the week I spent at Jazz Festival, I keep thinking about music. Then food and dancing seeped into my brain. I thought about how people in Richmond should get a chance to experience this first hand. I ruled out the obvious – I couldn’t bring Richmond to the Jazz Fest. But, I could bring acts from Louisiana to Richmond. I started making contacts, looking up bands (I even put my card on band vans with a scribbled “call me and let’s talk performance”), taking phone numbers. The following summer, Wayne Toups and Zydecajun hit the stage at Jumpin’ with that very same frenetic Louisiana energy. They were the first Cajun artists to perform in Richmond.

I kept on going to New Orleans and southwest Louisiana every chance I got for several years after that, making friends and learning more about the music, people and culture. Then I decided it was time to branch out.

My next stop was San Antonio, a city as exotic in its own right as New Orleans, with its distinct music, culture, food and language. I loved the sounds of conjunto, norteno, tejano, Tex-Mex, Chicago rock and roll and the music of San Antonio’s own Doug Sahm, patron saint of West Side soul. I went to the Tejano Conjunto Music Festival in Rosedale Park and listened to music I’d never heard before. It seemed to me that accordion was king in this genre. The accordion players who were fronting their bands – Flaco Jiminez, Nick Villarreal, Antonio Valerio Longoria, Mingo Saldivar, Santiago Jiminez, David Lee Garza, and Esteban “Steve” Jordan – were the rock stars of the festival. They were doing some incredible things with an “oom pah” sound. Bending and twisting it, you could almost see the music billowing out of the park and taking over the west side of the city. Once again, I was hooked on anther city, another type of music and culture. Not only the music, but Texas had definitely taken a firm hold on me. This time it took me a while, but in 1993, Esteban “Steve” Jordan played Jumpin’ and was one of the first Tex-Mex performers to appear in Virginia.

The more I traveled listening to different music, the more the world opened up to me. The more great stuff I heard and the more great people I met, the more I wanted to bring them to Richmond.

So, here it is in late December 2009, and I’m looking for acts for this summer’s Jumpin’. In keeping with those first few tentative steps into other types of music, worlds and ideas, I thought it would be natural to bring a couple of acts from the places I’ve mentioned above. I feel certain they’re going to capture the audience’s attention in the same way they’ve done mine.

More on the bands coming up in a later blog…

Patricia Jagoda, VMFA Manager of Performing Arts & Production

The restoration’s on the wall

Carolyn Frisa (left), Contract Paper Conservator, and Heather Logue, VMFA Conservation Technician, apply a new Japanese paper lining to the back of a lincrusta wall frieze. (Photo © Virginia Museum of Fine Arts)

One of the many new exhibits that will be on display in VMFA’s new McGlothlin Wing is the Worsham-Rockefeller Bedroom – an aesthetic-movement interior originally located in the residence of Richmond native Arabella Worsham, on West 54th Street in New York City. The fully furnished bedroom dates to the early 1880s.

One of the bedroom’s distinguishing original components is the “lincrusta” wallpaper and frieze. Lincrusta wallpapers were first made in 1877 in England by the same company that invented linoleum. Like linoleum, lincrusta contained linseed oil, which was mixed with paper pulp and embossed to form ornate three-dimensional patterns. The pattern was painted to emphasize the design and was sometimes even gilded, as is the case with the Worsham frieze.

When they arrived at VMFA, the lincrusta wall-coverings were dirty and in unstable condition. They were covered in a heavy layer of surface dirt and lined on the reverse with three layers of material: acidic brown paper, an old cloth backing, and then a third layer of acidic brown paper. There were tears and breaks in the wallpaper and frieze, as well as areas of separation between the lincrusta and backing layers. Losses to the lincrusta were also present, which is to be expected in wall-coverings in use for more than a century.

The primary goal of the conservation effort was to carefully clean and stabilize the wall-coverings so that they could be safely installed in their new location. Three VMFA Conservation Technicians – Talitha Daddona, Heather Logue and Sarah McIlvaine – worked under my supervision to perform the majority of the conservation treatment. The project began in September, and we expect to complete the work by the end of December.

The lincrusta had become brittle with age, resulting in flaking paper and pigment. Therefore, the first step in the conservation treatment was to re-adhere these lifting areas. The next step involved removing the dirt and soot. This was done by applying moisture with cotton swabs or cosmetic sponges. After we stabilized and cleaned the front, the lincrusta coverings were turned over to remove the acidic-paper backing. The cloth backings were removed from the friezes so that they could be re-lined with more stable Japanese paper. However, the cloth backings were left in place on the wall fills, as the lincrusta was too fragile to be safely removed without causing extensive damage. Losses to the lincrusta were infilled with Japanese paper toned with watercolor and gouache to match the surrounding areas.

Once conservation is complete, historic wallpaper professionals will hang the wall-coverings in their new location. When VMFA opens this May, make sure to visit the Worsham-Rockefeller Bedroom for a glimpse of this 1880s interior. And when you see the room’s walls, you’ll know a little more about the process of cleaning and restoring the lincrusta.

Carolyn Frisa, Contract Paper Conservator


Lincrusta wall fills during treatment: The acidic paper backing is being removed from the piece at the top. The wall fill at the bottom of the photo has been consolidated and partially surface cleaned. (Photo © Virginia Museum of Fine Arts)

An inside look for a memorable occasion

Photo by David Stover © Virginia Museum of Fine Arts

On Friday, Nov. 20, I was privileged to be invited to the dinner at VMFA in honor of Frances Lewis. Before dinner, Mrs. Lewis had a personal tour of the new Lewis Decorative Arts installation by curator, Barry Shifman. At Barry's request, I accompanied them through the gallery tour in my role as the Conservator of Sculpture and Decorative Arts.

We arrived in front of the bay with the Jean Dunand red lacquer cabinet – one of the many artworks conserved for the reinstallation. Mrs. Lewis asked if we could open it. Although we initially told her we could not, I thought it would be worth a try to comply with her request on this special occasion. The latch on the cabinet is metal – one of those materials not to be handled by bare hands in a museum. Since I had no cotton gloves with me, I went in search of some kind of cloth. I found a clean, unused napkin and returned to the galleries and offered Mrs. Lewis and her guests the opportunity to see the interior of the cabinet.

One of the special privileges of being an art conservator in a museum is we are among the few trained and allowed to handle the art when necessary. I removed my shoes, carefully entered the display area and opened the cabinet to show the interior, which contains rows of lacquered drawers with lettered tabs. The cabinet may have been some sort of index card filing cabinet, although the records don’t tell us that for sure.

I asked Mrs. Lewis what she kept in the cabinet when it was in her home. She replied that she didn’t believe she kept anything in it. That may be one reason the interior remains in such pristine shape.

Mrs. Lewis and her guests were obviously delighted to get a peek inside this cabinet. Barry suggested we might have special days in the future, when the entire museum reopens, where cabinets and desks might be propped open temporarily to give visitors a rare look inside. What do you think?

Kathy Z. Gillis, Conservator, Sculpture and Decorative Arts

Behind the scenes

(VMFA photos by Bob Tarren)

Twenty graduate students from VCU’s BrandCenter and I tracked through the dusty floors and galleries of the new McGlothlin Wing construction recently. The students are from Professor Mark Avnet’s Creative Technology class, and are working with me and the museum’s marketing department on our social media strategies.

Led by Courtney Delk of VMFA’s architecture & design department, we went on a fact-finding and immersion tour. Did I say dusty? And loud? There was an army of workmen inside and out, including construction workers, electricians, drywall specialists, painters, lighting experts, tile and brick workers, and more. We walked around ladders, ducked under scaffolding, around stacks of construction materials, and tried to stay out of the way of the workers and moving equipment. Hard hats were mandatory.

The objective was to give the students an up-close view of the museum’s transformation, and in particular, the social aspects of the new spaces. They were shown the visitor ‘lounges’ overlooking the Boulevard, the new Best Café and it’s outside patio, the expansive new galleries, and the impressive atrium, or ‘Main Street.’ We talked about WiFi in the new Sculpture Garden, the upcoming music events, and how the museum will be a great place just to ‘be,’ to hang out with friends. They asked great questions, and, as to be expected from the BrandCenter, approached the project as professionals. Sharp thinking, challenged assumptions, and strategic ideation were already evident. I’m sure their work will help us in our mission to introduce new audiences to VMFA. Right after they brush off the dust.

Bob Tarren, VMFA Director of Marketing