SUMMER 2024

Third Street Box Office Project

In commemoration of the 60th anniversary of the Civil Rights Act passed on July 2, 1964, The Paramount Theater of Charlottesville hosted area artists to activate a local remnant of the South’s segregation laws, The Paramount’s Third Street Box Office.

Artists presented temporary exhibitions that addressed the history of segregation and civil rights. The community was invited to visit the space for the duration of summer 2024 to learn more about the project and witness the work of each artist.

Three selected artists received an honorarium of $2,500 each to present an original work on the site of The Paramount Theater’s Third Street Box Office. Selected projects were on display for three weeks.

The Third Street Box Office at The Paramount Project was supported by a grant from The League of Historic American Theaters (LHAT) DEIB Initiative with the stated goals of sharing our historic, exterior space with community artists to extend our mission; igniting dialogue and fostering conversation; drawing attention to artists in our local community; and driving visitors to the Downtown Mall in Charlottesville.

The Process

  1. Open Call

After winning the grant from LHAT, Phase 1 of the project was to craft an open call for proposals to activate the Third Street Box Office space. I created a theme for the project that would be used on all related assets, with colors that were bright and eye-catching. Because this was a different kind of initiative, I wanted them to be distinct from our typical color palette.

Once I built the open call landing page and Google Form, we reached out to local news to get the word out, posted on social, and hosted a virtual Q&A to address any potential questions artists might have had before sending in their proposals.

At the close of the open call, we received 11 proposals from eight different artists.

2. Review and Selection

After collecting all the submitted proposals, I compiled them into one slideshow that the panel could review. I made sure to highlight important information like websites or work samples (if included) as well as create headings and layouts that would clearly delineate each part of the proposals.

When all proposals were reviewed, the decision came down to three artists, all with different practices and mediums.

The project would open with photographer Kori Price (whose proposal is outlined below), followed by fiber artist Tobiah Mundt, and closing the project would be architect Nick Brinen.

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The Artists

  • Kori Price is a multi-disciplinary artist and photographer based in Charlottesville, Virginia. Originally from Culpeper, Kori has been proud to call Central Virginia home for most of her life and is passionate about telling the stories of her community. Kori holds a B.S. in electrical engineering from Virginia Tech and seeks to maintain a balance between her technical and creative interests with her work. She is a founding member of the Charlottesville Black Arts Collective and currently serves as its president. Kori has been a resident artist at New City Arts Initiative as well as a writer-in-residence at McGuffey Arts Center. Her work has been exhibited at New City Arts Initiative, The Bridge Progressive Arts Initiative, Studio IX, McGuffey Arts Center, and Second Street Gallery.

  • Tobiah Mundt is a self-taught fiber artist who was born and raised in Houston, Texas. She studied Architecture at Howard University in Washington, DC, and eventually left the field of Architecture for sculpture. She uses needle felting, wet felting, and rug tufting techniques to create colorful forms and figurative pieces that illustrate and invoke emotion. She is the Co-Owner and Creative Director of The Hive, an arts and crafts bar in Charlottesville, Virginia, where she teaches fiber arts, blurring the line between art and craft. Tobiah has exhibited her work in Texas, Washington DC, Maryland, and Virginia.

  • Nick Brinen is a licensed and registered architect in Virginia, Texas, and New York. He is a Founding Partner of Studio Figure, where he oversees all project typologies across various scales. He is LEED AP BD+C and NCARB certified and a member of the National Organization of Minority Architects. In addition to co-directing projects at Studio Figure, Nick has taught architecture at the Rhode Island School of Design, University of Virginia, Pratt Institute, and Parsons School of Design. Currently, he is an Architecture Professor at James Madison University where his research focuses on the tolerances between hyper-local material resources and participatory-practice models with community based projects.

Exhibition

Once the exhibitions were up, it was my job to photograph them, process and all. Documenting each one was crucial, not only because of its significance to the theater and local history, but because each artist had a story that needed to be told.

These photographs serve as a visual narrative, offering insights into the dialogues between art and audience, past and present, thoughts and emotions. They also were part of the theater’s presentation at the national LHAT conference in the same year, which demonstrated how we used the grant money to fund the project.