Richmond Leader

Chamber RVA (Greater Richmond Chamber of Commerce) recently issued the following announcement.

WORKSHOP 

Your Story, Our Community: Create Your Storybook with Sushmita Mazumdar 

Saturday, December 4, 2021 | 11:00 AM–3:00 PM | Free

Exhibition Gallery & Lobby, Library of Virginia, 800 East Broad Street, Richmond, VA 23221

Join artist, educator, and Columbia Pike Documentary Project team member Sushmita Mazumdar for a special program exploring the human connections exemplified in the Library’s current exhibition, Columbia Pike: Through the Lens of Community, a unique display of photographs celebrating the extraordinary cultural diversity found within a single community in Northern Virginia. Mazumdar will show program participants how to make handmade houseshaped storybooks inspired by both the people in the photographs and their own lives. Her signature storybooks encourage us to think about how we write our own stories and how we can share them with others. Each storybook will be displayed on a City of Stories Installation, representing how each person's story is a piece of the place in which we all live. This event is free and open to the public. Participants will be able to take a copy of their storybook home

Columbia Pike originated in the 19th century as a toll road connecting rural Virginia with the nation's capital. Today, the Columbia Pike corridor is one of the most culturally diverse communities in the nation, and possibly in the world. More than 130 languages are spoken in Arlington County, with the densest concentration along the Pike. Unlike in many parts of the world, or even in our own country, however, the stunningly diverse group of people—representing every continent—who live and work there do so in relative harmony.

No registration required. For more information, contact Elizabeth Klaczynski at elizabeth.klaczynski@lva.virginia.gov or 804.692.3536.

Columbia Pike: Through the Lens of Community, an exhibition of photographs at the Library of Virginia, explores Arlington’s Columbia Pike, a community so diverse that it’s been described as a “World in a Zip Code.”

– Columbia Pike: Through the Lens of Community, a unique exhibition of photographs at the Library of Virginia running through January 8, 2022, celebrates the extraordinary cultural diversity found within a single community in Northern Virginia. Columbia Pike Documentary Project (CPDP) photographers, whose personal connections to the community allowed them to capture the strength, pride, resilience, elegance, and beauty of so many overlapping cultures, created the works on view.

The inspiration for the documentary project came from a conversation in 2007 when Wolf, along with fellow residents Paula and Todd Endo, recognized that Columbia Pike was something special and deserved attention. They welcomed additional photographers to the project—including Dewey Tron, Xang Mimi Ho, Lara Ajami, Moises Gomez, and Aleksandra Lagkueva along with writer and community art activist Sushmita Mazumdar—and set about photographing as many aspects of the Pike as they could. Together the team built a remarkable visual and oral history archive ranging in style from street photography to landscape photography to portraiture. Learn more about the documentary project at https://cpdpcolumbiapike.blogspot.com.

Several thousand photographs from the Columbia Pike Documentary Project were transferred to the Library of Virginia’s Special Collections this spring. More than 70 of these images are highlighted in Columbia Pike: Through the Lens of Community. The exhibition also includes information about the neighborhood, the residents, and the photographers themselves.

“The Library is grateful to welcome these compelling works to our collection,” said Visual Studies Collection coordinator Dale Neighbors. “As the nation seems more divided than ever, this collection shows how one community is making diversity work.”

Original source can be found here.