Richmond Independent Press by Dale M. Brumfield

Author:Dale M. Brumfield
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Arcadia Publishing Inc.
Published: 2013-03-01T16:00:00+00:00

“Leonardo Live at the Vatican.” Art by Ronnie Sampson for the Commonwealth Times, summer 1980. Courtesy the author.

“Sure, we screwed up famously, but we also came together in imaginative and creative ways,” said Peter Blake.

Editorial controversy aside, the weekly magazine flourished creatively. Heavily influenced by New York– and San Francisco–based publications like Village Voice, Wet and Boulevards, no creative stone went unturned, and even nonstudent artists, graduate students and fine arts instructors came to the paper brandishing portfolios and asking for illustration assignments.

“I was taking some classes with [VCU art instructor] Mallory Callan, and he was encouraging me to get some printed pieces and get that experience,” Artist Kelly Alder said in 2013. “I always wanted to be a commercial artist, and [the CT] seemed like a good place to start.” A spectacular artist, Alder had a cover assignment within a week, and he remained a fixture at the CT for two years before continuing to earn a living for years as one of Richmond’s most sought-after illustrators.

The CT office from the mid-1970s into 1982 was a work of radical art; graffiti and murals drawn directly on the hallowed plaster of the Millhiser House displayed complex felt-tip cityscape murals, cartoons and such zingers as “Who killed Bambi?” “No future,” “I’m a sexual intellectual” (a polite way of calling themselves a “fucking know-it-all”) and “It’s not for knowledge that I come to college but to work at the Commonwealth Times,” among others. VCU Evening College president John Mapp gladly submitted to having his picture taken signing his name on the production room wall just after Student Activities director Ken Ender told the staff to stop writing on the walls.

As Dr. Crutchfield noted, VCU suddenly grew up as an urban institution during the 1970s into the 1980s, and a similar raw, explosive attitude that spawned Richmond’s amazing punk rock and new wave music movement dominated both the art school and the CT. The staff simply wanted the magazine to reflect that more boldly artistic and diversified market, as well as exploit the talents of the various schools—and, like the judge said, have fun and break the rules.

The offices also became a hangout for a sundry mixture of Richmond creators, characters and even crazies. Poet and novelist John Alspaugh recruited Bill Pahnelas and Dale Brumfield to typeset and design his first collection of poetry, titled Everything Dark Is a Doorway (Palimpsest, 1982). A local (male) punk rocker showed up one Friday night in a woman’s party dress and intentionally sliced his own bicep numerous times with an X-Acto knife, dripping blood on one of the page layouts. One disturbed young man who was convinced that his brain was controlled by a computer in the VCU School of Business popped in periodically to brag that it was his best friend who threw a pie in the face of counterculture guru Timothy Leary during that live appearance at the Mosque in 1979. Filmmaker John Waters got a kick out of the office walls when he came for an interview during the Richmond premiere of his 1982 movie, Polyester.

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