The phrase “Shade is a place” describes an ever-evolving body of work by poet and multimedia artist MaKshya Tolbert. “Shade is a place: relief is my form” titles their 2023 installation at New City Arts combining poetry and pottery in an immersive gallery space. And “Shade is a place” names their National Poetry Series-winning book set to be published in Oct. 2025.
Perhaps most significantly, “Shade is a place” exists as a philosophy for Tolbert. Inspired by their experience of the shade trees lining Charlottesville’s Downtown Mall, the phrase describes an approach to exploration and artistic expression which has shaped their creative process over the past two years.
The evolution of Tolbert’s work is ongoing, as they continue to find new modes of meditating on shade and expanding their sensitivity to the ecological, architectural and social spheres of their city through this lens.
“I … talk about [‘Shade is a place’] as a social practice and as a set of relationships — shade walks, stewardship projects, opportunities to support people,” Tolbert said. “It seems like every year, the form changes a bit.”
Tolbert first developed an interest in shade as a Master of Fine Arts student in the University’s Creative Writing Program, from which they graduated this past spring. Tolbert grew up in Arlington, Va., but said they were eager to leave the state after high school.
This desire took Tolbert to Stanford, where they completed an undergraduate degree in American Studies and Creative Writing, then to Italy for a Fulbright fellowship studying Black foodways and Virginia plantation ecology. There, they found their scholarship pointing them in the direction of their home state — the site of the environments they were researching.
“As someone writing about plantation ecologies, I'm in Italy, in California, everywhere except the places where the plantations are,” Tolbert said. “I was really curious to come back here and be closer to my family, to the plantations … I’ve been thinking about wanting to find a safe, livable life in a place that a lot of people historically have been pushed out of.”
After returning to Virginia, in the first year of their MFA, Tolbert encountered a troubling story from 2006 in a course on eco-feminism and eco-poetics — that of a Black high school student who sat under an oak tree typically reserved for white students and returned to school the next day to find multiple nooses hanging from its branches. The situation intensified from there, ultimately leading to an unsolved arson attack on the school and attempted second-degree murder charges leveled at six Black teenagers.
Tolbert said learning of this series of events — incited by a student’s simple desire for shade — moved them to reflect on shade itself and their own relationship to it. They spent time wandering the Downtown Mall and drafting poems about its canopy and started sitting in on public meetings of the Charlottesville Tree Commission, a group of city-appointed volunteers who advise the City Council on the planting and preservation of shade trees on public property — Tolbert now serves as chair.
In 2023, they entered a six-month New City Arts Research Residency and began developing their multimedia installation, “Shade is a place: relief is my form,” out of New City Arts’ space on the Downtown Mall.
“To bring all of these questions I had about shade trees to the literal place where the trees are … [I needed] to be close by and think and turn on these questions,” Tolbert said. “That residency was where I began to try to put together sequences for the first time, ways to measure trees and to be able to think through these different formal ways that we talk about assessing trees and assessing their risks.”
The residency culminated in a 20-day exhibit in the New City Arts Welcome Gallery in Aug. 2023. Tolbert lined the floors with English ivy, displayed their own ceramic pots on pedestals and hung their poems from the ceiling — some of which were titled “Shade is a place” themselves. Tolbert said the majority of the poems showcased will be released as part of their book next year, a project which started out as their MFA thesis and synthesizes earlier iterations of the work.
“In some ways, the book is an archive of what that was like, what it was like to actually build a sense of place by way of dizzying myself on the Mall, by showing up to watch the work happen, to watch the arborists work, and then sort of see my work just blend into that,” Tolbert said. “My thesis in the grad program was a sweet opportunity to push myself to put it all together, and that is what the book will be.”
As they anticipate the collection’s release, Tolbert has dedicated themself to environmental service — they are now training in tree stewardship and recently earned a wildland firefighting certification. Still, they have maintained an interest in shade and placemaking as objects of artistic inquiry, with plans to adapt “Shade is a place” into a play.
An upcoming artist’s residency with architecture firm Nelson Byrd Woltz combines their artistic and action-oriented impulses — Tolbert will support storytelling in the firm’s development of a new memorial to the Underground Railroad. They said the project feels like a natural progression of their writing on the Downtown Mall and its trees.
“For me to be invited in to help direct some of that discursive world, that's, in many ways, a lot of what I was doing with ‘Shade as a place’ on the Mall, thinking about how we talk about where we are in space and time,” Tolbert said. “I'll be offering a lot of that same language-based work while also being part of a planning team.”
Reflecting on their creative goals, Tolbert noted an ongoing interest in one key aspect of the method which produced “Shade is a place” — loneliness. Tolbert said that feelings of loneliness invited them to consider shade as both a source of connection and a source of relief.
“I think what starts out as me wanting a sense of place and admitting loneliness gets me not only wanting to walk up and down the Mall and feel closer to the canopy, but also wanting to invite people to feel closer to the canopy and to me. Shade [becomes] a literal possibility of relief, ecological shade, but also this relational possibility of relief,” Tolbert said. “I feel like loneliness and relief have become two different poles of this project.”
These questions of relief — the relief trees offer, who accesses relief and how relief manifests in space — continue to inform Tolbert’s work as a writer, ceramicist, tree steward, firefighter and Charlottesville Tree Commission Chair. As ever, Tolbert is motivated by their surroundings — Charlottesville’s trees and people and the places in which they coexist.
The poetry collection “Shade is a place” is set to be released in Oct. 2025.
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