Like most brides to be, Wendy Blair Winkler spent more than a year planning her wedding. Unlike most wedding parties, her guests spent months building the event themselves on a farm in Free Union. Winkler modeled her wedding on experiences at Burning Man, an annual art festival held on the arid salt flats of transient […]
Visual artist Philip de Jong won’t content himself with creating beautiful work. In fact, he avoids contentment altogether. “At some point as a trained photographer your job is to make anything look good,” he said. “If people describe my work as pretty, I feel insulted on some level because all it means is that I […]
Fanny Smedile is not a professional dancer. But at last year’s Cville Sabroso, she put on a colorful dancing dress and found herself transformed. “When I wore the costume, I felt my folklore,” she said. “When I listened to the music, it took me back to my country. In that moment, I felt it in […]
Allison Mitchell helps people sort through and systematize the keeping of their stuff. But really, she says, they’re redefining self-love. “The irony for my clients is that they fear losing something, so they keep everything, then they lose the something they really wanted to keep,” said Mitchell, a Charlottesville-based organizing consultant for Richmond firm Abundance […]
The first time I read my work in front of an audience, I knew something had changed. The piece evolved as it left my lips, transforming the frisson I’d felt at the writing table into a brief but visceral tether with others. Listening to authors read their works, I understand the real invitation: to connect […]
Physics teacher Matt Shields, who recently received a 2014 MIT Inspirational Teacher Award for his work both in and out of the classroom with students at Charlottesville High School, never planned to be a teacher. “Physics was almost an accident. I think I got a C in physics in college,” Shields said, adding that his […]
“I don’t know why, but design is pretty much all I think about all the time. Much to my wife’s dismay.” Master woodworker and furniture maker Blaise Gaston laughed, fully aware that the affection he lavishes on his work is the sort many reserve for first loves. Which, in a way, it is. “I remember […]
Everybody’s an amateur photographer these days, using smartphone cameras and Instagram filters to create quick, easy, and brighter-than-life ‘art’. But in curator June Collmer’s latest exhibit, “The World of Printmaking,” she’s going to bat for a different aesthetic. “It’s the lines,” the local photographer said in an interview at the Vinegar Hill Café in the […]
You don’t often see sculptors in the library at work on invisible projects, but Justin Poe is an exception. “When I started out, I did these 2″ x 3″ wide sculptures, and I carried everything around in my backpack,” said the Charlottesville-based artist. “I worked in public, in libraries and restaurants, and got a lot […]
Cars rush along a busy street near downtown Charlottesville, bowing day lilies that cluster beside the driveway of Chad and Rebecca Morgan’s early 20th-century home. But when you stand in the heart of the kitchen—a straight shot from the sidewalk through the front door and down the hallway—you could be a million miles from anywhere. […]