For many years, The Hook ran a writing contest in conjunction with the Virginia Festival of the Book that was judged by John Grisham. With the newspaper’s closure last summer, it looked like local writers were out of luck if they wanted to compete for cash and readers. But WriterHouse, the local nonprofit dedicated to […]
When FIREFISH Gallery co-curators Araxe Hajian and Sigrid Eilertson brainstormed concepts for their next collaborative project, they decided to flip the script. Rather than host a visual art show that invited verbal interpretation, they decided to ask visual artists to interpret Hajian’s short story “This is How You Open a Pomegranate.” “I didn’t see this […]
The façade of a large house spans the stage, partly obscured by white drop cloths on which the shadows of trees create a ghostly overlay. The year is 1973, and an elderly woman in a yellow one-piece bathing suit, quilted housecoat, and striped sunhat wobbles out onto the gray clapboard porch. Radio static cuts through […]
“Social sculpture is the idea that whenever we’re shaping our own lives to be more beautiful, it’s an intentional act to bring more beauty or well-being into the world,” said Kate Daughdrill, a Detroit-based artist, farmer, and teacher who graduated from UVA. Daughdrill is one of 20-plus presenters slated to bring social sculpture to Charlottesville’s […]
When Andy Friedman enrolled in the Rhode Island School of Design, he devoted himself to Venetian oil painting, a skill so intricate that each work takes an average of three years to finish. “I knew that after college I would have to get a job, and I wanted to know the feeling of complete and […]
“When people think of the word threesome, they think of one man and two women, and they think of the man getting pleasured by the women,” said Tif Robinette, a self-declared feminist. “But here we have three really strong female artists from the state of Virginia reacting to and tearing apart ideas of the ideal […]
Have you ever driven through the desert? Flown across dry, red earth while mammoth spires of stone and humps of rock pin back the wide blue horizon? Maybe you stopped in the shadow of a peak and began to climb through wiry brush and sandy succulents, picking a forgotten trail up the monolith’s face. Dust […]
A long time coming When John Gibson moved to Charlottesville in 1991, “it was still a sleepy Southern university town,” the former executive director of Live Arts said over the phone, from Atlanta, where he lives now. “The C&O Jazz Club had just closed, and Prism Coffeehouse was down the road. Second Street was inside […]
Scientific materialism—in vogue these days—says that consciousness, like all things, is a product of the physical world. When we die, our spirit blinks out with our neurons. But what if consciousness resides both in and outside of our bodies? Are we part of some larger non-physical reality that can be accessed with the right type […]
“When I was 3, my parents took me to see The Nutcracker, and I remember telling them, ‘I want to be the Sugar Plum Fairy,’” said Caitlin Lennon. “They were like ‘O.K., sure, we’ll sign you up for ballet classes.’ But in my mind I thought, ‘No, I’m gonna do that. I’ll take classes for a […]