Hollywood tells us that romance unfolds in a montage, in sparkling date nights and lazy Sunday mornings and in the inescapable gravity of consistent, insistent closeness. But as a veteran of long-distance relationships (I’m talking 10,000-mile commutes), I can attest that sometimes love grows in our absence from each other. The space that separates two […]
At 4:49am on Saturday morning, I woke up just south of Washington, D.C., my eyes wide open and my stomach flipping. My friend Abigail and I had driven up the night before, to join the Women’s March on Washington. Per the organizers’ instructions, we packed clear plastic bags, loading up on wet wipes and fancy […]
Last year was exhausting, right? No wonder people pushed themselves to have the merriest holiday of their lives in 2016. Online sales hit the highest mark ever during Black Friday weekend. Consumers wanted, more than ever, to escape real life and celebrate in tinsel wonderlands. Now that you’ve digested plenty of fa-la-las and other family […]
Despite living 2,100 miles apart, Charlottesville artist Matthew P. Shelton and Trinidadian artist Nikolai M. Noel are close friends. They met in Virginia Commonwealth University’s MFA program, where they studied painting and printmaking, and were interested in the influence of colonialism and its aftermath on the creation of human identity. “We were both making work […]
Rarely do so many Americans feel divided, separated and isolated from one another as they have during this political season. Our inability to communicate and connect with one another as countrymen feels like an affront. For the thousands of refugees who flee violence, persecution, human trafficking or torture in their native countries in crisis, then […]
Like many creatives, Damien Shen spent most of his adult life focused on building a career instead of a formal art practice. But in 2013, the South Australia native and current Kluge-Ruhe artist-in-residence realized he had a calling. He just needed to work out what it was. “I did this journey down the east coast […]
The last time I went on an online date, I found myself at Buffalo Wild Wings with a guy named Tony. It was 2010, and I was living on the New Jersey shore at the time. (He was actually the second Tony I’d gone out with, it being the Jersey shore.) I remember feeling…underwhelmed. Missing […]
Since its debut in 1911, opera-lovers have considered Der Rosenkavalier a masterpiece of the repertoire. The German comedy follows the story of the Marschallin (Princess Marie Thérèse von Werdenberg) as she decides to end her affair with a younger man and save another woman from an unhappy marriage. More than a century later, on the […]
For some new readers, poetry feels light years away from reality. It reads like a dense abstraction—the literary equivalent of a modernist painting that makes you tilt your head sideways and wonder what the heck you are missing. But when poet Amie Whittemore first found poetry, the self-described “voracious reader” felt like someone flicked on […]
Like many young urbanites, New York- based artist Patrick Costello finds satisfaction in a can. “I started to get interested in canning when I was 19 and started growing food,” he says. “The knowledge was taught to me by my mom and my grandma, and it became a way of rooting myself to patterns that […]