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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
Right now, there’s a debate raging about the American dream. What does it look like? Who is it for? And what will we sacrifice in order to achieve it? The debate itself isn’t new. Art has always asked these questions. And Live Arts offers a poignant example with Dreamgirls, which caps off the theater’s 25th […]
Makers. Mistresses. Proto-feminists. Those are a just a few of the titles reserved for the artists represented in The Fralin Museum of Art’s “Two Extraordinary Women: The Lives and Art of Maria Cosway and Mary Darby Robinson.” Guest curator Diane Boucher explores the work, themes and ideals that united these 18th-century artists, including the political […]
When you woke up this morning, you probably pressed, fluffed, tucked or splashed water on a work of art—one you wear every day, whether you know it or not. “I became a hairstylist in 1991 because I wanted to be an artist, but not a starving artist. Color became my painting, and cutting became my […]
Charlottesville is like the Bermuda Triangle for writers: You come here, get sucked in and never leave. You can’t help it, really; the literary community is huge. The arts are vibrant. The opportunities for engagement immense. But in a town so bookish that you can’t throw a rock without hitting a writer, it’s still a […]