Four Virginia Artists

art With Charlottesville turning its collective eye to photography via the Festival of the Photograph, the UVA Art Museum devotes a small space to a related exhibition that gives just a taste of four Virginia camera artists. This is a disparate quartet of heavyweights: fine artists and top-notch journalists including Sally Mann, Sam Abell, Emmet […]

Strange fruit

“Personal” is a word often applied to Sally Mann’s photographs (along with others—“intimate,” “startling,” and sometimes that chestnut of wary critics, “disturbing”). And “personal” also describes the atmosphere of Steven Cantor’s documentary about Mann, What Remains,

Outside chance

It’s hardly news to anybody that the local real estate market has shifted. Whereas buyers a couple of years ago had to be happy with whatever they could find, now it’s sellers who are feeling a little desperate. What’s more, inventory is way up. When I asked Martha deJarnette, an associate broker with Pace Real […]

Capitalism on the commune

In August 2004, Derek Breen went upstairs to check his e-mail. “My bedroom was right above the hammock shop,” he remembers. At the time, just over a year into his Twin Oaks tenure, he was managing the hammocks business, the community’s biggest income source. Pier One was a longstanding and very sizable client—representing up to […]

Oakers among us

Devon Sproule, perennial favorite of the Charlottesville folk scene, just might be Twin Oaks’ best-known local alum. (She grew up there.) But she’s hardly the only ex-Oaker, as they call themselves, to settle in Charlottesville. With the community only 35 miles away from our relatively cosmopolitan city, perhaps it’s a natural that Oakers leaving the […]

Making a living

… Plenty of outsiders come. They’ll pull off I-64 at Shannon Hill, then follow the calm roads a few miles north into Louisa County. Along the way is the usual rural mix of trailers, tiny frame houses, more prosperous-looking farms.

local food issues take center stage

Along with peas and leafy greens, local-food talk is in bloom this early May. A mass mailing by the Piedmont Environmental Council (PEC), plus a pair of events connected to UVA’s Department of Urban and Environmental Planning, are attempting to jump-start local buzz about how food is produced, distributed and eaten around Charlottesville. “A number […]

Heart transplant

“It had been coming for quite a few years.” That’s the understatement with which Janice Dodrill describes her decision, last summer, to redo the kitchen she’s lived with since 1980. Janice and her husband, Ernie, live in a brick ranch house in Earlysville, and if you talk with them about their home, you get the […]

Breaking ground on a planned utopia

Charlottesville may be a hotbed of green architecture—after all, it’s home to William (Cradle to Cradle) McDonough and legions of his followers—but it lacks actual green developments on a large scale. That’s the contention of Chris Schooley, who’s leading the charge by local development company Stonehaus to create a sustainable community nearly out of thin […]