On his first day of college, Wes Swing rented a cello. There was something about the instrument that called to him. Perhaps it was the vocal quality, its aural proximity to the human voice; perhaps it was the instrument’s ability to express a particularly full range of emotion, with its deep, full lows and intense, […]
“Nobody understands an artist like another artist,” says local portrait artist Frank Walker. And so Walker, who has drawn all his life—first imitating the figures in Sgt. Rock comic books and later working in the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers graphics department, earning a BFA in painting and printmaking from Virginia Commonwealth University and working […]
Last April, A’nija Johnson walked into the Jefferson School African American Heritage Center auditorium ready to speak her truth at the Nine Pillars Hip Hop Cultural Fest’s freshman class competition. Wearing a floor-length skirt, a Tasmanian Devil “I need coffee” T-shirt and a pair of sunglasses, the local high schooler found herself in a room […]
A music venue is a strange place to be in the middle of the day. A club is designed for the nighttime, with its dark walls, ceilings and stages meant to be illuminated not by the sun but by bright lights, coming alive when bodies are in the room and music is in the air. […]
In the sunflower yellow kitchen at the back of her narrow house, Catherine Monnes drops a few thistle teabags into a pink tulip-shaped teapot full of boiling water. She slides the lid into place and carries the pot into her plant-filled sunroom. The evening light is disappearing behind the trees in her North Downtown yard […]
To-may-toes. To-mah-toes. ’Maters. No matter what you call them, if you want to be slicing into the freshest ones around come summer, you’ll want to sign up to participate in community-shared agriculture. And now’s the time to do so. The community-shared agriculture (or CSA) model of farming, which developed in North America in the 1980s, […]
Two of Tavola’s bartenders are shaking up national drinks-related competitions. Bar manager Steve Yang was named one of 12 regional finalists in the United States Bartenders’ Guild’s annual World Class bartending competition. “Qualifying is both humbling and terrifying,” Yang says of going shaker-to-shaker with some of the best bartenders in the country. An expert panel […]
Light rain falls softly and steady on patchy grass, whispering pat-pat-pat-pat as it dampens the rocky soil. It’s late February, and despite the rain, the air is warm at the foot of Bear Mountain in Amherst County. Dean Branham isn’t wearing a jacket, and rain droplets bead and roll off his baseball cap onto his […]
When Lincoln Perry lived in a house on Altamont Circle, he would crawl up to the roof of the Altamont apartment building to get a good view of the North Downtown neighborhood’s brick houses and church steeples for some of his paintings, including the one shown here. This painting is part of a series that […]
One of the most iconic images from the classic holiday film A Christmas Story is the fishnet stocking- and black stiletto-clad leg lamp that causes quite a stir when Ralphie’s dad, Mr. Parker, displays it in the front window of his home at Christmastime. With its fringe-trimmed shade reminiscent of a can-can dancer’s skirt, the […]