After being wooed by four mop-haired musicians in matching black turtlenecks harmonizing “Help!” on a television screen, 5-year-old Rob Sheffield became a Beatles mega fan. “Don’t you know that band broke up?” his parents would ask. “They don’t exist anymore,” his teacher would say. It was the early 1970s, and while they weren’t wrong—The Beatles […]
Over the past few weeks, Charlottesville artists have been mourning the loss and celebrating the life and work of one of their own. Local sculptor Gabriel Allan, whose larger-than-life bronze sculpture of a fire-winged man, “The Messenger,” is at IX Art Park, died March 15. Gabe, who grew up mostly in Crozet and Charlottesville, lived […]
Soft morning light filters in through the window of Andy Faith’s studio in the basement of McGuffey Art Center, and try as it might, the light can’t possibly illuminate every object on every shelf in the place. There’s an old Monticello Dairy ice cream carton, yellowed and full of rusty nails; tea bags; rough slabs […]
Sandwiched between South Street and some train tracks, the Pink Warehouse has stored various things throughout its 105 years: wholesale food for the Albemarle Grocery Co.; tools for the Chesapeake and Ohio Railway; imagination. In 1983, Roulhac and Ben Toledano—an author of architectural history books and a Southern literature-loving lawyer—bought the abandoned building. They renovated […]
Sitting on a bench full of pillows at a large, round wooden table she made with her own hands, Bolanle Adeboye smears veggie cream cheese on both halves of a cinnamon raisin bagel. The visual artist is fighting a cold, and her housemate, cellist and songwriter Wes Swing, asks if she’d prefer a cup of […]
About 100 miles outside of Berlin, Germany, author Tim Mohr stood in a snowy field gripping an axe in his hands. He’d borrowed a friend’s car to get there, and, anticipating neither the sub-zero cold snap nor the fact that he’d have to chop frozen wood in exchange for an interview with a former member […]
It was freezing cold, slick, and raining sideways the fall night that letterpress printer Amos Paul Kennedy Jr. spoke about his work at the Jefferson School African American Heritage Center. It was a small crowd, maybe due to the weather, says Maggie Guggenheimer, director of external relations for Virginia Humanities, who helped bring Kennedy to […]
The first unit Francesca Grazioli’s American studies class tackled was one on the history of Confederate statues “and how they affect surrounding communities,” says the St. Anne’s-Belfield junior. Impressed by how her classmates engaged in these difficult conversations, “especially in the context of August 11 and 12 [2017]…I thought that their voices, along with all […]
Deborah Willis has never been far from a camera. Her father was a photographer, and he documented many things, including frequent visits the family made from their home in Philadelphia to Virginia. Willis’ father grew up in Orange County, and they made trips to Charlottesville, Louisa, Fredericksburg, and Luray Caverns—many of them documented on film, […]
Greg Weaver has been playing video games since…well, since he can remember. Growing up, his family had an Atari system and his cousin had a classic Nintendo NES. One particularly exciting Christmas, the family got a Super Nintendo system. The Weaver siblings spent hours playing on the consoles, immersed in the worlds contained therein, but […]