Around 11 last Monday night, Holly Renee Allen could hear her son playing guitar in his room, picking out the notes to “House of the Rising Sun” and “Dueling Banjos.” As she listened to her 14-year-old work through the classic songs, she thought about the callouses on her own fingertips, the ones she started building […]
Kent Morris stands in the lobby of the Kluge-Ruhe Aboriginal Art Collection with a big grin on his face. He’s just in from a birding excursion through Charlottesville-area marshes, and swiping through photos on his phone: here’s a few of a bald eagle, and a few of its nest. Here’s one of a native bird […]
Hosting an all-LGBTQ+ hip-hop showcase has been on Remy St. Clair’s mind for a while now. Over the past few years, while performing at various regional Pride events as rap duo Sons of Ichibei, St. Clair and Cullen “Fellowman” Wade kept hearing similar refrains from artists on these Pride bills: “We’d love to…but we don’t […]
Federico Cuatlacuatl began making art when he was 7 years old. It was a “survival instinct” that kicked in when his family moved from Cholula, Mexico, to Indiana. “I knew like, two words of English, and I needed a way to communicate that I felt sad and depressed, and that I missed home, and that […]
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 […]
Like many ideas, singer Richelle Claiborne’s latest musical endeavor came into focus after a couple of bourbons. She had a story she wanted to tell—one about her creative influences, her ancestors, herself—and she wasn’t sure how to express it. An artist of many talents, Claiborne could work it out through poetry, a spoken word performance, […]
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 […]