Around the same time Aja Gabel began learning the alphabet, she began playing the violin. As she became more adept at writing, filling “notebooks with stories as kind of a way to play,” she became more skilled at reading and playing music. When she was 10 years old she traded the violin for the cello […]
From 1988 to 1992, two recent UVA graduates, Chris Farina and Reid Oechslin, set out with a camera, 16mm film, little money and no lighting equipment, to interview residents of Charlottesville’s West Main Street. They wanted to learn more about their newly adopted hometown by inquiring into the lives and histories of the people tethered […]
Artist Melissa Cooke Benson’s explorations in portraiture, long inspired by her daily life, have aligned with geographical moves, new and different cityscapes and cultures and alterations in her interior life, too. “With each life transition,” she says, “I’ve had to digest what’s going on around me and think of a way of incorporating what I […]
This week, New York-based artist Ed Woodham brings his Art in Odd Places festival to Charlottesville in a two-day, intensely collaborative event with the theme of “matter.” Sponsored by the UVA Studio Arts Board, the mission of AiOP, Woodham writes in the program guide, “is to engage and activate the everyday places in our lives. […]
What makes literature distinct from other art forms is the opportunity it allows us to inhabit the space in someone else’s mind, to experience a life other than our own. This act of temporarily shedding our perspectives and concerns teaches us empathy and compassion. After a year in which Charlottesville suffered the effects of intolerance, […]
It began at a Live Arts callback a few years ago. That’s where Lynn Thorne, a native Virginian who had just moved to Afton, met Jennifer. “We kind of became instant friends, and she shared with me pretty early on that her husband was transgender,” Thorne says. At the time, Thorne admits, she didn’t really […]
Premiered on Broadway in 1949 and revived in 2008, South Pacific tells the story of American naval officers (both nurses and sailors) stationed on an island during World War II who are forced to confront their own racist attitudes amidst love and war. This month the musical comes to life on stage at Charlottesville High […]
Imagine the thousands of hands that have held the spine of a library book, the fingers that have turned the pages. Imagine the moments in history that have intersected with the text through the lives of its readers. Beginning in 2015 and ending in June of 2017, a project called Book Traces @ UVA sought […]
With her new book, Sketchbook Dares: 24 Ways to Draw Out Your Inner Artist, artist, writer and teacher Laura Lee Gulledge challenges anyone of any skill level to draw. The former Louisa County art teacher says, “It’s the sort of book I wish I’d had starting off as a teacher but also as a creative […]
Every day since Donald J. Trump became the Republican presidential nominee on July 21, 2016, local artist Warren Craghead has drawn him, or someone in his administration. Now six months’ worth of Craghead’s daily drawings have been published in a collection titled Trump Trump, Volume 1: Nomination to Inauguration. “I thought when I started it […]