“My fascination with the Underground Railroad began in elementary school,” says photographer Jeanine Michna-Bales in an email. “It was part of our school curriculum and I remember just being amazed that people had to go through this long journey in order to be free.” Michna-Bales, now based in Texas, grew up in the Midwest amid […]
Sometimes art is so public—in galleries, in gardens, on exterior walls of buildings—that unless we purchase it ourselves, we forget that it may go on to live a private life inside a home, becoming part of the fabric of lived human experience. In the case of “Housing2Home,” this month’s exhibition at New City Arts Initiative’s […]
Charlottesville native Henry Hoke remembers writing stories and poems while a student at Venable Elementary. “I think I always made things up,” he says. “I always came from places of imagination.” He left the city at age 18 to study film at NYU. After living in the world of film, first in New York and […]
Before Hannah Barnaby became a writer, she was an editor at Houghton Mifflin. It was there that the process of creating picture books first fascinated her. Yet it wasn’t until after the birth of her children that she began to read enough picture books to really understand how they worked. During the five years that […]
While singer-songwriter Devon Sproule’s sound has evolved over time, she continues to write thoughtful and compelling lyrics. This month her eighth album, The Gold String, will be released. The record is themed on the idea of an invisible string connecting all things, and the possibility of finding “spiritual togetherness in everyday life,” Sproule says. For […]
If you have never heard of Bix Beiderbecke, the unlikely jazz legend from a Midwestern, German-American family, listen to his tunes on YouTube or Spotify and you’ll want to know more. Dig deeper and you’ll learn that cornet soloist and pianist Leon Bismark “Bix” Beiderbecke was born in Davenport, Iowa, in 1903 and died in […]
Every superhero has an origin story that explains how he or she obtained superpowers, and sometimes these powers lie dormant until a challenge arises. Tom Tom Founders Festival writer-in-residence Roye Okupe didn’t know he had the power to write until he had no choice but to try. With a background in animation and an important […]
The second annual Shenandoah Fringe Festival—“a culmination of the wild, wondrous and weird of our region,” according to creative producer Carmel Clavin—is upon us. In a way, the festival, set in downtown Staunton, functions as the Island of Misfit Toys for the arts, by providing a platform for disparate artists not affiliated with a formal […]
Artist Sharon Shapiro has a unique history with the Welcome Gallery, where her exhibition “Above Ground” opens this week. Now operated by New City Arts Initiative, the space served as her art studio from 1996—when she first moved to Charlottesville from Atlanta—until 2001. Fittingly, her exhibition is themed on nostalgia—or the disruption of it—in an […]
The programming of the annual Virginia Festival of the Book—now in its 23rd year—always seems to strike a beautiful balance of gravity and levity, tragedy and comedy, difficult reality and the dream of a better future. The organizers draw from a vast array of writers with different lived experiences and this year is no exception. […]