November’s First Friday Exhibits

First Friday is a monthly art event featuring exhibit openings at many Downtown art galleries and additional exhibition venues. Several spaces offer receptions. Listings are compiled in collaboration with Piedmont Council for the Arts. To list an exhibit, please send information two weeks before opening to arts@c-ville.com. First Friday exhibitions: BozArt Gallery 211 W. Main […]

Virginia Film Festival celebrates 25 years of changing with the times

The phrase “calm like a duck” comes to mind. It is late September, 11 days before the announcement of the lineup for this year’s 25th Anniversary Virginia Film Festival, and festival director Jody Kielbasa and his staff are scrambling to pin down films and featured guests. Kielbasa is a pretty high-octane guy. Former Virginia Governor […]

ARTS Pick: Natalie Cole

Award-winning vocalist Natalie Cole has refreshed standards out of the Great American Songbook from Sinatra and her own father, Nat King Cole. With boundless vocal dexterity and a wealth of soulful emotion behind her lyrics, Cole is on tour supporting 2009’s Still Unforgettable, which harkens back to her ’91 Grammy Award for Album of the […]

ARTS Pick: Eric Church

Country megastar Eric Church operates in threes. Hat, sunglasses, and stubble are his distinctive on-stage accoutrements. Blood, sweat, and beers are not only a lifestyle for the devout Church-goers who come to his concerts, but the name of his record-breaking arena tour. Chief, his recent platinum album, is his third studio output. Church seamlessly weaves […]

ARTS Pick: Stanley Ann

Stanley Ann Dunham falls in love and marries a Kenyan student in the early ’60s. She struggles through a second marriage to a corrupt civil servant in Indonesia, and comes through it to work in anthropology and assist poverty-stricken women in third world countries. All the while she is raising the 44th President of the […]

ARTS Pick: Waynesboro Symphony Orchestra

The Waynesboro Symphony Orchestra has more than doubled its original 23-member size since its debut performance in 1996.  This increase in membership has brought with it nothing less than musical growth and a series of memorable performances. Led by Music Director Dr. Peter Wilson, former conductor of the National Symphony Orchestra, the group celebrates the […]

Years in the making: The silent thrill of being a luthier

The first thing I sensed after stepping inside Vacanti Violins on Fourth Street was a hush like I’d entered a shrine or a place of worship. The walls are lined with gleaming, caramel colored violins and the workshop area appointed with knives, planes, gouges, and scrapers of every shape and angle. Essence of varnish, wood, […]