Pick: Sacred Music of Monticello

Seeds of the soul: The community of enslaved people who lived and worked at Monticello developed musical traditions that influenced American music for centuries. Sacred Music of Monticello presents a program juxtaposing spirituals associated with Monticello’s enslaved people with a modified version of Giovanni Battista Pergolesi’s Stabat Mater, a composition found in the library at […]

More than pretty

It’s the accepted wisdom: You can’t have it all. Or can you? When it comes to gardens, C. Colston Burrell thinks maybe you can—and he’s spent a lifetime considering this very question. A noted horticulturist, garden designer, and author, Burrell will offer his thoughts at Beauty, Integrity and Resilience: Can a Garden Have Everything? The […]

Forged like metal

By Luke Williams Despite the chilly February evening, Second Street Gallery was filled with warm energy for the opening of “Stuart Robertson: A Suh Wi Dweet.” The exhibition offers a never-before-seen collection of portraits by Robertson, a Jamaican artist. The patois title translates roughly to “This is How We Do It,” foregrounding Robertson’s love of […]

McBride in stride

It’d be easy for a bunch of theater-minded folks to say to themselves, “I’m not part of the drag community, but I can put on a play about drag, no problem.” That would be a trap, though, and one the Live Arts’ production team wants to avoid in its latest play, The Legend of Georgia […]

Galleries: March

A sense of displacement: Fumi Ishino’s “On the Palette of Scarlet” at Visible Records “There was much of the beautiful, much of the wanton, much of the bizarre, something of the terrible, and not a little of that which might have excited disgust,” writes Edgar Allan Poe in his short story “The Masque of the […]

Pick: How to Live on Earth

All that you can’t leave behind: What if you had to say goodbye to Earth forever? In UVA Drama’s How to Live on Earth, four contestants win the opportunity of a lifetime—a trip to Mars—with the condition that they stay there forever. Playwright MJ Kaufman drew inspiration from the Mars One project and reality TV […]

Pick: Charles Owens

Smooth sax: Tenor saxophonist Charles Owens has been performing, composing, and teaching music for over 25 years. Owens got his start in New York, where he attended The New School. He’s released nine albums and regularly performs at venues in Charlottesville and Richmond, bringing listeners peace and happiness through the rich, mellow sounds of his […]

Pick: Mdou Moctar

Shreddin’ it forward: Growing up in Agadez, a desert village in rural Niger, Mdou Moctar built himself a guitar after seeing YouTube videos of Eddie Van Halen performing. Moctar combined Van Halen’s six-string techniques with traditional Taureg melodies to create a modern Saharan-rock sound, full of rhythmic drums, epic guitar shreds, and plenty of noise. […]

What art can be

By Matt Dhillon Since The Fralin Museum of Art at UVA was built in 1935, it’s had to close its doors a few times—once during World War II and again in the ’60s when the space was requisitioned for classrooms. In 2020, the growing pandemic shut the museum down for a third time. “There’s certainly […]

Small bites

Arrivederci, stay tuned There’s little that disappoints us more than a well-loved, local restaurant that’s gone before its time. Mangione’s on Main, known for an inviting ambiance as well as the quality of its hearty Italian cuisine, closed its doors just shy of the restaurant’s third anniversary. “Our lease was ending, and we knew that […]