First Fridays 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.
Fine Arts
“Now and Then”: New work by local artist Nym Pedersen up at WriterHouse
Pablo Picasso once said, “It took me four years to paint like Raphael, but a lifetime to paint like a child.” Local artist Nym Pedersen understood Picasso’s quest and long ago joined the master on the road to imaginative artistic expression. Of course, Pedersen does not literally paint like a child, but he has maintained that [...]
Christian contemporary artists work to bridge the gap between faith and popular culture
What if I were to tell you that here in Charlottesville there is a nucleus of artists who self-identify as Christians, who are on the cutting edge of the scene, and who have no interest in converting you? We’re talking honest-to-goodness churchgoers exploring creativity with no evangelical intent other than to create works of art [...]
Jason Ring
05/20/2013 8:00 pm Jason Ring Blue Moon Diner, Charlottesville
April First Fridays Guide
First Fridays 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 [...]
ARTS Pick: Charlottesville Area Quilters Guild show
A Stitch in Time Springtime typically begets a seasonal bedspread switch, and this eighth-installment of the Charlottesville Area Quilters Guild (CAQG) biennial quilt show offers the best of warm, vibrant, and lively linen inspiration. Transforming the East Rivanna Fire Station into a hub of [...]
Cut and color: Jordan Grace Owens opts for bright, compelling simplicity
“I love old photographs,” Jordan Grace Owens said, “partly for nostalgia and partly for aesthetics—the weirdly forced poses and the flattened shadows from years of degradation. Most of my full-color paintings do refer to specific vintage photos, but the line drawings are almost entirely made up [...]
Anne Chesnut connects digital design and personal iconography
Gallery director, Lyn Warren said: “It’s very easy to enter Anne’s prints from different points. You can come at them from the standpoint of subject, concept, or visually. The more you look, the more you see.”
Nature versus nurture: Artists Allyson Mellberg and Jeremy Taylor examine coexistence
“In Jeremy’s work, all of his animals are really dignified,” Mellberg said. “Their eyes are really human. You identify with them beyond just seeing them as animals. The reason Jeremy uses the animals that he’s using isn’t because they’re cute, it’s because those animals are prey.”
March First Fridays Exhibits
First Fridays 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 [...]
Fast forward: Second Street Gallery celebrates 40 years of contemporary art for the people
“Perhaps we aren’t being controversial enough,” Steve Taylor, the director of Second Street Gallery, joked during a recent interview after explaining that no one had walked out of a show in a huff recently. Beneath the joke lay the inherent tension in Taylor’s job: Second Street’s mission [...]
Breaking the chrysalis: Whistler’s early work reveals non-conformist beauty
The butterfly of “Becoming the Butterfly,” The Fralin Museum’s current exhibition of etchings and lithographs by James Abbott McNeill Whistler refers to the stylized butterfly that Whistler used to sign his work and the exhibition.
UVA’s French department ventures out with a film festival
This weekend, UVA’s French department will show a selection of recent French films at various locations around town. The festival is aimed at both casual filmgoers and academics, and the organizers hope to draw French-speaking and subtitle-reading viewers.
ARTS Pick: SIN: An Exploration of Eroticism Through Art
FIREFISH Gallery presents “SIN: An Exploration of Eroticism Through Art.”
ARTS Pick: Kluge-Ruhe Valentine’s Day Tour
The Kluge-Ruhe Aboriginal Art Collection is hosting a Valentine’s Day Tour of Aboriginal expressions of love and romance.
A room of his own: Bradley Stevens at Warm Springs Gallery
Bradley Stevens works in oil because of its slow drying time, which allows him to manipulate it, softening it and blending it.
February’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.
ARTS Pick: Place Based
Thomas Wolfe says you can’t go home again. Leah Naomi Green and Josh Garrett-Davis seem to disagree. After swapping his South Dakota home for New York’s cityscape, Garrett-Davis found himself drawn back through his recent novel, Ghost Dances: Proving Up on the Great Plains. Green never [...]
October’s First Friday Listings
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 [...]
ARTS Pick: Yhonnie Scarce
Using glass to tell the story, Australian Aboriginal artist Yhonnie Scarce confronts the ominous history of her people and the role of colonization. She conveys a fragile legacy of violence and oppression through personal memories and abstract representation in works such as “The Day We Went [...]
Jean Hélion’s journey through abstraction at the Fralin Museum of Art
“Jean Hélion: Reality and Abstraction,” currently on view at UVA’s Fralin Museum of Art presents a small, yet rich collection of this under-appreciated artist’s work. The eight paintings and numerous works on paper are both handsome works of art and revealing souvenirs from Hélion’s artistic [...]
ARTS Pick: Picasso deconstructed
UVA art history professor Lydia Gasman spent countless hours studying, annotating, and deconstructing Modernist artwork and was a leading expert on Pablo Picasso. She was known for her unrivaled vision into the artist’s world, and amassed an enormous collection of analytic works. “Picasso, [...]
ARTS Pick: Final Fridays
Friday 8/31 Finals begin According to the UVA art scene, a final during your first week is the ideal way to ease back in to college life. The Final Fridays series kicks off with four special exhibitions at the Fralin Museum of Art. “Ancient Masters in Modern Styles,” “The Valley of the [...]