Saul Kaplan puts his legacy on paper
“I’ve been drawing for 65 years. That’s not an exaggeration. I have a pile of stuff. In the end, I know they’re gonna pull a dumpster up, and there goes the stuff.“ Saul Kaplan, artist and poet, paused as he opened his self-published volume of drawings, ceramics, and paintings. “The way I explain it is, […]
Author Earl Swift’s improbable true stories reveal themselves
On any given day, you’ll find author Earl Swift writing in one of three places: the third floor of the VFH offices, Alderman Library, or Twisted Branch Tea Bazaar on the Downtown Mall. As he types in the company of academics and baristas, you’d never guess that he once lived in a canoe for 22 […]
Live Arts adapts cult novel
Peter DeMartino might never have spent nine months translating a 1920s Russian novel about Jesus, the devil, and a nine-foot-tall cat into a full-scale theatrical production if not for one strange affinity. “I met Julie [Hamberg, artistic director at Live Arts] after I got to play Edna in Hairspray,” said DeMartino, who works as the […]
Knit stop: All you need is Two Arms!
Picture this: It’s a sunny day, and new leaves rustle overhead as you walk along the Downtown Mall. In the distance you see people moving their arms, loaded with cloud- or cocoon-like substances. As you approach, you realize they’re actually knitting, using their arms like needles to weave thick skeins of yarn made from old […]
Peter Ryan’s new dinner table drama
By turns a screenwriter, off-Broadway playwright, and local children’s theater author, Peter Ryan found his latest creative sweet spot at the Holiday Inn on Fifth Street. “This is theater for people who get restless during normal theater,” he said of his latest show, The Club Ritz Caper, which performs in the hotel restaurant during dinnertime. “It’s […]
Jen Sorensen wins the Herblock for excellence in editorial cartooning
If you’ve heard the name Jen Sorensen, it may be because she’s the 2014 winner and first female recipient of the prestigious Herblock Prize for editorial cartooning—or because she’s been published in C-VILLE Weekly for more than a decade. “I went to UVA as an undergrad and wound up sticking around Charlottesville for many years after […]
The abundant, accessible art of Warren Craghead
“I recently saw a book of Picasso’s work where they published everything he did, and between two awesome paintings were about a hundred that weren’t so great.” Warren Craghead laughed with what sounded like relief. “I remember thinking, ‘Oh, right. This is the real world. I shouldn’t feel so bad about myself.’” The Charlottesville-based cartoonist […]
Swatch watch: Brighten up
Need to take your home décor out of hibernation? We asked Second Yard’s Jon Floyd to recommend a few of the Downtown shop’s warmer prints now that spring has sprung. Here are our favorites from what he pulled.
Les Yeux du Monde welcomes color in ‘Visions of Spring’
If you’re tired of grey skies and slush, you might want to visit Les Yeux du Monde before the end of March. “When you walk in the gallery, you see a lot of color,” said Lyn Bolen Warren, the curator of the space’s current exhibit, Visions of Spring. “You see these big painted urns reaching upward, […]
One-woman show could possibly save the world
If you’re reading this on your smartphone, and you’ve got Facebook, Twitter, and an appreciation for live comedy and action/adventure, you’re needed at the Helms Theater. There’s a world that needs to be saved, and only you can save it. In her one-woman show, Mission: Implausible!, veteran actor, director, writer, and UVA MFA student Sandi […]
Local authors turn to self-publishing with mixed emotions, success
When a heart attack left Avery Chenoweth wondering how much time he had left, the author decided to self-publish for the first time. A Charlottesville resident since 1990, Chenoweth had already published Albemarle: A Story of Landscape and American Identity, Empires in the Forest: Jamestown and the Making of America, and the short story collection […]
WriterHouse sponsors new creative nonfiction contest
For many years, The Hook ran a writing contest in conjunction with the Virginia Festival of the Book that was judged by John Grisham. With the newspaper’s closure last summer, it looked like local writers were out of luck if they wanted to compete for cash and readers. But WriterHouse, the local nonprofit dedicated to […]
Ten locals interpret written work through visual art
When FIREFISH Gallery co-curators Araxe Hajian and Sigrid Eilertson brainstormed concepts for their next collaborative project, they decided to flip the script. Rather than host a visual art show that invited verbal interpretation, they decided to ask visual artists to interpret Hajian’s short story “This is How You Open a Pomegranate.” “I didn’t see this […]
Live Arts production of Grey Gardens is a beautiful musing on interiority
The façade of a large house spans the stage, partly obscured by white drop cloths on which the shadows of trees create a ghostly overlay. The year is 1973, and an elderly woman in a yellow one-piece bathing suit, quilted housecoat, and striped sunhat wobbles out onto the gray clapboard porch. Radio static cuts through […]
Kate Daughdrill on the power of social sculpture
“Social sculpture is the idea that whenever we’re shaping our own lives to be more beautiful, it’s an intentional act to bring more beauty or well-being into the world,” said Kate Daughdrill, a Detroit-based artist, farmer, and teacher who graduated from UVA. Daughdrill is one of 20-plus presenters slated to bring social sculpture to Charlottesville’s […]
Taking the story off the page
When Andy Friedman enrolled in the Rhode Island School of Design, he devoted himself to Venetian oil painting, a skill so intricate that each work takes an average of three years to finish. “I knew that after college I would have to get a job, and I wanted to know the feeling of complete and […]
“Threesome” holds the ideal woman in a new light
“When people think of the word threesome, they think of one man and two women, and they think of the man getting pleasured by the women,” said Tif Robinette, a self-declared feminist. “But here we have three really strong female artists from the state of Virginia reacting to and tearing apart ideas of the ideal […]
Lord Huron’s existential sonic pursuit
Have you ever driven through the desert? Flown across dry, red earth while mammoth spires of stone and humps of rock pin back the wide blue horizon? Maybe you stopped in the shadow of a peak and began to climb through wiry brush and sandy succulents, picking a forgotten trail up the monolith’s face. Dust […]
Insufficient Funds: Can public money grow Charlottesville’s arts scene?
It seems like an absurd plan to grow a city’s art scene: take the cultural community, run it through two years of focus groups and surveys, and publish six long-range goals (diversity and inclusion, arts education, cultural destination, creative workers, creative placemaking, and cultural infrastructure). It’s a wonky, almost anti-artistic approach. Doesn’t such an effort […]
The new New Age: A fledgling UVA society has millennials talking about psychic fulfillment
I met Nick Lasky the day after my birthday during Charlottesville’s first-ever psychic festival. The tarot card reader, festival coordinator, and UVA fourth year wore a striped Baja hoodie and long hair under a fuzzy pink bunny hat. “So you’re the reporter,” he said. I’d come to the Aquarian Bookshop on the Downtown Mall to understand […]
Charlottesville Ballet puts a new twist on the art of dance
“When I was 3, my parents took me to see The Nutcracker, and I remember telling them, ‘I want to be the Sugar Plum Fairy,’” said Caitlin Lennon. “They were like ‘O.K., sure, we’ll sign you up for ballet classes.’ But in my mind I thought, ‘No, I’m gonna do that. I’ll take classes for a […]
ASC’s She Stoops To Conquer stands on comic timing
With a tilt of her head and a cascade of red curls, Kate Hardcastle considered her suitor across stage. “You’re so great a favorite there, you say?” “Yes, my dear,” Young Charles Marlow grinned, determined to prove to this beautiful barmaid his popularity at the Ladies Club. Swaggering toward the stage right audience, he looked […]
PVCC reaches out to the community for Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead
When Tom Stoppard wrote Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, an absurdist comedy about two minor characters from Shakespeare’s Hamlet, he was only 27 years old. Trapped in a nebulous otherworld, courtiers Rosencrantz and Guildenstern debate the nature of freedom and fate from lives pre-scripted to death. Comic dialogue coupled with philosophical themes, including the use […]
Filmmaker and actor Brian Wimer on freedom in expression
“There’s a point in Peter Pan when Peter and Wendy are pretending to be parents to the Lost Boys. Peter says, ‘Are we playing or is this real?’ Wendy says, ‘Oh it’s a game, but it’s real.’ Eventually Peter says, ‘I’m tired of playing this game, let’s play a different one.’ But that’s the reality […]
Spirited away: An amateur’s foray into ghost hunting yields spooky results
Rain pattered against windows of the Court Square apartment where I sat in near-darkness, listening for ghosts. Two friends and I watched our lone light source, a candle, cast wavering gold on the ceiling. We were alone in the living room, but we asked our questions out loud. “Do you remember this kind of candlelight?” […]
Live Arts takes off with Stephen Adly Guirgis’ The Motherfucker with the Hat
When Stephen Adly Guirgis wrote The Motherfucker with the Hat, he didn’t overthink the f-bomb. “It just felt like the right title,” he told me in a recent interview. “I also thought the play was going to be performed in my company’s 99-seat theater.” Not quite. While Guirgis prepared the show at LABrynth, the West […]
ARTS Pick: The xx
London trio The xx performs its signature chill-out electro pop on the final leg of a U.S. tour that followed the 2012 launch of its latest album Coexist. Fresh from a festival circuit that included Coachella and Bonnaroo, the band blends gentle rock with metaphysical themes and electronic elements resulting in evocative, intriguing trance ballads […]