She paints the same view day after day, recording the subtle and great changes of hour, season, and weather. Her subject is both profoundly familiar to her and constantly changing. Laura Wooten’s “View from the Ridge” at Second Street Gallery features 90 small paintings (8 inches x 8 inches) and nine larger works (30 inches […]
Little looks: The biggest little show of the year returns when “Teeny Tiny Trifecta 3” begins this week. The juried group exhibition is a collection of three pieces, all measuring nine inches or smaller, from over 100 area artists who work in a variety of styles. The show also celebrates Second Street Gallery’s 47th season, […]
One of the first assignments Stacey Evans gives her photography class is to visit the same place at different times throughout the day, a few days in a row. She tasks her PVCC students with noticing the light, how it’s different minute to minute, hour to hour, day to day. If Monday’s morning light is […]
Throughout the month of March, sad email after sad email landed in Kristen Chiacchia’s inbox. Art fairs postponed, gallery shows canceled, museums closed to the public—and then there were the news reports. The Second Street Gallery executive director and chief curator decided to close her [...]
This week, something extraordinary will happen in Charlottesville: Four exhibitions of contemporary Aboriginal Australian art will open in four different venues across town, bringing the total number of such exhibitions currently on view to six. And a seventh will open in mid-February. Having [...]
Walking into Beatrix Ost’s “Illuminations & Illusions,” now on view at Second Street Gallery, I was immediately reminded of Hieronymus Bosch’s famous triptych “The Garden of Earthly Delights.” It wasn’t one particular painting that suggested this, but rather the cumulative effect of all the [...]
What do we really see when hues are subdued, diminished, or deleted outright? Tough question. If you’re like me—colorblind—that’s kind of how you go through life. Art’s power when deprived of its full spectrum of possibility is difficult to gauge, since most of us who live the difference are [...]
![Karen Blair (“Blue Iris”) is one of five area artists exhibiting beside two works by abstract expressionist Joan Mitchell in Second Street Gallery’s “Lady Painters: Inspired by Joan Mitchell,” on view until July 19. [Second Street]](https://www.c-ville.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/Blair-Blue-Iris-2016-mixed-media-on-canvas-43-x-43-320x170.jpg)
Three years after starting her tenure as Second Street Gallery’s executive director and chief curator, Kristen Chiacchia says she feels at home. For the next month, when she enters the gallery, among the works greeting her are a watercolor and oil painting by celebrated mid-century abstract [...]
Our voices bounce back at us as we speak. I’m one street over from the Downtown Mall in Megan Read’s studio, and it, like her paintings, has an uncluttered spaciousness about it. Older finished works line part of a wall, and paintings in progress are set up at various heights on another. But [...]
By CM Gorey Photography rules our lives now. And unless you’re a staunch Luddite with something to prove, you’re a contributor and a consumer from first coffee cup through alarm-setting before bed. We have transitioned from the point-and-shoot, badly lit grease fests of 1980s homespun glossies [...]
On the cusp of winter, the garden behind John Grant and Stacey Evans’ home is a spectrum of browns, greens, bare trees, bamboo shoots, and naked stems. It’s all askew as the fading light of day shines orange through the spaces formerly occupied by verdant leaves and vibrant blooms. Gardening [...]
Nonprofit Gearharts Chocolates Summer Open House Saturday, July 28 Tour the local chocolate purveyor’s production facility and get a taste of chocolates and other locally made treats. A portion of the day’s sales will benefit the CASPCA. Free, 11am-5pm. Gearharts Fine Chocolates, 243-B Ridge [...]
The inspiration for many of Regina Pilawuk Wilson’s paintings lies in another art form: weaving. At a roundtable discussion at the Kluge-Ruhe Aboriginal Art Collection, Wilson explains that her people, the Ngangikurrungurr, who are indigenous to Australia’s Daly River region, had passed on [...]
Artist Melissa Cooke Benson’s explorations in portraiture, long inspired by her daily life, have aligned with geographical moves, new and different cityscapes and cultures and alterations in her interior life, too. “With each life transition,” she says, “I’ve had to digest what’s going on [...]
Growing up in a family of artists and architects in Lahore, Pakistan, Murad Khan Mumtaz, a visual artist who practices the tradition of so-called Indian miniature painting, says the act of creating things came naturally. “My father, who is a practicing architect, has more or less [...]
First Fridays: December 1 “Every artist starts with something inside themselves that feels true to them,” says sculptor and installation artist Ivy Naté. “I’m not sure what came first for me…balancing chaos and order, or reinventing the obvious.” “I feel lucky that at times I am able to [...]
Each year, UVA’s student-run Arts Board Committee invites an artist to the University of Virginia. This year, in collaboration with the visual studio arts program, the students have invited New York-based artist Ed Woodham, founder and director of Art in Odd Places, a collaborative arts [...]
Maybe it’s a cheap conceit for a writer, but there are times when it’s necessary to state the obvious: One of art’s prime functions is to take you somewhere else. In a riveting moment of contemplation, art conveys you to a deeper plane of thought, motivates you to cultivate an unexpected [...]
A new exhibit at Second Street Gallery might represent the start of a new era for the gallery. José Bedia, a renowned Cuban painter and sculptor, will visit the gallery February 3 for a solo show and other events. Born in 1959 in Havana, Bedia studied Palo Monte, a branch of Congo-derived [...]
Despite living 2,100 miles apart, Charlottesville artist Matthew P. Shelton and Trinidadian artist Nikolai M. Noel are close friends. They met in Virginia Commonwealth University’s MFA program, where they studied painting and printmaking, and were interested in the influence of colonialism and [...]