Tag: Fine Arts

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 I graduated,” Sorensen said in a recent phone interview. “I think it was in 2002 that I wound up coming into the C-VILLE Weekly office for a meeting with Cathy Harding, the editor then. It was kind of scary, but she gave me a chance, and it was the beginning of my getting published by alt weeklies.”

Today, Sorensen’s work appears in The Progressive, The Nation, The Austin Chronicle, NPR, Ms., Politico, activist website Daily Kos, and alt weeklies around the country. She’s known for pointed observation of thorny issues like gun control, racism, income inequality, health care, and sexism.

After being a finalist for the Herblock in 2011, Sorensen told the Washington Post that she admired the prize’s eponymous artist because “he cartooned from a definite moral perspective—and a good one, at that. Too many daily editorial cartoonists go for the easy-breezy sight gag or contemporary movie reference without actually saying much. Herblock took the job seriously.”

Sorensen often tackles the telling of difficult truths with a strong first-person narrative. Her point of view is an easy stand-in for “the little guy,” oft-maligned by big business or murky government policy, and her careful explanations of complicated issues expose convoluted logic for easy scrutiny. The results are factually substantiated arguments for or against politically controversial subjects. Take her widely read 2012 piece “An Open Letter to the Supreme Court About Health Insurance.”

“I drew [‘An Open Letter’] right before the Supreme Court was ruling on the Affordable Care Act,” Sorensen said. “I just wanted to say that as a self-employed person I’d had a lot of problems with health insurance over the years. My husband got denied because he had plantar fasciitis. My insurance costs were skyrocketing.”

The piece went on to win a Robert F. Kennedy journalism award for editorial cartooning, and her 2014 follow-up comic, “My Experience with Obamacare: A Freelancer in Texas Applies for Health Insurance,” went viral after being featured on NPR.

“I was trying to combat some of the conventional wisdom about Obamacare and share a story that many people aren’t hearing,” Sorensen said. “Yes, it’s annoying that the website went down yesterday, but I think that pales in comparison to the benefit of people like me being able to receive care.”

Sorensen’s commentary ranges from coverage of Democratic conventions and Sarah Palin rallies to cartoons about “the coup against President Sullivan and the corporatization of higher education,” she said. It’s an evolution she might not have foreseen as an undergrad.

“When I got out of college my biggest influences were Robert Crumb and B. Kliban, people who had an absurdist sense of humor,” she said. “That’s how my strip started out in the late ’90s. Then the 2000 election came along, and the political climate changed so dramatically I felt compelled to draw about it.”

When asked if she misses creating lighter fare, Sorensen mentioned the book of Gary Larson wiener dog art she has lying around her house. “I look at all these fake paintings and think, ‘This is pure humor just for humor’s sake,’” she said. “I still love doing strips about pop culture and technology, but politics are an endless source of inspiration. I can’t help myself.”

Sorensen and Bob Woodward will speak at the annual Herblock Prize ceremony at the Library of Congress on April 29. See page 31 for this week’s comic.

 

*A previous version of this story mistakenly cited Pete Levin, not B. Kliban, as one of Sorensen’s biggest influences.  It also said that Gary Larson art appeared on her walls of her home instead of in a book.

“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 has made a creative career of drawing “without thinking,” sketching by impulse during television shows, theater performances, even at stoplights. He also creates more careful and deliberate drawings but commits to execution above all else.

Incredibly prolific, with a pen in hand and pad in pocket at any given time, “I draw all the time,” Craghead said near the end of our phone interview. “I’m kind of drawing right now.”

We discussed a theory I’ve read in Steven Pressfield’s The War of Art: Artists need diligence, to do the work and remain divorced from the outcome. Waiting for the muse is for amateurs, Pressfield said. Consistency predicates success.

“Art doesn’t have to be a rarified space,” Craghead agreed. “I don’t have to go to a studio with my fancy paper and expensive pen. My batting average of good drawings is not better than anyone else’s, but I do more of them. It’s the way I process the world.”

Craghead draws in visceral reaction to the world around him, filtering news through sketches in order to assemble ideas into narrative coherence. “I see these horrible things on the news and feel powerless, so even though it does nothing in the real world I start drawing about it,” he said. His recent book, Untitled, is a collection drawn from images of victims of a gas attack in Ghouta, Syria, and all proceeds from it go to Save The Children’s Syrian Children’s Relief Fund.

Ladyh8rs, a Tumblr Craghead created and dedicated to “grotesque portraits of misogynists,” came to him when “they were contemplating making transvaginal ultrasounds a prerequisite to abortions in Virginia, and I got really mad,” he said. “Unfortunately there are always new people to draw.”

Craghead’s children, Violet and Ginger, are happier subjects of inspection. “Fauves,” a series of RGB-saturated children’s comics, records their actions and conversations in an attempt to capture “the crazy incandescence of kids.”

Not all of his work follows a theme, however. “I started as a painter, so I got used to confusion, being O.K. with chaos and not having everything nailed down,” he said. He often blends language with his sketches, approaching pieces like a poet. “People talk about comics and jump right to graphic novels, but words and images together don’t necessarily have to be a story,” he said.

In fact, exposing art to the world may be just as important as the art itself. “My work insists that art can be accessible, cryptic, and beautiful all at the same time,” reads Craghead’s artist statement, and his brand of “eco-lo-fi-publishing” makes it possible. He sends work out into the world—a concept he calls “seed toss”—as notes for his daughters’ lunches, free print-and-fold art books, drawings on postcards, and sketches on Post-Its that he leaves around town. “I’m sure most of them just get swept aside when someone cleans up,” he said, but permanence isn’t the point.

“Think about humans versus dandelions,” he said. “We gestate our young, these singular creatures, and take care of them for years. Some artists work that way, but there’s another way of looking at it. Dandelions release thousands of seeds. The majority don’t survive, but everywhere there can be a dandelion, there will be a dandelion.”

See Warren Craighead’s exhibit “We Are Waiting in a Forest” at WriterHouse through the end of April.

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 before opening to arts@c-ville.com.

First Fridays: April 4, 2014

BON 100 W. South St. Acrylic paintings by Chicho Lorenzo. 5-7pm.

BozArt 211 W. Main St. “New Beginnings” exhibit featuring works by the Central Virginia Watercolor Guild. 5-9pm.

The Bridge PAI 209 Monticello Rd. “Habitat City” on display for the public. 6-8pm.

CitySpace 100 Fifth St. NE. “Create2,” a group exhibit and artwork by Katie McKinley in the PCA office. 5:30-7pm.

C’Ville Arts 118 E. Main Street. “Making Time” by clock maker Allan Young. 6-8pm.

Fellini’s #9 200 W. Market St. Photography, oil and watercolor paintings, pencil drawings and mixed media by the staff of Fellini’s. 5:30-7pm.

FIREFISH Gallery 108 Second St. NW. “Eyes on the Infinite,” paintings by Cristina Rutkowski. 5:30-8pm.

McGuffey Art Center 201 Second St. NW. “From Heaven to Earth,” sculptures and mosaics by Ninni Baeckstrom in the Sarah B. Smith Gallery; “Art Meets Ecology” in Lower Hall North; illustrations by Kate Samworth and Bob Anderson in Lower Hall South; an exhibition of new sculpture and drawings by Fred Crist and oil paintings on canvas and paper by Renee Balfour in the Upper Hall Galleries. 5:30-7:30pm.

Mudhouse 213 W. Main St.  “Leadline,” steel sculptures by Lily Erb. 6-8pm.

New Dominion Bookshop 404 E. Main St. “New Creations” by Lindsey Oberg. 5:30-7:30.

Second Street Gallery 115 Second Street SE. Various artists contribute their work for an ticketed benefit auction on April 12. 5:30-7:30.

Telegraph 110 Fourth St. NE. “Epic Encounters” featuring prints by various artists. 5-10pm.

Warm Springs Gallery 105 Third St. NE. “Rhythm and Motion” by Joseph Holston. 6-8pm.

WriterHouse 508 Dale Ave. “We Are Waiting In A Forest,” drawings by Warren Craghead. 5:30-7:30pm.

WVTF and Radio IQ Studio Gallery 216 W. Water St. “Landscape of Myth II,” paintings by Michael Heivly. 5-7pm.

OTHER EXHIBITS

Albemarle County Office Building 401 McIntire Road. “VSA Art Show” featuring works by more than one hundred local artists with disabilities.

Angelo 220 E. Main St. “New Work: Marsh and Ocean,” paintings by Robin Braun.

“Creperie Gallery” at The Flat 111 Water St. E. Recent paintings by Randy Smith.

Fralin Museum of Art at the University of Virginia 155 Rugby Rd. “Jasper Johns: Early Prints from the Collections of Jordan D. Schnitzer and his Family Foundation,” “Portraying the Golden Age: Drawings from the Maida and George Abrams Collection,” and “Joseph Cornell and Surrealism.”

The Garage 250 First St. N. “Objects in mirror,” an exhibit by John Early with a reception on Friday, April 11, 5-8pm.

Java Java 421 E Main St. Watercolors and acrylics by Lisa Bennet and Kari Caplin with a reception on Sunday, April 6, 2-4pm.

Kluge-Ruhe Aboriginal Art Collection 400 Worrell Dr. “having-been-there” by Nici Cumpston.

Les Yeux du Monde 841 Wolf Trap Road. “Still Life and Other Subjects,” paintings by Trisha Orr.

Piedmont Virginia Community College 501 College Dr. “7th Annual Chocolate Chowdown” featuring a variety of art student works and chocolates for visitors with a reception on Friday, April 18, 5-7pm.

Pigment 1229 Harris St. #13. “Bloomers” acrylic on wood paintings by Bolanle Adeboye.

Spring Street Boutique 107 W. Main St. “Artists and Elephants,” featuring oil paintings by Lindsley Matthews, acrylic paintings by Beth Hamerschlag, and photographs by Erwin Baumfaulk.

Thomas Jefferson Memorial Church 717 Rugby Rd. “Paintings’ Skeletons” by Mordiqai McQuade with a reception on Sunday, April 6, at noon.

A rich and deeply satisfying show, “Joseph Cornell and Surrealism” at the Fralin Museum explores Cornell’s work in the context of the Surrealist movement of the 1930s and ’40s. Prior to seeing it, I had the common, yet incorrect impression, that Cornell was a hermit-like creature akin to Henry Darger who created his work in a self-imposed vacuum.

While it’s true Cornell lived most of his life in the modest home he shared with his mother and invalid brother in Queens, rarely leaving the city and never venturing beyond New England, Cornell was from a fine old New York family. Before his father died, which significantly altered the family fortunes, Cornell had enjoyed an idyllic childhood in Nyack, New York and attended Phillips Academy. Though he was painfully shy, he was an inveterate gallery goer and engaged with other artists in the Surrealist circle (André Breton, Max Ernst, and Marcel Duchamp, among others) who had made New York their home in the years leading up to the second World War.

Cornell worked with both collage and assemblage. In the former, two-dimensional materials are glued to a flat surface. Cornell’s assemblages include curios like the charming Bel Écho Gruyère, a round cheese container that holds the noisemaker from a moo box disguised as a wrapped wedge of cheese. When the box is turned upside down, it bleats. He is most famous for his shadow boxes featuring found objects in various arrangements under glass. These works evoke a cabinet of curiosities, or a shop window and also suggest specimens offered up for examination.

Given his personal history it’s no wonder Cornell was obsessed with childhood, the time when things had been so rosy for him. Nature, science, and fantasy also come into play, and the color blue. Mysterious and otherworldly, it adds a sense of romance and nostalgia. Many of his boxes have blue glass and his film, Rose Hobart, was projected through a blue lens.

“Hölderlin Object” is a rhapsodic homage to the Romantic poet, Friedrich Hölderlin using this hue. Here, the blue glass “imbues it with a sense of what the Germans would call Sehnsucht, a kind of longing,” said Fralin director Bruce Boucher. Cornell’s boxes have always reminded me a bit of reliquaries and this seems particularly the case with the oak leaf, a symbol of majesty, strength, and endurance, and the sumptuously bound object that may or may not be a volume of Hölderlin’s work, made precious by its containment within an elegant, inlaid wood box.

My favorite boxes are “Untitled (Game),” whose austere beauty seems to harken back to early American games and the two Dovecotes that presage Donald Judd. One can clearly see Cornell’s influence rippling through contemporary art. Unfortunately, for every one like these exemplaries, there are a dozen Cornell boxes that have inspired legions of soulless copycat assemblages and even a work like Edward Kienholz’s dreary (and creepy) “The Wait.”

While they’re not my favorite, there’s something so poignant about the boxes referencing French hotels. I imagine Cornell, too paralyzed by various personal issues to travel, toiling away in his basement workroom all the while thinking about the France he dearly loved but would never see while constructing “Grande Hôtel de la Boule d’Or” and “Hôtel de L’Étoile.”

Cornell’s filmmaking is a revelation. The lush and enigmatic Rose Hobart is shown together with Duchamp’s Anémic Cinéma and Man Ray’s L’Étoile de Mer recreating a 1936 screening of the same three at the Levy Gallery. Cornell’s is a montage created from the 1931 film East of Borneo and is named for the female lead, the long forgotten Hobart, who must have been one of those actresses Cornell was known to worship from afar.

In “Monsieur Phot,” a film scenario collage in black and red paper with stereoscope photographs, one is struck by Cornell’s innate eye for design. And it’s not surprising that he made extra cash designing covers and feature layouts for Harper’s Bazaar, View, Dance Index, and other magazines.

One of the great delights of the show is the small gems by prominent Surrealists on display. There are two gorgeous and wonderfully restrained Dalis, “Solitude” and “Paranoiac-Astral Image,” a splendid Max Ernst, “Red Sun and Forest,” and Duchamp’s enchanting and inspired miniature collection of his most famous works, “From or by Marcel Duchamp or Rose Sélavy (Box in a Valise)” on which Cornell collaborated as the box fabricator.

Despite the obvious cross-pollination going on between Cornell and the Surrealists, he made a point of separating himself from them, famously saying that they practiced black magic, while he practiced white magic. Supposedly their erotic bent was a turn-off for the reticent Cornell. But more to the point, his art is really a Surrealist-Dada hybrid. He cherry-picked what he wanted from each movement, adding his own unique slant to the mix. While I am not wild about the fussy, Victoriana-tinged pieces that have been copied ad nauseum, others are so striking and moving it’s hard not to fall under their spell. Cornell brilliantly combined the naïve with the sophisticated, offering fleeting glimpses of meaning that only add to the work’s allure.

“Joseph Cornell and Surrealism” is a collaboration between the Fralin, which owns six Cornell boxes and 14 collages, the majority of which were donated by the Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation, and the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Lyon where it was exhibited during the fall/winter.

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, a collage of a tree that is almost life-size. Some pieces are smaller, quieter and more meditative, but the colors are very optimistic. They all have that same hopeful feel.”

Visions of Spring, a six-artist show that runs through March 30, portrays landscapes and life sources, lakes and fields and flowers and fruits that recall natural renewal and preservation. “Some artists are very specific,” Warren said. “They grew up on farms and are watching the world turn into parking lots, so this is how they try to preserve what they remember.”

While each artist brings distinct intentions and styles to the show, Warren, who has her Ph.D. in art history, selected both gallery newcomers and regulars for their awareness of art in its historical context. “Priscilla’s paintings are like Monet’s,” she said. “Ann Lyne has her own really expressionistic stylist way of painting, with lots of gesture and movement, that references the greats from Degas to Matisse, Picasso and Diebenkorn. Lou Jordan’s latest paintings are reminiscent of Milton Avery in their color and subject matter. John McCarthy, who died in 2008, wrote about studying Matisse and his colors. He was interested in doing the things the early modern masters did, and he did a great job learning their lessons.”

Unlike the work by the masters, however, many pieces in Visions “can be purchased for less than the cost of having a poster framed,” Warren said. And they preserve the energy of blue skies and warm breezes, the resonant gratitude of artists who dwell in a confluence of memory and present moment.

Contributing artist Elizabeth Bradford called her work a meditation, “the meeting of a real place, my spiritual reaction to it, and the visual vocabulary I use for expressing that reaction. Sometimes that meditation is about stillness, and sometimes it is about overwhelming activity, both of which exist side by side in the natural world.”

“Spring by the Lake was literally painted when the very first natural wildflowers peeked up through the ground,” said contributor Priscilla Whitlock. “Imagine standing in the middle of a field with clovers, blue-eyed grasses, buttercups, ferns, and colored weeds intermingling at your feet. The brush work echoes the rhythm of the growth on the ground.”

Lou Jordan uses oil paints to likewise savor and spend time with his subjects. “When I spent time in Rome recently, I looked out our window and saw herb beds and an orchard,” he said. “Lemon trees were wrapped in white to protect them from cool weather as the lemons ripened. The beds were turned over for new plants, and early lettuce and herbs were visible in some. I painted this many times, and I walked through it and remembered it.”

“I grew up on a farm in Kentucky with a naturalist painter grandmother who took her grandchildren on long nature walks,” said Cary Brown, a contributor whose paintings pay homage to springtime birds in danger of extinction. “For instance, the Whippoorwill has almost completely disappeared because of compromised farmland and pesticides,” she said. “This was a bird many of us knew in our childhoods, a sound we went to sleep hearing.”

John McCarthy’s wife, Judy, sees gratitude in her late husband’s work, a translation of the joy we all feel when springtime finally arrives. “Winters were so cold and confining to him,” she wrote, “and this was the time of year he would venture out and take photos of new buds in the fading light. The colors were so glorious after the dark days of winter. He would have epiphany moments that were then transformed into works of art, and we would both see the world with new eyes.”

Les Yeux du Monde will host an artists’ luncheon on Wednesday, March 26.

Mary Buford Hitz was in her late 20s when Hurricane Camille’s devastating floods hit Nelson County on the night of August 19 1969, killing 153 people in a few hours and forever changing the mountain landscape.

Hitz, a Richmond native who now lives in Charlottesville, was staying on family property in Afton that late summer week. Five days after the skies cleared, she and her brother drove 10 miles south on the Blue Ridge Parkway to Reed’s Gap to survey the damage.

“The creek was back into its little confines, but 30′ from it, there would be a shed stuck in a tree, dead cows, farm equipment that just ended up there.”

She’s carried those sights and the stories of death and survival that emerged in the wake of the storm with her all her life. Last year, they became the framework for her first novel, Riding to Camille, self-published through Authorspress in Charlottesville.

“You never have the same sense of security that that kind of thing can’t happen once you’ve witnessed it happen,” she said of those days in the Blue Ridge. “It’s proof of the forces of nature that can strike with total randomness.”

Hitz has long been a writer, but never of fiction. When she and her husband, former CIA Inspector General Frederick Hitz, were living in Northern Virginia in the ’70s, she began freelancing for the Washington Post and later penned stories for the Richmond Times Dispatch and area magazines. In 2000, the University of Virginia Press published her biography of her mother, Elisabeth Scott Bocock, a “flawed but feisty” woman who pioneered historic preservation efforts in Richmond.

She wrote from life, from experience, from memory, so penning novels never occurred to her. “I don’t go around with plots fomenting in my brain,” she said. But the year her book on her mother was published, she was handed some characters who begged to be put on a page.

They were strangers, thrown together on a horsepacking trip through New Zealand’s Southern Alps. The trip was write-home-worthy in itself—Hitz tripped while leading a horse down a remote mountainside and broke her leg, requiring a rescue initiated with a call from a 40′ antenna erected in a sheep hut. But it was the people who captivated her: A gruff male outfitter estranged from his distant, cold wife; a young Swiss woman who seemed to have seized his attention; a collection of smart young travelers who banded together in the face of adversity.

She found herself imagining their backstories and the events that led to that trip full of tension and trouble. It was a natural step to set the unfolding of their imagined personal calamities against the backdrop of Camille, a disaster in a time and place so perfectly burned into her own memory.

“I didn’t really invent the story,” Hitz said. “The characters gave me the story.”

They came to life through a long writing process that led her to a residency at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts in Amherst, where she hunkered down for 11 days, getting herself “in a mood of catastrophe”—something she found was necessary before she could screw up the fortitude to write vividly about violent ends.

The result is the story of an unsuccessful marriage rocked by a sudden, passionate tryst just as the historic storm tears apart a group of horseback-riding tourists on a mountain outing. Woven in is Hitz’s own passion for horses, for histories, and for a landscape that, while achingly beautiful, can be a setting for destruction and death. Because as fascinating as she found the novelist’s task of filling in the blanks, what moves her most is still the true story underneath the plot.

“I wanted to make someone who reads it, who had no contact with Camille at all, understand that everything that happened to individuals in the book—the fictional characters—actually happened to somebody,” she said.

Each March, visiting and local literati of all ages and reading preferences fill Charlottesville for the annual Virginia Festival of the Book. History buffs and romance readers mingle with self-published writers and award-winning authors including John Grisham, Lois Lowry, and John Lewis.

Attendees have lots of choices to make during the five-day festival (March 19-23). Elaborate transportation routes are planned to get from one venue to the next and it’s a struggle to find a window to eat between author panels. Inevitably, there are sessions that slip through the cracks or hold a conflicting time slot. There are also the can’t-miss moments.

Sometimes obvious, sometimes buried deep in the schedule, these are the hidden gems sought by festival goers. The 2014 panels offer two such opportunities with authors who are especially notable for being offbeat and off the beaten path.

You know Chip Kidd. Perhaps not by name, but if you’ve ever picked up a copy of Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park, David Sedaris’ Naked, or Haruki Murakami’s IQ84, then you’ve held his work in your hands. You can get to know Kidd a bit better through a special StoryFest presentation on his recent book, Go: A Kidd’s Guide to Graphic Design.

As a graphic designer known for his book covers, Kidd is quirky and engaging. A focus on typography and visual puns imbues his designs with a distinct personality that is easily identifiable on coffee tables, bookstore displays, and library shelves around the world. Words can’t do justice to the designs, but a stunning amount of his work is collected in Chip Kidd: Book One: Work: 1986-2006. Go take a look; I’ll be holding your place here when you get back.

Infinitely versatile, Kidd is also a writer. Much like his book covers, Kidd’s two novels (The Cheese Monkeys and The Learners) are witty and colorful explorations of graphic design. Autobiographical in parts, with main characters who are practicing graphic designers, the novels are accessible and fun to read.

Taking a break from fiction, Kidd’s recent authorial stint led to the publication of a graphic design guide for children. Go: A Kidd’s Guide to Graphic Design features easy -to-understand explanations of the design process, samples from some of the modern design masters, and hands-on projects to try. The book’s Tumblr (gothebook.tumblr.com) even has a way to submit designs (your own or your child’s; no one has to know) created during these projects. This book—and really all of Kidd’s work—is meant to draw attention to the art form of graphic design and bring awareness to the design that goes into every aspect of our daily lives. Whether it’s a book cover, a gum wrapper, or a printed festival schedule, you’ll never look at the world the same after an encounter with Chip Kidd.

“Chip Kidd and Go: A Kidd’s Guide to Graphic Design” will be held on March 22 at 4pm in the Monroe Room at the Omni Hotel. The event is free and open to the public.

Off the beaten path

There are guidebooks to help you find the best jazz club in New Orleans or the most authentic pizza in Naples, and then there are books for travelers seeking the furthest corners of the world. Bradt travel guides are the latter, meant for adventurers—and armchair adventurers—but certainly not for your average ski bunny or beach bum planning an upcoming vacation. For example, new releases include guides to Borneo, Sudan, Jordan, and Zimbabwe.

In an ideal world, my bag would have been packed before I even finished writing that sentence, and I’d be on a plane to Harare by now. But that would mean missing Hilary Bradt’s Festival of the Book presentation, where she’ll share tales of her own travel adventures as well as her similarly daring efforts in forming Bradt Travel Guides Ltd.

Celebrating its 40th anniversary this year, the publishing company prints travel memoirs as well as adventure guides, including the founder’s breathtaking story of crossing Ireland on horseback. The theme that runs through all Bradt books is that of sustainable travel. For example, a popular series is on slow travel (similar to the slow food movement). All of the titles, though, are packed from cover to cover with helpful information, informed tips, and a uniquely engaging degree of the individual writer’s personality. The publisher also offers a Bradtpackers newsletter for readers interested in having these tantalizing travel tales delivered directly to their inbox.

Though Bradt’s wanderlust was born out of a deep love for Laurence Olivier and a theater mishap, her first travel guide was written while floating down the Amazon River. She seemingly hasn’t stopped adventuring, writing, leading tours, and publishing since. Thus far, she’s written 14 books and helped create an international community of adventurers who share her curiosity. Bradt will be sharing in person at “Wild Adventures and Extreme Publishing with Hilary Bradt,” moderated by Jeanne Siler on March 21 at 10am at a free panel in the City Council Chambers.

Share your favorite authors with us in the comments section below.

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 as an illustration of a story,” Hajian said. “I wanted to see how someone else would tell this story. We did it backward, not writing responses to art, but art as response to writing.”

Inspired in part by their new memberships with the Virginia Arts of the Book Center, Hajian and Eilertson chose 10 diverse local artists, including Eileen Butler, Chicho Lorenzo, Ken Nagakui, Julia Travers, Kate Hunter, Rose Brown, Suzanne Nelson, Frank Riccio, and Claudia Walpole to create new works that interpret the story.

“It’s a kaleidoscopic story, not plot driven, much more of an inner monologue,” said Hajian, who is Armenian-American. “A few artists I knew said ‘It’s so visual, I want to draw it.’”

At face value, “This is How You Open a Pomegranate” is the recollection of an American woman traveling with relief efforts to an Armenian village leveled by an earthquake. (Though the story is fiction, it takes place in Spitak, a real city devastated by a 1988 earthquake.) When the narrator finds a baby alive in the rubble, she forms an unexpected bond with the child and must decide whether to stay or leave.

In pottery, textiles, paintings, collage, multimedia, mosaics, and letterpress prints and art books, artists’ responses ranged from food imagery to scenes of objects built or broken. “They reminded me how we focus on what themes resonate emotionally, these ideas of being uprooted, of attachment and detachment, of loss and the concept of home,” said Hajian.

All the works are for sale to benefit the Armenia Tree Project, which plants trees in impoverished and deforested zones like Spitak. Though the gallery often hosts collaborative shows to benefit non-profits, “this is the first time we’ve interpreted an object of literature,” Eilertson said.

As a result of artistic interpretation, the facts of the story shifted, and the exhibit reads like a game of visual telephone. For example, one artist believed the infant was a boy, despite Hajian’s description of a baby girl.

Hajian herself interpreted the story three times, once through writing, once through textiles, and again in the compilation of a hand-bound, limited edition book cataloging the project. She saw firsthand how fiction suggests a story without committing to it, how language, like art, is a lens to the truth, not the truth itself.

“Even in real life, we don’t know how much we’re embellishing in our heads,” she said. “When I try to fact check my memory, I’m shocked by how much it morphs. Art morphs too.”

Eilertson, who also contributed to the show, said she painted an Armenian goddess that wound up looking Brazilian.

“But it’s O.K. It’s all art therapy. It turns into something you don’t intend it to be,” she said.

Art writers use words to interpret meaning, to tease out themes like multicolored threads. If you’re reading this, you’re interpreting, too, contributing to the weave. And when you look back, meta-magic will happen. You’ll remember a story about this story, a fiction about artists narrating fiction about what may or may not be a pomegranate.

When the truth dissolves in extrapolation like this, we all become art-makers. As Eilertson said, “I think that’s just what happens in art. Things become bigger than themselves.”

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 before opening to arts@c-ville.com.

Angelo 220 E. Main St. “New Work: Marsh and Ocean,” paintings by Robin Braun. 5-7:30pm.

Bozart 211 W. Main St. Selected works by Julia Lesnichy. 5:30-7pm.

The Bridge PAI 209 Monticello Rd. A preview of the “Habitat City” on display for the public. 5-8pm.

CitySpace 100 Fifth St. NE. “Youth Art Month,” featuring artwork by students from Albemarle County Public Schools in the CitySpace Gallery. Artwork by Warren Craghead in the PCA office. 5:30-7pm.

C’Ville Arts 118 E. Main Street. “Adventures in Felting” by Karen Shapcott. 6-8pm.

Fellini’s #9 200 W. Market St. “da Vinci Meets Warhol” by Jack Graves III. 5:30-7pm.

FIREFISH Gallery 108 Second St. NW. “This is How You Open a Pomegranate,” a collaborative exhibit. 5:30-8pm.

The Garage 250 First St. N. “Scenes from Lake Elster,” photographs by William Connally. 5:30-7:30pm.

Jefferson-Madison Regional Library 201 East Market St. “Landscape as Character,” paintings by Tom Tartaglino. 5-7pm.

McGuffey Art Center 201 Second St. NW. “Planets & Plants,” featuring ceramic wall reliefs by Scott Supraner in the Sarah B. Smith Gallery; “Paper: On, Of,” a group exhibit of works on paper in the Lower Hall Galleries; and “Charlottesville In 2 Dimensions: Bridges” in the Upper Hall Galleries. 5:30-7:30pm.

Mudhouse 213 W. Main St. “Spring Flowers,” oil on canvas works by Joanna TYKA. 6-8pm.

Patina Antiques 1112 E. High St. 5-7pm.  Oil paintings by Page Peyton.

Second Street Gallery 115 Second St. SE. “Expecting Reality,” a photography exhibit organized by guest curator Jon-Phillip Sheridan. 5-7:30pm.

Telegraph 110 Fourth St. NE. “Plastic Memories” featuring prints by Brandon Baker, Caldwell Tanner, Lottie Pencheon, and Penny Candy Studios. 5-10pm.

Warm Springs Gallery 105 Third St. NE. “Artista and Elephants,” featuring oil paintings by Lindsley Matthews, acrylic paintings by Beth Hamerschlag, and photographs by Erwin Baumfaulk. 6-8pm.

WriterHouse 508 Dale Ave. “Tilted,” paintings and drawings by Chris Butler. 5:30-7:30pm.

WVTF and Radio IQ Studio Gallery 216 W. Water St. “Feast,” an exhibit of food-related artwork as part of the New City Arts Forum. 5-7pm.

OTHER EXHIBITS

Fralin Museum of Art at the University of Virginia 155 Rugby Rd. “Jasper Johns: Early Prints from the Collections of Jordan D. Schnitzer and his Family Foundation,” “Portraying the Golden Age: Drawings from the Maida and George Abrams Collection,” and “Recent Acquisitions.”

Kluge-Ruhe Aboriginal Art Collection 400 Worrell Dr. “having-been-there” by Nici Cumpston.

Les Yeux du Monde 841 Wolf Trap Road. “Visions of Spring” featuring Elizabeth Bradford, Cary Brown, Lou Jordan, Ann Lyne, John McCarthy, Priscilla Whitlock.

Martin Luther King Jr. Performing Arts Center 1400 Melbourne Rd. “VSA Art Show” featuring works by more than one hundred local artists with disabilities.

Pigment 1229 Harris St. #13. “Wolf Songs: and other tales from the desert,” featuring mixed media work by Lauren Stangil.

Piedmont Virginia Community College 501 College Dr. “Of Cabbages and Kings,” oil paintings by Cynthia Burke.

Thomas Jefferson Memorial Church 717 Rugby Rd. “World in Focus” by Jennifer Jamison.