PCA Blog

Celebrate Memorial Day by watching this classic film with live musical accompaniment in a stunning historic theater!

Starring Buster Keaton, The General is based on an incident that occurred during the Civil War. The story follows Engineer Johnny Gray and the two loves of his life: his girl, Annabelle, and his locomotive. Legendary critic Roger Ebert considered The General to be one of the ten best films of all time.

Musical accompaniment will be provided by Matthew Marshall and Elizabeth Leverage-Hilles. Marshall is well-known locally for his accompaniment for silent films presented during the Virginia Film Festival and for his courses at the University of Virginia where he teaches about film history, theory, and genre studies. He has also recorded soundtracks for the British Edition of Charlie Chaplin’s The Kid as well as George Melies’ Conquest of the Pole. Classically trained in piano and violin, Elizabeth Leverage-Hilles is a member of the Reel Music Ensemble, which performs live accompaniment for silent films in the area, including at the Paramount, Vinegar Hill Theater, and Scottsville’s Victory Hall Theater.

Doors open at 3pm with tastings from local restaurants and a raffle. The film will be preceded by an archival newsreel, a Popeye cartoon, and a film historian’s take on why The General is so unique.

This family-friendly event is presented by ParadeRest, which provides ways to engage military and their families with the local community. This event is FREE and open to the public.

The Paramount Theater is located at 215 E. Main Street on the Downtown Mall in Charlottesville.

The Waynesboro Cultural Commission presents Waynesboro Writes, supported by The Waynesboro and the Waynesboro- East Augusta Rotary Clubs and the Waynesboro Kiwanis.

Waynesboro Writes demonstrates the development of writing and thinking skills of Waynesboro’s elementary students. The publication includes all four Waynesboro elementary schools. Each school annually selects the best student writing from kindergarten through fifth grade.

Free copies of the publication will be available at the Waynesboro Heritage Museum, the Shenandoah Valley Art Center, Stone Soup Books and Cafe and the Waynesboro Public Library. To read samples from previous editions, click here.

Waynesboro Writes is one of the many projects of the Cultural Commission to support community writing, among them workshops on topics such as the personal essay, fiction writing, and screenwriting. To learn more, visit www.waynesboroculture.com.

Every year, The Bridge Progressive Arts Initiative partners with the Albemarle County Public Schools’ Office of Community Engagement to offer the iConnect Photo and Writing Workshop.

iConnect matches students with photographers and writers. Over the course of a week, they produce a book organized around a theme that the group explores in Charlottesville. This year’s theme is El Trabajo (work). The program’s director John Casteen describes it like this:

“An iConnect week starts slowly: a primer and refresher on aperture and shutter speed, a lesson on metaphor and simile. In both the visual and the linguistic: detail, detail, detail. Composition. Narrative. When we make our way into the city to find material and people at work, each student is paired with an individual mentor; cameras around their necks, they look, ask, talk, and look again. The mentors answer, ask back, look, write. The week carries us through the city’s neighborhoods and places of business: a furniture shop in full swing, an automotive garage taking a breather over the lunch hour, a barber shop full of chatter, television, and the sound of clippers, a restaurant breaking down lamb carcasses for the grill, a bright-lit room redolent of every spice imaginable. The week is a feast for the senses, a creative hothouse, a reason to keep going.”

The exhibit will remain on display through May 25. The Bridge PAI is located at 209 Monticello Road in Charlottesville. Admission to the gallery is FREE.

Lap The Miles Productions presents a concert by Josephine Foster and Diane Cluck at the Twisted Branch Tea Bazaar on Saturday, June 1 at 8:00pm.

Josephine Foster is a modern American folk singer-songwriter and musician from Colorado. She has recorded albums of psychedelic rock, music for children, blues music, unorthodox interpretations of 19th century German Lieder, and a 27-song cycle based on the poems of Emily Dickinson. After her previous performance in Charlottesville in 2006, Foster relocated to rural Spain, collecting and arranging collections of folk songs.

In 2012, Foster returned to Colorado to record a new solo album titled Blood Rushing which took inspiration from local themes from her childhood such as the western geography, native rhythms, and imagined mythology. Listen to songs from the album as well as interview with Foster on NPR here.

Tickets cost $7 and are available for purchase online or at the door.

Lap The Miles Productions is a new booking outfit in Charlottesville, bringing independent music concerts to venues such as the Twisted Branch Tea Bazaar.

Book and publication designer Josef Beery will lead an intensive ten-week investigation of the mysteries of the written word titled “Design With Type” at the Virginia Arts of the Book Center.

In-class exercises will introduce the important principles of layout and design. Through lecture and exercises students will study the basics of design including rhythm, scale, texture, framing, layers, transparency, and modularity. Students will study the history of type and learn the different character and voice of different type designs.

Study of the letter itself will include a look at the essentials of glyph design with a special understanding of typefitting, logotypes, and the use of special characters. We will explore the intricacy of kerning and tracking and learn how type can be used to express a hierarchy of communication on a page through styles, color, and sizes.

An in-depth investigation of the grid and its use in page layout will illuminate the key to communicating with elegance and effect. Hands-on projects and oral critiques will explore the processes of building the page for a poster, a website, a magazine article, and a booklet.

The course will meet for ten weeks on Saturday mornings 10:00am-12:00pmm starting May 25 and ending on July 27.
Tuition is $1000 and the course is eligible for the UVa Education Benefit. For members of the VABC, the cost is $950. There is one scholarship available.

For more information contact josef@josefbeery.com. To register for the course, please contact gsqueen@comcast.net.

Please note that this is not a class focused specifically on letterpress printing.

New City Arts and The Haven are seeking applicants for two studio spaces on the second floor of The Haven (112 West Market St., Charlottesville, VA) for a 10-month residency, beginning September 2013 and ending June 2014.

The New City Arts Initiative is a collaborative non-profit fostering engagement with the arts in the greater Charlottesville area. The Haven is a day shelter for the homeless and those in need in downtown Charlottesville. Together, The Haven and New City Arts have turned the second floor of The Haven into two studio spaces in order to provide working space for artists and integrate creative programming into the resources available to Haven guests during the day.

Each studio space is a quarter of an approximately 400 square foot, open workspace room. Windows on every wall provide wonderful, natural light during the day. More details about the residency are available here.

Both resident artists will be required to develop a flexible arts program, focused on developing the artistic endeavors of Haven guests in the day shelter. Artists who demonstrate artistic excellence, an interest in studio production, and experience with community organizing are encouraged to apply. Artists are expected to spend a minimum of 4 hours a week with guests and at least 6 in the studio.

A full application should be emailed to Maureen Lovett — artsdirector@newcityarts.org — by midnight on June 8.

This summer, the Kluge-Ruhe Collection has partnered with Cicada Press at the University of New South Wales in Sydney to showcase the recent prints of a group of Australian Aboriginal artists. There will be an opening reception to celebrate Black Prints from Cicada Press, along with the re-opening of the museum’s permanent exhibition Past Forward >> Contemporary Aboriginal Art, on Friday, May 31 from 5:30-7:30pm.

Since 2006 Michael Kempson, director of Cicada Press, and Tess Allas, curator of Black Prints, have invited emerging and established Aboriginal artists to explore printmaking as an artistic practice in the form of workshops and residencies. The resulting exhibition includes work by artists such as Gordon Hookey, Vernon Ah Kee, Reko Rennie and Laurel Nannup.

The title Black Prints is a word play on the Australian child’s summer obsession of collecting cicada carcasses. While ‘greengrocers’ are the most common species, many of them can be traded for just one of the rarely found, but highly prized ‘black prince’ cicada. Fittingly, summer 2013 marks the emergence of 17-year cicadas in Virginia.

The exhibit will remain on display through August 18.

[Image Credit: Brett Nannup, Self-Portrait, 2012, courtesy Cicada Press]

In celebration of Ash Lawn Opera‘s upcoming production of La boheme, the recently revived Ash Law Opera young professionals group BRAVO will host its first salon with wine, dessert, and discussion.

It is BRAVO’s mission to provide Charlottesville’s young professionals the chance to build community, make friends, and learn about opera at the same time. Opera enthusiasts (and the curious) between the ages of 25 and 45 are encouraged to check BRAVO out!

The salon will take place on Thursday, May 30 from 7:30-9:30pm at Live Arts on the fourth floor. This event is FREE and open to the public, but please RSVP by emailing bravo@ashlawnopera.org.

For over 33 years, the Ash Lawn Opera Festival has produced opera and other musical performances first at Ash Lawn-Highland, and now at the beautifully renovated Paramount Theater in downtown Charlottesville.

The next Big Blue Door Jam takes place on Thursday, May 16 which happens to be International Rivalry Day, and “Rivals” is the theme for this month’s storytelling event!

Come hear stories of hilarity and tragedy as people tell tales about their rivalries. Co-hosts Tom Clay and Jude Silveira will present this smorgasbord of local people from all walks of life telling true 6-8 minute stories.

For more information, please visit www.bigbluedoor.org.