Luminescence III, mixed media, Mylar paper, Acetates, 2017 Serge Marchetta and Masha Ryskin

As many as 400 artists a twelvemonth enjoy residencies at the Virginia Middle for the Artistic Arts. Fellows, as they are known, frequently visit classes, and each month, the Center hosts an evening Salon Series, in which two or three Fellows are invited to campus to present their work to the community in the Reahard Gallery of the Cochran Library, which is equipped with a chiliad pianoforte as well as suitable engineering science for showing visual images.

Writers, visual artists, and composers have given a wide range of presentations. For instance, Ailís Ní Ríain, an Irish contemporary classical composer, performed works created for the Brontë Parsonage in England, essentially a sonic accessory to a bout of the facility, including sounds that would have been nowadays to the Brontës when they were living at that place, such as the ringing of a hammer on stone from the cemetery nearby, birdsong, or falling pelting. Another composer, Andrea Clearfield, shared her piece of work recording the concluding royal court vocalist of Lo Monthang in Nepal, a remote and restricted region near the border of Tibet. Those recordings are part of the Earth Oral Literature Project of Cambridge Academy, defended to preserving endangered languages. She also composed music influenced by the Tibetan music she heard, and then her presentation and performance were intended to interest students studying music composition and performance, ethnomusicology, anthropology, religious studies, Asian studies, and globe music, for example.

Composer Andrea Clearfield performs
Composer Andrea Clearfield performs at a Salon evening. Photo by Medford Taylor.

Occasionally, the Salon takes the course of a performance. In the spring of 2019, filmmaker Amy Jenkins showed her remarkable documentary Instructions on Parting, an exquisite and moving tape of the year she lost three members of her family to cancer and also gave nascency to her showtime child.

Artists who take appeared at the salon series include:

  • Andrea Clearfield is an award-winning composer of music for orchestra, chorus, chamber ensemble, trip the light fantastic, and multimedia collaborations. She will show original footage from her Tibetan music documentation and talk over a new body of work —much of it composed at VCCA —that was inspired by that fieldwork. With anthropologist and ethnomusicologist Katey Blumenthal, Clearfield recorded the last royal courtroom singer of Lo Monthang, Nepal, a remote and restricted region near the border of Tibet. Their recordings are part of the World Oral Literature Project of Cambridge University, defended to preserving endangered languages. She will discuss how this aboriginal culture has influenced her life and music and perform examples of her Tibetan-influenced compositions.
  • Born in Ukraine and currently working in Brooklyn, NY, Luba Drozd earned a BFA from Pratt Plant and an MFA from Bard College. Her video and audio installations take been exhibited at the Bronx Museum, LUBOV Gallery, UIMA Chicago, Jamaica Center for Arts and Linguistic communication, Carver Heart Gallery, Ukrainian Museum in New York, Apexart, BRIC, Smack Mellon, Anthology Picture Archives, the New York Video Festival at Lincoln Center and Art in General. She is the recipient of a MASS MoCA Visiting Artist Residency, a VCCA artist residency, a Millay Colony residency, an Eastern State Historic Site Grant for New Work, a BRIC Media Arts Fellowship and the Bronx Museum AIM fellowship. She will present two video and audio installations. Motivated politically, the works subtly layer how intangible spaces within us —such as memory space, knowledge, and perception of fourth dimension — are controlled and regimented.
  • Rose Skelton is a fiction writer and journalist who lived in and reported on west Africa for fifteen years. Her articles have appeared in the International Herald Tribune, The Guardian, the Observer, the BBC, the Independent and others. She has an MFA in creative writing from Warren Wilson College in N Carolina, and is currently working on a collection of brusk stories entitledHomescar,set on the Scottish Hebridean Islands. She trains African journalists in investigative reporting, and is a member of the Tobermory Lifeboat crew, which rescues people at sea. She volition read a story, "Heartwood," about the friendship between a man and his neighbour, a shepherd, later on the death of the man's married woman. The story is set on the Isle of Mull, where she lives.
  • Katy Mixon is a visual artist working in painting, sculpture, quilting and photography. She earned her M.F.A. from The University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill and her BA from Davidson Higher. She is an alumna of The School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Mixon is a recipient of a 2017 Working Artist Grant and a 2015 Ruth and Harold Chenven Foundation Award. She was a finalist for a 2016 William and Dorothy Yeck Young Painters Award and a 2015 VCUarts Fountainhead Fellowship. Mixon was an artist-in-residence at VCCA, The Kimmel Harding Nelson Center, The Hambidge Heart, AICAD Studio Do Residency and Byrdcliffe Fine art Colony. Select exhibition venues include The Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art, North.C.; Ackland Art Museum, N.C.; Spartanburg Art Museum, SC; Target Gallery, Va; Ceres Gallery, N.Y.; Safety Stamp Project, Fla; Allcott Gallery, N.C.; and 701 Middle for Gimmicky Art, S.C. Mixon lives and works in Orangeburg, Due south.C., and Brooklyn, N.Y.
  • Idris Anderson'south 2nd collection of poems, Doubtful Sound, was selected by Sherod Santos for the Hollis Summers Prize of Ohio Academy Press and was published in March 2018. Her first drove of poems,Mrs. Ramsay's Knee, was selected by Harold Blossom for the May Swenson Poetry Accolade. She has won a Pushcart Prize (2010) and the New York Yeats Society Poesy Prize and has published poems inAGNI,Crab Orchard Review,The Hudson Review,Michigan Quarterly Review,The Paris Review,Plume,Southern Review and other journals. She was born and grew up in Charleston, S.C. and moved to the San Francisco Bay Area two decades ago, when she was awarded an NEH Teacher-Scholar grant to study Greek and Greek tragedy at Stanford Academy.
  • Ailís Ní Ríainis an Irish contemporary classical composer who aims to produce work that challenges, provokes and engages. She composes in a diversity of forms, including musical theater, concert music, opera and site-specific installation music. In 2016, she was awarded the prestigious Paul Hamlyn Award for Artists, the largest individual artists' award in the United kingdom of great britain and northern ireland. Her music has been performed at the Southbank Centre in London, The National Concert Hall in Dublin and Carnegie Hall in New York. Her debut album, a Brontë concept anthology,Linger, was released in 2015 alongside a music installation for the Brontë Parsonage in Yorkshire. Although her formal artistic preparation has been in classical music as a composer and pianist, Ríain is also a author. She is published by Bloomsbury and Nick Hern Books, and her plays accept been produced in Europe and the U.Due south.Desolate Sky was long-listed for the James Tate Black Award, andThe Tallest Homo in the World was curt-listed for the prestigious Eugene O'Neill Playwright's Conference USA. Ríain is deaf. She is a passionate advocate for the arts and disability sector in both the Uk and Republic of ireland, where her work has been supported and commissioned past leading arts and disability organizations, including Unlimited, DaDaFest, Fine art & Disability Republic of ireland and Sound and Music, the UK's national new music organization.
  • Sarah Goodyear is the author of the novelView from a Burning Bridge, published by Red Hen Printing. As a journalist, she has published articles and essays in dozens of venues, amid themPsychology Today, The Village Voice, Ms. Magazine, and the CityLab website, which is part ofThe Atlantic. As a performance storyteller, she has fabricated appearances at Lit Brooklyn and the Shed in New York Metropolis. She is likewise a songwriter who has performed at venues in New York including the Mercury Lounge and Rockwood Music Hall. She lives in Brooklyn with her wife, her teenage son, and their 2 dogs. will read from her novel in progress, which is chosenStand up Clear. Information technology'due south the story of Alice, a teenage daughter growing upwards and running wild in the New York Metropolis of the late 1970s. When her mother almost dies in childbirth, has a nervous breakdown, and loses their apartment, Alice has to figure out how to make it on her own in a urban center that is having its own kind of plummet. The volume is funny, distressing, and ruthless — like Alice herself.
  • Director/Producer/Writer Laurie Kahn is devoted to bringing the lives and piece of work of compelling (withal overlooked) women to the screen. Her films have won major awards, been shown on PBS primetime, broadcast around the world, screened at prominent museums, and used widely in academy classrooms and community groups. Her first motion-picture show, A Midwife's Tale, is based on Laurel Thatcher Ulrich's Pulitzer Prize-winning book.  It won film festival awards and a primetime EMMY for Outstanding Not-Fiction. Her filmTUPPERWARE! won the George Foster Peabody Award and was nominated for the primetime EMMY for Nonfiction Directing.  Her most recent picture show,Love Betwixt the Covers, has received glowing reviews worldwide and 5 stars at Netflix, Amazon, and iTunes. In 2000, Laurie produced an award-winning interactive website,DoHistory.org. Earlier founding her own product company, she worked onEyes on the Prize: America's Civil Rights Years 1954-1965, The American Feel, Frontline's iv-hour serialCrisis in Cardinal America, All Things Considered,and Fourth dimension Out. She is a Resident Scholar at the Women'south Studies Research Center at Brandeis University. Laurie will testify excerpts from her films Love Betwixt the Covers,TUPPERWARE!, andA Midwife'due south Tale,and  discuss her new project, a feature picture about the 13 intrepid female pilots who aced the "correct stuff" tests at the dawn of the infinite age only were told that space is merely for men. Her films are informed past a deep involvement in telling history from the lesser up, especially the stories of women.
  • Paige Critcher holds a BFA  from Ohio Academy and an MFA from VCU. She has worked in photography since 1984, beginning equally a part of a commercial studio, so every bit a fine art printer and gallery owner. She also worked in the early on digital world at a service bureau, and taught photography at VCU, at Sugariness Briar Higher, and for Semester at Ocean. She has spent the terminal iii years traveling and writing grants for a Women's Shelter in Petersburg, Va. Paige will prove images from the last three years of travel to seventeen different countries, and she will read briefly from her travel journals.
  • Cheryl Davis is a recipient of the Ed Kleban Award for her work as a librettist, and her musicalBarnstormer, written with honour-winning composer Douglas J. Cohen, received a Jonathan Larson Performing Arts Foundation Award, nether the auspices of the Lark Play Development Center. Her playMaid'southward Door was produced at the Billie Holiday Theatre to excellent reviews and received seven Audelco Awards; information technology was also presented at the 2015 National Black Theatre Festival. Her playCarefully Taught was performed at the Astoria Performing Arts Center. Her new musical,Bridges, was produced by the Berkeley Playhouse in Feb 2016. Cheryl is a musical theater librettist and lyricist and an alumna of the Advanced Workshop of the BMI/Lehman Engel Musical Theatre Workshop. She has a degree in English and a Document in Theatre and Trip the light fantastic from Princeton University and has studied playwriting with Jean-Claude Van Itallie and Jeffrey Sweet. She is a quondam Dramatists Guild Fellow, having been mentored by playwright/librettist Alfred Uhry. She is an alumna of the Playwrights' Lab of the Women's Projection and Productions, of the River Writers Unit of measurement of the Ensemble Studio Theatre, and the Milk Tin Theatre Visitor, and is a member of the Dramatists Guild. She is the Vice President of Theater Resource Unlimited, a producers' networking arrangement, and is General Counsel for the League of Professional Theater Women. She is a practicing attorney in Manhattan and is General Counsel of the Authors Society.
  • David B. Wohl composes music for theater, multimedia, dance, idiot box, and concert hall, and has received sixteen ASCAP Special Awards for his works. He is the composer and arranger of the widely performedA 1940s Radio Christmas Carol (Samuel French, publisher), sequel to the popThe 1940s Radio Hour, and is the composer and lyricist for the multi-award winning musical,Jed. David is a musical manager and keyboardist for numerous productions and ensembles (jazz, stone, swing, funk, classical, and theatrical), and has played keyboards on the national tour ofJesus Christ Superstar.  He is also a composer, producer and arranger for artists and corporate clients. His upcoming CD to be released is entitledEnkindling Path.His music degrees come from Roosevelt Academy (B.Chiliad), Northwestern University (Thousand.One thousand.), and McGill University (D.Mus).
  • Composer and lyricist David Wohl and writer Cheryl Davis are the creators of the new musicalJed,based on the Coretta Scott King Award-winning volume and Reading Rainbow favorite,Uncle Jed's Barbershopwritten by Margaree King Mitchell and illustrated by James Ransome. They will offer a presentation on the collaborative process of writing a musical, theatrical structure, and the nature of theater songs. Wohl volition perform a few excerpts from the show.
  • Serge Marchetta is a native of Montreal and holds a BFA in Painting from the University of Quebec, Montreal (1995). Masha Ryskin lives in Providence, RI and is a political refugee from the Soviet Matrimony. She holds a BFA in Prinmaking from Rhode Island Schoolhouse of Blueprint (1995) and an MFA in Painting/Mixed Media from Academy of Michigan (1997). Marchetta and Ryskin met at CAMAC Art Middle in France in 2009 and, in parallel with their individual practices, have been collaborating since and then, producing drawings, photographs, videos, as well equally gallery and open up-air installations. They have participated in a number of artist residencies in the United states of america, Norway, Iceland, Finland and kingdom of the netherlands, and together have exhibited in the The states, Canada, and Europe. Their piece of work stems from enquiry on light, and recent projects are explorations of ambiguity of space through light, layered imagery, and shadows. They are also intrigued by the transformation of a static work as a issue of light, equally well as projected video and animation sequences.
  • Emily Maloney is the author of the forthcoming book Toll of Living (Flatiron Books, 2020), about health care in America seen through the lenses of both patient and practitioner. Her work has appeared in or is forthcoming from The New York Times, Glamour, Virginia Quarterly Review, the Northward American Review, and the American Periodical of Nursing. She has worked as an ER tech and EMT, dog groomer, pastry chef, general contractor, tile setter, catalog model, and has sold her ceramics at art fairs. She has also worked in center management at a multinational pharmaceutical company and many of her experiences in that location take fed into her current book projection. Her essay, "Price of Living," which originally appeared in the Virginia Quarterly Review, was selected for Best American Essays 2017, edited past Leslie Jamison. Next up is a memoir about growing up with nonverbal learning inability.
  • Over the course of ane tumultuous year, creative person and director Amy Jenkins confronts the cancer diagnoses of her mother, sister, and brother, and also welcomes her beginning child to life. Crafted in a unique visual mode, the movie weaves breathtaking vignettes of nature unfolding with cinéma vérité family footage to pb united states of america to a bold and daring acceptance our ain mortality. Weaving cinéma vérité family footage with scenic vignettes of nature unfolding,Instructions on Departingtells an elegiac story about transformation, grief, and the essential nature of the collective human journeying. As Jenkins welcomes her first kid into the globe, she also must negotiate the cancer diagnoses of her female parent, sister, and brother, all of whom fall sick within the same year. Crafted from Jenkins' video journals and narrated through archived answering auto messages, Jenkins, a visual artist, turns her camera to interrogate loss. Her vulnerability leads u.s. to a bold and daring acceptance of our own bloodshed and a reverence for the fleeting beauty of life. Instructions on Parting had its Globe Premiere in New York at the Museum of Mod Fine art Md Fortnight Festival in February and its International Premiere at the Sydney Motion picture Festival, AU, in June. The moving-picture show won All-time Documentary at the Athens International Film and Video Festival, OH. The film had its New England Premiere at the Independent Film Festival Boston in April, and was also screened at Montclair Moving-picture show Festival, NJ and the Greenpoint Picture show Festival, Brooklyn, in April/May.

Read More than near the VCCA Salons

  • Virginia Eye for the Creative Arts to agree salon at Sweet Briar
  • Filmmaker and novelist open 2018-2019 VCCA Salon series at Sweet Briar
  • VCCA Salon series returns to Sweet Briar on February. 7 with visual artists, 'Cost of Living' author
  • VCCA Salon to feature documentary movie screening of 'Instructions on Departing'