The mystery will be solved on Saturday at six.
The Virginia Center for the Creative Arts (VCCA) will unveil “The Commission” at Morven Farm in Charlottesville on Saturday May 10th. This year’s Commission — “Coming to Know What We’ve Always Known” — showcases a collaborative art installation created for one night only. Proceeds from the gala fund-raiser will afford future artists time at the VCCA working retreat in Amherst County.
The 2014 winning Commission combines the imaginative work of VCCA Fellows, poet Sally Dawidoff and visual artist Georgia June Goldberg. Dawidoff’s poems have been published in Agni, The Boston Review, Ploughshares and The Southern Review, among others. Her adaptation of The Crazed by National Book Award Winner and VCCA Fellow Ha Jin will premiere May 17 at Central Works Theater, Berkley, California. Davidoff earned her MFA in poetry from Columbia University and her BA from Harvard University. She lives in Berkley and is a member of the poetry collective, The Urban Range.
Goldberg, a visual artist living in Ross, California, received high honors at Yale and Princeton Universities where she studied drawing and painting with painter/printmaker Sean Scully and was awarded a Masters of Architecture degree under the tutelage of famed architect Michael Graves. Goldberg’s work has been exhibited from Soho 20 in New York City, to the American University Museum, Washington, D.C. to the Herbst International Exhibition Hall, San Francisco.
Artists Dawidoff and Goldberg consider their installation-to-be “an homage to the beauty of nature,” one inspired by novelist and playwright Thornton Wilder’s observation: “The response we make when we ‘believe’ a work of the imagination is that of saying: ‘This is the way things are. I have always known it without being fully aware that I knew it.”
The Commission festivities — including the art installation, cocktails and auction viewing — will all begin at 6 p.m. at Morven Farm, 791 Morven Drive. The live auction will start at 7:30 p.m. at the Main House. This year’s auction features travel packages for a week on Pawley’s Island and a photographic safari in South Africa.
Raffle tickets are on sale for April Amherst, a prize painting by VCCA artist Mary Page Evans.
Evans, a native of Virginia, now lives in Wilmington, Delaware. Her paintings are part of numerous private and corporate collections including The National Museum of Women in the Arts, the Eleanor D. Wilson Museum at Hollins University and the Delaware Art Museum where she was recently honored with a 40-year retrospective. Colorist painter Gene Davis called Mary Page Evans “a hallelujah painter,” her works “hymns of unadulterated joy.”
Click here for further information on the VCCA auction and The Commission, soon-to-be-revealed.
MYSTERY REVEALED!
After a day of downpours, the skies cleared to dramatic effect. Some 200 poplar saplings painted day-glo chartreuse lit up the evening’s festivities at Morven Farm. The poet’s voice rose quietly from hidden speakers along the sloping path. It was worth the wait.
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