When I was an adolescent, I read novels voraciously, and the genre of sword-and-sorcery fantasy appealed to me most. It combined supernatural magic, an element seeded into countless cultures and religions, […]

The miracle is that we have integrity at all. O, not fidelity to a moral code. That’s a pale shadow of the integrity I mean. Stable identity. Some semblance of unity. Or, to put it in the word that has h […]

 
    What is the difference between illustration and fine art? 
 

Streetlight’s featured artist Kate Samworth, and Nick Clark, former Chief Curator and Founding Director of the Eric Carle Museu […]

Growing up on a dairy farm in Northern New York, in Southern Jefferson County during the 1960’s meant, for my family, doing most of the work with our physical bodies. With a maximum of 25 dairy cows, one t […]

Imagine a world without bird song. A world without bird beaks, long, sharp and charmingly curved. A world without feathered wings red, gold and green.

Artist Kate Samworth did, in fact, imagine s […]

The premier poetry event of this year’s Festival of the Book in Charlottesville was “Shrines to Longing,” the March 20 reading by Charles Wright, America’s current (20th) poet laureate, and Mary Szybist, who was […]

In 1995 Kay Redfield Jamison published her ground-breaking memoir, An Unquiet Mind, A Memoir of Moods and Madness.  For my husband who was diagnosed with bi-polar disorder in 1987, and myself living through his m […]

“Nothing stays long enough to know.
How long since we’ve been inside
anything together the way

these birds are inside
this tree together, shifting, making it into
a shivering thing”
 

—Mary Szyb […]

Imagine for a moment an American family collected in a cozy living room and gathered close for the evening’s entertainment. But instead of gazing expectantly at some oversized TV screen while battling the c […]

“I have an attraction to Berlin, especially the 1920s, when it was an art and science haven for the best and the brightest. I am also fascinated with German Expressionism, and many of the ar […]

January is upon us and with it the start of several weeks of bone-rattling cold and snow-cancelled classes erroneously dubbed “Spring Semester.” For me, it heralds the beginning of a poetry class I teach at the […]

Photographer Sam Abell is a seeker, camera in hand. A National Geographic staff photographer for 33 years, Abell has traveled from Japan to Newfoundland, from Australia to Russia discovering and shooting […]

I don’t know why I believe that I’ll find the truth about America in Mississippi. It’s a dreamscape, really. So overlaid with lies, oppressions, and Faulknerian legend that to expect anything authentic about the p […]

Chroma Projects enjoyed four exciting years of being able to introduce and exhibit art in our glorious space on the (Charlottesville) Downtown Mall. But all things being eventually subject to change, we […]

 
When I first moved to Qatar ten years ago, I was disappointed to find that the desert of the Qatar peninsula (on the northeastern coast of the Arabian peninsula) was not as lush as that of Arizona, where I […]

As I write, Halloween is upon us.  Not that I need to say anything.  Signs of its approach have been around for a while.  It is unlikely to slip by unnoticed.  Depending on how you measure such things (pu […]

Western photographer Katherine Minott moves in close in color and black and white.

Her closeups — abstracts as well as things recognizable — explore “the beauty hidden in every day objects, the sacred […]

Charlottesville’s Les Yeux du Monde Gallery is presently exhibiting a solo show by mixed media painter and landscapist Anne Slaughter, profiled earlier in Streetlight. Slaughter is known for her layered s […]

Lydia was larger than life.

Her paintings, installations, lectures and scholarship were all intertwined, embodying her probing and profound intellect and her far ranging quest to decipher modern culture […]

Like many other people, I have had Ferguson, Missouri on my mind in recent weeks. I have been thinking most directly, of course, about Michael Brown, his parents, family members, friends, all those who feel […]