The American Craft Council Charlotte Show
November 2-4, 2007
Charlotte Convention Center, Charlotte, NC

New artists, new work, and a new kids’ component will be on display at “The American Craft Show” in Charlotte at the uptown Convention Center, November 2-4, 2007. Celebrating its 13th year in Charlotte, this much-anticipated event delivers the nation’s leading 220 artists and their latest designer jewelry, furniture, clothing, home decor and more, to the public. Guests can indulge in daily raffles, live demonstrations and walking tours led by local celebrities throughout the weekend.

Craft 4 Kids - Artists will present clothing, furniture, jewelry, toys and accessories designed especially for children.

Charlotte Convention Center is located at 501 South College Street.

Glass piece shown is by artist Lisa Aronzon. 

This virtual 3D interpretation of Education City in Doha Qatar was developed by the students of VCU’s School of the Arts in Qatar.

Theatre Master Classes Sept 10 – 14, 2007
Jason Butler Harner graduated from Theatre VCU with a BFA in Acting in 1992. His first play was What I Did Last Summer, directed by Gary Hopper in then named Shafer Street Theatre. He is currently starring on Broadway in Tom Stoppard’s landmark trilogy The Coast of Utopia alongside 40 actors including Billy Crudup, Ethan Hawke, Martha Plimpton, Brian F. O’Byrne , Amy Irving and Richard Easton. A frequent presence in Off-Broadway theatres, he garnered an OBIE Award for his radical reinterpretation of Tesman in New York Theatre Workshop’s acclaimed Hedda Gabler and was nominated for a Drama Desk Award for his performance in The Paris Letter at the Roundabout Theatre. Other Off-Broadway credits include Orange Flower Water (EDGE Theatre), Observe the Sons of Ulster Marching Towards the Somme (Lincoln Center), Juno and the Paycock (Roundabout Theatre), Crimes of The Heart (Second Stage), The Ruby Sunrise ( The Public), An Experiment with an Air Pump (Manhattan Theatre Club), Five Flights (Rattlestick), Henry VIII (New York Shakespeare Festival), Loved Less (VIA Theatre), Macbeth (The Public, with Alec Baldwin and Angela Bassett), and Tony Kushner’s revival of Hydriotaphia, or the Death of Dr. Browne.

After graduating from VCU, he was an apprentice at Actors Theatre of Louisville, and subsequently moved to New York City where he earned an MFA in Acting from New York University. Most recently he has appeared in the award-winning Coast of Utopia at the Lincoln Center Theater. He has been fortunate to act in theatres across the country with a broad spectrum of directors and plays, most notably in The Glass Menagerie at The Kennedy Center, opposite Sally Field; at the Mark Taper Forum in The Cherry Orchard, opposite Annette Bening and Alfred Molina; in the American premiere of The Invention of Love at the American Conservatory Theatre opposite James Cromwell; and at the Dallas Theatre Center in the title role of Hamlet. He has also been seen on the stages of Seattle Repertory, Yale Repertory, Williamstown Theatre Festival, the Berkshire Theatre Festival, Commonwealth Shakespeare Festival, and the Adirondack Theatre Festival.

Recent television credits include appearances in each of the Law and Orders, with Kyra Sedgewick on The Closer, and as ‘Dandruff Donnie’ on Hope and Faith.’ Film appearances include the indies Garmento, Nylon, Trifling with Fate, Robert DeNiro’s directorial debut The Good Shepherd , and the forth coming action adventure release of NEXT starring Nicholas Cage and Julianne Moore.

His training and exposure to a number of methods has enabled him to not only work in all the mediums, but also on a variety of material ranging from classical to new American plays, as well as an extensive palette of performance styles.

Charles Brownell, Art History professor, is awarded the Excellence in Architecture Award from ACORN. The Alliance to Conserve Old Richmond Neighborhoods will present its Annual Golden Hammer Awards for Preservation Excellence on October 4th. The Edmund A. Rennolds, Jr. Excellence in Architecture Award will go to Dr. Charles Brownell, III, Professor of Art History. He is being honored for setting a high standard of academic achievement and educating the next generation of architectural historians. The event will be held from 6:30pm to 8:30pm at Orchard House School, 500 N. Allen Avenue.

Women’s Costumes from Chimaltenango, Guatemala. Friday, September 28 at 4pm.

Presented by Ann Pollard Rowe, Curator of Western Hemisphere Collections at The Textile Museum in Washington, DC. The presentation traces the changes in indigenous women’s costumes, primarily the traditional huipil, over the last century. This lecture is free and open to the public and will be held at Grace Street Theater, 934 W. Grace Street.

Kinetic Imaging welcomes sound designer, Ann Kroeber, Thursday, September 6 at noon in the Student Commons Theater.

Ann Kroeber has supplied sound effects for such diverse films as The Black Stallion, The English Patient, Gladiator, the Lord of the Rings films, Hidalgo, The Horse Whisperer, the recent Star Wars trilogy, and many others. Kinetic Imaging’s Stephen Vitiello spoke with Ms. Kroeber and tells me this…

Although she is often called upon to supply sounds from her huge collection of animal noises/vocalizations, she is also renowned for her unusual recordings of sounds from everyday life, many recorded with a FRAP (Frequency Response Audio Pickup) contact microphone custom-made many years ago by an English audio guru named Arnie Lazarus. In fact, the Hollywood Edge FX library even put out a disc of her FRAP recordings — Common Sounds Heard in Uncommon Ways—as part of a three-CD set called Sounds of a Different Realm. The other two of the discs are dominated by the work of her late husband, Oscar-winning FX designer/editor Alan Splett, who did groundbreaking work with Carroll Ballard, David Lynch, and other directors before his untimely passing in 1995.

I checked in with Kroeber recently to talk about her sound design work on Ballard’s forthcoming film Duma, about the adventures of a young boy and a cheetah in South Africa (set for mid-February release; the article will appear in the March issue of Mix), and while I was admiring her wall of hundreds of SFX audio tapes in her office at the Saul Zaentz Film Center in Berkeley, she revealed that many of the reels were from Alan Splett’s one-of-a-kind collection of sound effects compiled by the American Film Institute through the years.

“Alan worked at the AFI when he was doing [David Lynch’s] Eraserhead,” she says. “He was hired to catalog their sound library, and he also made copies of the tapes for himself as part of their arrangement. Then there was a flood in their basement and [the AFI’s] copies were ruined, so then Alan had the only copies. And it’s just amazing stuff. There’s all sorts of World War II airplanes that were done for old movies. There’s traffic in the ’40s and ’50s in different cities — it just sound so different that what you hear now. There’s people’s voices — old walla; it’s different, too. And the sound quality on a lot of it is awesome. I’d love to work with the AFI to make it available.”

Ideally, Kroeber could get a grant to pay for digitizing the entire collection and putting it up online, making it available to students and sound professionals for the first time. Nothing is in the offing at the moment, but perhaps something will soon materialize.

Maya Weaving from the Bowdler Textile Collection
VCUarts Anderson Gallery, 907-1/2 W. Franklin Street
September 28–December 9

This exhibition highlights selections from the Bowdler Textile Collection of Mayan weavings from Guatamala. The exhibition emphasizes the millennia-old practice of woven arts in the region and the significant historic and contemporary role women have played in the production and the perpetuation of this tradition. Highlights of Ixchel’s Thread include approximately 35 elaborately woven and decorated huipils, the classic Maya women’s formal wear, as well as presentations and weaving demonstrations of contemporary garments reflecting adaptations of traditional Maya techniques and designs to a contemporary 21st century market. The work of VCU fashion design and merchandising students from a service-learning course in Fashion Line Development in Guatemala will also be featured along side a documentary of their experience that will be produced by VCU HDTV.

The exhibition will be co-curated by James Farmer, Chair of the VCU Department of Art History, Linda T. Lee, Assistant Professor of the VCU Fashion Design and Merchandising Department, and McKenna Brown, Director of the VCU School of World Studies.

The following is the New York Times review of Sarah Peters’s show at Winkleman Gallery this summer.

SARAH PETERS
‘Being American’
Winkleman Gallery
637 West 27th Street, Chelsea
Through July 21

In her first solo show, Sarah Peters breathes life into an obsession with the art and history of colonial America. The breath comes from a fidgety crosshatch technique rendered in pencil and black ballpoint pen that gives her images both a gauzy drift and an almost fingernails-on-blackboard screechiness.

The gallery explains that Ms. Peters revisits the naïve, often awkward motifs of colonial art to make them more complete or realistic. Thus “Dreamer,” a portrait of a man in the angular style of an itinerant painter, has a trio of voluptuous bikini-clad women in the background, perhaps to show what was really on the man’s mind. “Séance” adds intimations of ghosts, or at least moving curtains, to an image of a flower urn, a traditional mourning motif.

But what Ms. Peters really does is make this world seem crazier, suggesting the thinness of the line between the cooked and the raw amid a general atmosphere of chaos and decay. “Still Life With Battle” shows a compote dish of fruit and a background swarming with tiny figures: naked men armed with clubs. And the show’s tour de force, a 20-foot-long drawing titled “Being American,” shows an Arcadian landscape strewn with columns, portrait busts and neo-Classical statues as well as a woman sculptor, contemplating a nude torso.

Ms. Peters’s precedents include Edward Gorey and the early work of both Jim Nutt and Sue Williams. Her alternately wafting and grating drawing style makes her images feel at once romantic and hard-bitten. They may seem to float through the mists of time, but they have a few scores to settle.

ROBERTA SMITH

September: “Art starring Jeff Debell and Kathy Rosen” curated by Blake Huff
Reception: Friday, September 7th, 5–6pm
Exhibition: September 7th–28th

Red Door Gallery presents Variations= 14 Richmond Artists
Featuring works by Ed Steinberg (Painting and Printmaking faculty), Tom Hale, Jim Black, Eric Knight, Brad Birchett (AFO faculty), Kristin Polich, Chris Kull, Bev Perdue, Mark Sprinkle, Tim Robinson, Vaughn Garland (2003 Painting MFA from VCU), Greig Leach, Judith Anderson and James Timberlake. Through September 30th.
Location: Red Door Gallery 1607 W. Main Street (at Lombardy and Main)