VCCA Salon series kicks off Sept. 5 with mixed-media artist Laura Boles Faw and film critic Deirdre Boyle

Renowned media historian and film critic Deirdre Boyle and artist and lecturer Laura Boles Faw will open Sweet Briar’s 2019-2020 VCCA Salon series at 7:30 p.m. Thursday, Sept. 5, in the Reahard Learning Gallery in Mary Helen Cochran Library. The monthly salon brings VCCA fellows — artists in residence at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts — to campus to share their expertise and experiences with students, faculty, staff and the general public. All events are free.

Boles Faw, who is teaching a three-week class at Sweet Briar this fall, earned a B.A. in art history from Sewanee and an M.F.A. from the San Francisco Art Institute, where she has served as a lecturer for many years, teaching both foundational and upper-level sculpture classes. Her work, exhibited across the country and overseas, includes drawings, sculptures, mixed-media installations, performances, photographs, projections and video installations, and she works both independently and collaboratively with other artists. Her teaching also includes working with an all-girls high school and leading art experiences for people of all ages making ephemeral artworks in a eucalyptus grove within the Presidio in San Francisco.


Laura Boles Faw


Boles Faw will present collaborative and solo artworks that illustrate her interest in site, place and context to explain her development of the Fellows Studio course this fall, Site-specific Art in the Sweet Briar Landscape. Her presentation will include works made during her own undergraduate and graduate studies, projects that sparked her interest in site and research into the historical layered-ness of place. The presentation will also include images of work by Sweet Briar students from the course and a description of their working process and experiments within the classroom and the landscape.

Deirde Boyle’s essays, reviews and interviews have appeared in multiple journals. She is the author/editor of eight books, including “Subject to Change: Guerrilla Television Revisited” (Oxford University Press). She has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, Fulbright Fellowship, Asian Cultural Council Fellowships and a Cable ACE Award and is currently a jury chair for the Peabody Awards and a Fulbright specialist in documentary. She has enjoyed writing residencies at the VCCA, The MacDowell Colony, Yaddo, UCross and Blue Mountain Center.

Boyle is currently writing “Ferryman of Memories: The Films of Rithy Panh,” which will be published by Rutgers University Press. Panh is an internationally acclaimed Franco-Cambodian cinéaste and genocide survivor who has made over 20 fiction and documentary films and is best known for his Academy Award-nominated film “The Missing Picture.” At Sweet Briar, Boyle will speak about her fascination with Panh’s films and introduce the audience to his work by showing some clips from his documentaries. She’ll also talk about her experiences in Cambodia.


Deirdre Boyle


Boyle’s writing about Panh’s work has been published in numerous journals and in two books. In 2015, she traveled to Phnom Penh to interview Panh and attend the Extraordinary Chamber of the Courts of Cambodia. In 2017, she saw his multimedia installation “Exile” in Geneva and later viewed his direction of the theater work “Bangsokol, Requiem for Cambodia.” She also attended the premier of Angelina Jolie’s Netflix film about the Cambodian genocide, “First They Killed My Father,” which Panh produced.

Boyle is associate professor in the School of Media Studies at The New School in New York City.

Additional VCCA Salons will take place on Oct. 3, Dec. 5, Feb. 6, March 5 and April 2. For more information, email Carrie Brown at cbrown@sbc.edu.

To find more events at Sweet Briar and for up-to-date information, visit sbc.edu/events.