Virginia Center for the Creative Arts to hold salon at Sweet Briar

Rose Skelton


Three VCCA fellows will present their work to the Sweet Briar community at 8 p.m. on Thursday, March 1, in the library’s Reahard Gallery.

Andrea Clearfield will show original footage from her Tibetan music documentation and discuss a new body of work — much of it composed at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts — that was inspired by that field research. She will also perform examples of her Tibetan-influenced compositions. Clearfield is an award-winning composer of music for orchestra, chorus, chamber ensemble dance and multimedia collaborations.


Andrea Clearfield


With anthropologist and ethnomusicologist Katey Blumenthal, Clearfield recorded the last royal court 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, dedicated to preserving endangered languages.

Ukrainian-born Luba Drozd will present two video and audio installations. Her works subtly layer how intangible spaces within us — such as memory space, knowledge and perception of time — are controlled and regimented. Drozd’s video and audio installations have been exhibited at several museums, including the Bronx Museum, UIMA Chicago, the Carver Center Gallery, the Ukrainian Museum in New York and the New York Video Festival at Lincoln Center.

In addition to her visiting artist residency at the VCCA, she is also the recipient of a MASS MoCA Visiting Artist Residency, a Millay Colony residency, and fellowships at BRIC and the Bronx Museum.

Fiction writer and journalist Rose Skelton will read a story, “Heartwood,” about the friendship between a man and his neighbor, a shepherd, after the death of the man’s wife. The story is set on the Isle of Mull, where she lives. Skelton lived in and reported on west Africa for 15 years. Her articles have appeared in the International Herald Tribune, The Guardian, the Observer, the BBC, the Independent and others.


Luba Drozd


She has an M.F.A. in creative writing from Warren Wilson College in North Carolina and is currently working on a collection of short stories entitled Homescar, 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.

The salon is an important step in building a stronger relationship between the VCCA and Sweet Briar, which is one of the primary goals of the College’s new Center for Creativity, Design and the Arts. Margaret Banister Writer-in-Residence Carrie Brown, the center’s director, is excited about the occasion.

“VCCA fellows often organize themselves for informal salons in the evenings at the residence at VCCA,” Brown says. “I’m delighted that they’re willing to share those experiences with the Sweet Briar community.”

This will be the first of many such events at Sweet Briar.