Woodcut Support Group
If that fantasy you had about setting up a silk-screening workshop in your shed is still a fantasy, know that Studio 23, Richmond's printmaking collective, is on the hunt for new members — students, professional artists and people whose sheds are filled with the detritus of other quickly abandoned hobbies. The studio offers use of its comparatively vast and uncluttered printmaking facilities in Plant Zero, including its 1,500-pound printing press. studiotwothree@gmail.com.
The Sore Stirrer’s Apprentice
The Virginia Foundation for the Humanities holds its annual Folklife Apprenticeship Showcase this Saturday in Charlottesville, featuring demonstrations and performances by program graduates, younger artists who've spent the last year training with master craftsmen. The aim is to preserve for at least one more generation time-honored Virginia arts like oyster shucking, apple cider making, Brunswick stew stirring, leather working and unfiltered Pall Mall smoking. Plus music: gospel and, a more recent import, Persian drumming. The showcase is free. Saturday, May 9, 1-5 p.m., www.virginiafolklife.org.
Twitter Goes Analog
New micromagazine Abe's Penny is a 4-by-6-inch sign of the times. Most print publications — from Vogue to The New York Times to certain more local papers — are shrinking, but Abe's, published by New York art scenesters and sisters Anna and Tess Knoebel, must be the first to have adopted a postcard format: art on one side, text on the other. Sadly, this leaves precious little room for any shirtless-dude-phone-sex ads. But how much better to know the Postal Service is still running (I hadn't seen the little trucks in a while and wasn't sure.), and not just that previous, precious indie band. www.abespenny.com.
Beer No Evil
Michelob's making its bid to catch the comet tail of the luxury-for-everyone trend. Kroger and 7-Eleven now carry the Michelob Wheat Beer Sampler, a $6.99 six-pack featuring two each of Belgian-style, German-style and American-style wheat ales, all this with a pretentious yet fairly elementary flighting sheet in each box, apparently so that you and your pals can conduct elegant tastings 'round the beer pong table. Good roommates, I'm told, will not drink the Belgians, then leave the other, less-tasty beers to be consumed by late-arriving palates, nor will they repeat this action over and over, filling the fridge with two-thirds-full boxes of unwanted German and American brews (a fitting model, too, for what happened to the waffle so many years ago). www.michelobsamplerpack.com.
Got Those Too-Much-Blue Blues
When you were 12 and tried makeup for the first time, your teenaged neighbor assured you it was easy. Then you saw in the lighted mirror not only a quantity of aquamarine eye shadow but also your own intense skepticism as to whether you could ever master this sort of thing. But perhaps, since then, you've grown foolishly less skeptical and so are interested in attending a workshop at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts promising to make you color competent — capable of grasping tonal harmonies and of applying this knowledge to self, home and garden. Surely things will be different this time. Friday, May 15, at noon, www.vmfa.state.va.us, 340-1400.
The Mahler 9, Just in Time for Summer
Austrian composer Gustav Mahler didn't live to hear his Symphony No. 9 performed, which makes plenty of sense once you hear the thing. There's not another piece of music that makes you feel so anxious, as if the anxiety and the tenderness just might swamp your boat for good this time. Naturally, some of us have been counting down the days until we could have this experience again. And here's the chance: In its last performances of the season, the Richmond Symphony will play, ah!, the Mahler 9, May 15, 16 and 18, at Second Baptist Church, First Baptist Church and St. Michael's Catholic Church, respectively. www.richmondsymphony.com.
