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FLOW Festival Features Riverside Art

With all the rain we’ve had in central Virginia, rivers are in their glory, and Charlottesville intends to celebrate with a special art show called Flow. 

As the founder of Chroma Gallery, Deborah McLeod loves art, and she enjoys strolling by the Rivanna River, so the FLOW art festival was a natural for her group and Albemarle County:

“I want people to think about the history of the river,” she explains.  “How the river has served people throughout time – for fishing, doing laundry, for transportation, river baptism – just the absolute refreshing, inspiring quality of it.”

This Saturday, from 11-4 painters and sculptors, musicians and dancers will share their work from points along the Rivanna in Darden Towe Park.  Two of them will even allow the river to make art.

Credit FLOW
Dancers perform at last year's FLOW arts festival

“They’re going to stretch white silk across it, and then they’re going to put it in the river and let the river make a landscape, because all of the different colors of sediment in the water are at different heights as the river flows.”

The community is also invited to a boat decorating competition.

“It’s called the Flowtilla Spontaneous Decorated Boat Parade,” McLeod says. “Anybody can join.  There’s no entry fee.  You don’t have to let us know ahead of time.  Just show up at 1:30 on Saturday, September 29th.”

And if you don’t have a boat?

“Get inner tubes and put platforms across the top of them and do something that way,” she suggests, “or just get in an inner tube.  Decorate it like a bagel!”

Artists will compete for $2,000 in prizes – and will be judged by the head of the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts and his wife.  

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