2025 Shop Local Gift Guide
Here are ways to make shopping for gifts this holiday season feel super festive. Our beloved independent local businesses need our support. In thinking of things to make your dearest people smile, let’s try to shop our values and make our community smile as well. Each year, Arbus Magazine presents our Shop Local Gift Guide so that you can see what locally owned businesses are offering and be inspired to enjoy shopping for gifts. Enjoy...
Storytelling in Words & Paint
By Jim Draper My earliest childhood memories find me sitting in a stuffy, smoke-filled, mid-Mississippi living room. Lining the walls sitting on a hodgepodge collection of brought-in chairs was a collection of ancient relatives. Over the pings of silver forks on china plates and the clanks of ill-fitting teeth on caramel cake, I listen to their stories. The tales were mythic, colorful, dramatic, and sensual. Good bulls and big trees,...
NewBeginnings for a Treasured Tradition
WJCT’s mission is: “To provide programming and services that celebrate human diversity, encourage joyful learning, and promote civic participation, all to empower citizens to improve the quality of their lives.” That mission has been met and exceeded for more than six decades, with ever-increasing participation and support of the North Florida community. Recently, dramatic federal and state funding cuts to WJCT and...
Creative Haven A Conversation with the Wall Street Journal’s Noli Novak
Interviewed by Sheri Webber From Hallways to Galleries Q: Congratulations on your new space. What makes this gallery different from other artist collectives? A: Thank you. Many collectives operate like studios with long hallways and closed doors. While those workspaces are useful, they don’t allow art to be properly displayed. We wanted to do something more intentional. From the beginning, we committed to creating not just individual...
Cover Artist: Casey Matthews
Although a native of San Antonio, Texas, Casey Matthews has considered the Southeast her home for over 30 years. She studied art and art history at Texas Christian University and the University of Alabama. Her many subjects are approached with light-hearted enthusiasm and delivered with singular verve and style yet are introspective and spiritually enlightening. For Matthews, it is important not to become complacent and not to be...
The Liminal Space Between Presence and Remembering
By Vanessa Harper When I first laid eyes on Caitlin Flynn’s body of work, I felt transported in time. Some paintings took me to the rustic beaches of old Florida or Cape Cod in decades past, while others open like a doorway to what comes next. Her work suspends you between memory and imagination and captures fragments of a shared nostalgia with scenes that feel like they belong equally to someone else’s story and to your...


