Echoes of the Shadows
An exhibition featuring works by 2025 Studio Art graduates and Aunspaugh Fellows
Curated by Ganiyu Jimoh (Jimga) and Elnaz Latifpour (PhD candidates, Art and Architectural History)
Reception: May 17, 12:30pm
On view May 19—June 6, 2025
In celebration of the 2025 Studio Art graduates and Aunspaugh Fellows of the University of Virginia’s Department of Art, the Ruffin Gallery presents the exhibition Echoes of the Shadows.
Echoes of the Shadows brings together a diverse constellation of works that grapple with what lingers beneath the surface; emotionally, politically, and materially. Across sculpture, animation, textiles, paintings, and print, the artists trace forms of presence shaped by absence: bodies remembered through fragments, histories buried and re-exhumed, identities masked, revealed, or imagined. Shadows, in this context, are not simply remnants of what once were active forces: cast, shifting, and shaping perception. They speak not only to what is hidden, but to the echoes that remain when something is lost, transformed, or held in silence.
The works in this exhibition were curated from works presented by Studio Art Majors and Aunspaugh Fellows across five weeks of exhibitions. This exhibition has become a living archive of vulnerability and resistance. These artists do not attempt to resolve the shadow; they dwell in it, carve into it, listen to its textures. Whether through grief rituals, poetic traces, inherited trauma, or speculative storytelling, each work contributes to a shared grammar of subtle disruption. Echoes of the Shadows invites viewers to move through liminal space; to engage not with certainty, but with careful attention, and to consider how art can speak most powerfully in the quiet aftermath of what can’t be fully seen.