About the Ruffin Gallery:
Since 2008, the Ruffin Gallery has been an active part of the Studio Art program. Each year the gallery hosts four to six exhibits that serve as one of the University's most important showcases for contemporary art and are an integral part of the Studio Art experience. Students gain valuable experience through their involvement with the production and installation of exhibitions by visiting artists. The gallery also hosts an exhibition by each year's Ruffin Distinguished Artist-in-Residence. Past Ruffin Distinguished Artists-in-Residence have included Nick Cave, Mark Dion, Guillermo Gómez-Peña, Marisa Williamson among others. Every Spring, the gallery is the site of the Fourth-Year Thesis and Aunspaugh Fellows Exhibitions. These openings are important occasions when the whole Studio program gathers to celebrate students' successful completion of the major. In addition to the Ruffin Gallery, student and visiting artist work is frequently shown throughout Ruffin Hall.
Exhibition proposals and any questions may be directed to Elena Yu, Ruffin Gallery and Visiting Artist Coordinator. Exhibitions are selected by a committee of Department of Art faculty and staff.
Ruffin Gallery is open to the public Monday-Friday 9am-5pm. The gallery is located on the 3rd Floor of Ruffin Hall, at 179 Culbreth Road, Charlottesville, VA 22903. Nearby parking is available at Culbreth Garage.
Current and Upcoming Exibitions
A Continuous Storyline: Four Decades of UVA Painters, Curated by Megan Marlatt, Professor of Studio at University of Virginia
January 6-February 14, 2025
Gallery hours: Monday-Friday, 9am-5pm
Public Exhibition Reception + Megan Marlatt retirement celebration: Friday, January 31, 5-7pm
Ruffin Gallery at the University of Virginia is pleased to announce A Continuous Storyline: Four Decades of UVA Painters, curated by Professor of Art Megan Marlatt and featuring the work of eight of Marlatt’s former UVA students from across a thirty-five year career at UVA.
“I’ve always thought my students were teaching me more than I was teaching them. I call them 'my students,' but they never really belonged to me. They had wills of their own that decided whether they wanted to learn or not. They had their own ambitions, fears, failures, and triumphs that would lead them to choose whatever path they decided to tread, as I had mine. We’d all stumble around in the studio classroom, trying to realize our creative lives. I had to learn from them as much as teach them.
"I call this exhibition of my former students A Continuous Storyline because each year would bring more students. The lessons would start again until thirty-six years had piled up behind nearly eighteen hundred students. ‘I don’t remember saying that,’ I’d say to myself when a former student told me they remembered a lesson. I also had my own ambitions and fears as their teacher. I remember my failure at realizing I couldn’t teach some of my students any longer; they had developed beyond what I had to give. I remember my triumphs as these same students embraced the creative life we all mutually strove for, becoming my peers.
"A Continuous Storyline: Four Decades of UVA Painters is an exhibition of eight of these former students, from four decades of my teaching at the University of Virginia. Each artist’s work tells their own story, from Gina Beaver’s thick lips that endeavor to speak in paint to David Askew’s fantastic exploration of identity, beauty, and racial ambiguity. John Arnold’s paintings tell the story of a landscape encrusted in the salt disaster of his small hometown of Saltville, while Maggie King Johns’ sculpted works carve out the body of a young woman’s identity growing up in a Southern Christian home. Tales whispering from the past in a place far away, Phượng Duyên Hải Nguyễn struggles to recount her memories of Vietnam while Tori Cherry tries to capture the present, simple moments in her day-to-day life. Jackson Casady’s paintings retell the tales of an upbringing in Hollywood, while Matt Kleberg’s pictures of architectural alcoves beckon us to climb on his stage and orate.
"As they develop their own personal narratives, these artists will in turn make their impact on younger artists, either through direct teaching or simply by example. Their stories of reaffirming a creative life will continue."
—Megan Marlatt, Professor of Art at the University of Virginia
EXHIBITING ARTISTS: John Arnold (‘98), David Askew (‘21), Gina Beavers (‘96), Jackson Casady (‘17), Tori Cherry (‘20), Maggie King Johns (‘14), Matt Kleberg (‘08), Phượng Duyên Hải Nguyễn (‘15)
This exhibition was made possible with the support of the University of Virginia’s Department of Art and the UVA Vice Provost for the Arts.
Recent Exhibitions
New Growth: Ten Years of Mountain Lake Biological Station, Curated by Sarah Irvin and Tracy Stonestreet
October 21-December 6, 2024
Panel Discussion: Friday, November 8, 4-5pm
Opening Reception: Friday, November 8, 5-7pm
This exhibition celebrates the mission and history of UVA’s ArtLab Residency at Mountain Lake Biological Station. Begun in 2013, ArtLab brings together artists with scientists to observe, explore, and investigate the natural world. Each artist in the exhibition is a past participant of the residency, and each artwork reflects in its own way the type of exploration and research that ArtLab fosters.
The artworks curated here communicate the profoundly positive impact of interdisciplinary interaction. Tapping into the principles of observation, they focus on the natural world and our relation to it, and call attention to the artist’s central role as observer. This has the collective result of blurring the fictitious line between observer and the observed, and of highlighting the human ability to step out of and interpret the workings of our planet.
CURATORS
Sarah Irvin, Artist and Curator and Tracy Stonestreet, Artist, Writer, Researcher, and Director of University of Mary Washington Galleries
ARTISTS
Nancy Blum | Sara Bouchard | Gregory Brellochs | Rob Carter | Zehra Khan | Meredith Leich | Chris Mahonski | Nathalie Miebach | Ash Eliza Williams
Supported by an Arts Enhancement Grant from UVA Arts & the Office of the Provost & the Vice Provost for the Arts.
The Threat, The , Presented by The Institute for Improvisational Infrastructures
August 30-October 4, 2024
Opening Reception and Performance: August 30, 5-7pm
The Institute for Improvisational Infrastructures presents The Threat, The , an indoor and outdoor exhibition that examines and rewrites spatial, material, sonic, and performative languages of security, sovereignty, and revivalism in the Global North.
Its installations, performances, sound, video, and printed matter read the historical proliferation of security state infrastructures — defensive architectures, counterterrorist technologies, risk-management procedures — not as stabilization but indication of political precarity unfolding. Riot gear, Thomas Jefferson’s serpentine walls, border surveillance, and more populate this long history of infrastructures that reify civic boundaries, choreograph state violence, and sediment unjust distributions of capital, power, and freedom. Local Jeffersonian architecture, for instance, encodes into the built environment not only the boundary but the loop: it traffics in a revisionist nostalgia, seeking to make spaces of the present in the image of the past. The temporalities that result are self-renewing cycles, references to references, quotes of quotes, that continually copy, paste, multiply, and abstract familiar architectural languages. Enacting its slow violence, the built environment is less thing than process.
As we aim to dismantle signifiers of subjugation today — names, monuments, buildings — to make space for other social possibilities, a nearby epistemic task sits unfinished: a radical remaking of what role our built environment plays in the political and civic imaginary. A state engaged in perpetual militarization and speculative counterterrorist practices produces its own imaginative vacuum, its own paranoid politics of the possible: we can hardly envision a polity today whose continuance is not bound up with securitization and, particularly today, the management of its borders. After nuclearization and 9/11, the fantasy of the security state, as anthropologist Joseph Masco argues, is a future without emergencies, every potential political disruption, protest, and incursion already preempted by administrative threat assessment and risk analysis.
Site-responsive, public, and multimodal, The Threat, The rescripts object, action, site, sound, and text using tactics from a range of theatrical, architectural, and activist traditions to grapple with the legacies and artifacts of the security state and to disrupt popular securitarian narratives circulated as pretext for state violence. The exhibition's installations are built on site only to exist for a month, its parts to be disassembled and recycled afterwards. This refusal of literal object permanence embraces temporalities compressed both by precarity under conditions of racial capitalism and by queerness as death drive, as a mode against the knowable, the commodifiable, the continual, and the monumental. If the built environment reproduces and is reproduced by our existing social orders, how might we, as architectural theorist Keller Easterling asks, hallucinate an alternative?
The Institute for Improvisational Infrastructures (III) is:
a counter-architectural firm
a placemaking promise
a spatial hacking
an institutional détournement
an administrative irrationality
a corporate fiction
Working between alternative architecture and experimental performance, the III is committed to critically utopian engagements with publics and places.
A long-term project by Conrad Cheung (Assistant Professor of Studio Art at the University of Virginia), the III is a fictional one-person architectural firm that researches, designs, and constructs. The project is undergirded by questions about the ethical complexities of labor, precaritization, authorship, and political accountability in global architectural practice today.
Supported by the UVA Arts Council and the UVA Department of Art
HOME
An exhibition featuring the 2024 Studio Art graduates and Aunspaugh Fellows
Reception: May 18, 12:30—3:00pm
On view May 18—June 14, 2024
In celebration of the 2024 Studio Art graduates and Aunspaugh Fellows of the University of Virginia’s Department of Art, the Ruffin Gallery presents the exhibition HOME.
The graduating class of 2024 began their college experience online, and conflicted feelings surrounding the idea of “home” emerge in their art. The place that once hosted the most personal moments of their lives was suddenly on display to classmates and professors. “Home” became fraught with paradoxes: private yet public, safe yet compulsory, familiar yet strange, calming yet discomforting. For many students, “home” became less physical and more conceptual, embodied by family, friends, memories, and identities that were clarified in moments of quiet (or perhaps unquiet) reflection. At the close of their time at UVA, the artists can look back at several events on Grounds that underscore the conflicts surrounding “home” in the university community.
Such complicated feelings and experiences are laid bare in HOME. The artists on display ask us to consider our own meaning of “home”: is it a material place? A feeling? A group of people? Or has our own definition of “home” yet to be realized?
Curated by Abigail Bradford and Dustin Thomas (PhD candidates, Program in Mediterranean Art and Archaeology)
Thesis Exhibitions - 4th Year Studio Students and Aunspaugh Fellows
April 8 - May 3, 2024 (Exhibitions change every week)
Closing receptions: Fridays, 5-7pm
Full Press Release
Please join the Department of Art and the rest of our community in congratulating our graduating students and 5th Year Aunspaugh Fellows on the work they have done and the exhibitions we now get to enjoy on all three floors of Ruffin Hall and in Ruffin Gallery.
Thesis shows in Studio Art are the culmination of four academic years of undergraduate liberal arts at UVA. We, as faculty & staff, are incredibly proud of the hard work all of our students put into their creative practices and exhibitions. Students are involved with the production and installation of these exhibitions and gain valuable experience in the handling and hanging of important works of all types, as well as the work of hosting their own receptions. We all come together as a department during these Friday student exhibition receptions to recognize the student’s successful completion of the major.
Exhibition Schedule
Week 1
April 8 - April 12
Ruffin Gallery: Jasmine Brown, Emma Todd
3rd Floor: Todd Bensen
1st Floor Media Gallery: Brenden Nieves
Week 2
April 15 - April 19
Ruffin Gallery: Maddie Butkovich, Claire Szeptycki
3rd Floor: Proud Chandragholica
2nd Floor: Christina Liu
1st Floor Performance Room: Hyebin Lee
Week 3
April 22 - April 26
Ruffin Gallery: Samantha Farber, Heeran Karim,Adrian Moore
3rd Floor: Natalie Schiff
2nd Floor: Adam Centanni
1st Floor Performance Room: Rian Gonzalez
Week 4
April 29 - May 3
Ruffin Gallery: Lucia Mayor-Mora, KJ Vaughan, Tori White3rd Floor: Garrett Stebbins
2nd Floor: Hadley Hoffman1st Floor: Autumn Jefferson, Jessie Mai, Mix Rudolph
1st Floor Media Galleries: Zoe Farmer, Aria Liu
1st Floor Performance Room: Jay Pendarvis
Week 5
May 6 - May 10
1st Floor Media Gallery: Anne Kickert
EscapeRoom, Curated by Kim Bobier and Marisa Williamson
February 23 - March 29, 2024
Press Release
Panel Discussion: Friday, February 23, 3 - 4:30 pm
Opening Reception: Friday, February 23, 5 - 7 pm
WTJU Interview with Marisa Williamson about the EscapeRoom Exhibition in Ruffin Gallery.
University of Virginia (UVA) is a site of reckoning. The legacies of slavery and white supremacy reverberate throughout its built environment. EscapeRoom confronts frameworks of injustice that contemporary audiences inhabit and inherit in relation to this UNESCO World Heritage Site. Its title evokes “edutainment” formats, such as museum period rooms and escape room games, which immerse visitors in scenes of the past. Yet, rather than reproducing one historical container or master narrative, EscapeRoom charts critical routes through a maze of predatory systems. It showcases recent works by artists who operate across temporalities, geographies, and disciplines to hack the master’s tools and harness radical alternatives.
Thomas Jefferson, founding father of both UVA and the USA, designed a plantation-university. His paradoxical vision of freedom still permeates the school and the nation. Perhaps this is why Angela Davis called the palatial campus’s lawn rooms “cramped as prison cells.” Suppose you are trapped in a system that defines you not as you are. How do you get through, get out, or transform? EscapeRoom’s artworks explore carceral, colonial technologies of (over)sight. The artists’ perspectives offer counterprogramming to UVA’s founding pedagogy of paternalism and racializing surveillance, typified by Jefferson’s Anatomical Theatre, a now-demolished UVA classroom that advanced a race science of biological hierarchy. Students, faculty, and professional grave-robbers plundered Black burial grounds to obtain cadavers for anatomical dissection and observation. Such dehumanizing dynamics in the name of science laid a foundation for UVA to become an epicenter of early twentieth-century eugenics.
On Grounds (as the UVA campus is known), the academic art gallery promotes a different kind of dissection and observation. How can this space serve as a site of autopsy (from the Greek, to “see for oneself”)? How can it forge sightlines of redress and amplify the personhood of people (past and present) who are treated as fungible objects of supervision? The Anatomical Theatre is the only Jefferson-designed building that the university has torn down. Yet, “[t]he master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house,” cautions Audre Lorde. At the very least, EscapeRoom’s artworks unsettle its foundation from within. The artists, most of whom identify as women and femmes of color, work in an array of media, from ceramics, installation, textile to Augmented Reality. They variously sneak in protective heirlooms, summon guidance from ghosts, track the elusive war machine, reclaim prison-censored material, reimagine race and gender as technology, and activate interdisciplinary hush harbors. These interventions trace lines of flight while questioning the viability of escape. Leery of simple solutions, the exhibition gathers multisensory and multi-dimensionally expressive forms of sense-making. It convenes clues as to how, if at all, we might get free.
CURATORS
Marisa Williamson, Assistant Professor of Studio Art at University of Virginia with a research focus on Blackness and Kim Bobier, Adjunct Assistant Professor at Pratt Institute’s Department of History of Art and Design
ARTISTS
Chotsani Elaine Dean | Sue Jeong Ka | Alma Molina Carvajal | Yanique Norman | Amina Ross | Mauricio Vargas | Carrie Mae Weems | Lauren Williams | The Unsettling Grounds Artist Collective | UVA’s Fall 2023 Introduction to New Media students
Supported by the UVA Arts Council and the UVA Department of Art
Camilo Leyva Espinel: AMBI PLAYGROUND
January 26 - February 16, 2024
Opening Reception: Friday, January 26, 5 - 7 pm
The exhibition AMBI PLAYGROUND features a new installation by Bogotá, Colombia-based interdisciplinary artist and professor Camilo Leyva Espinel.
The prefix ambi can be traced to its Proto-Indo-European roots: mbhi could mean “around,” and it is probably derived from ant-bhi, which might mean “both sides.” Doubt is ingrained in etymology, which is captivating and fortunate in this instance. The paradoxical aspect of ambi’s meaning is what called for its use in the title of the exhibition. It creates a third space, a spiraling cycle, an open site for possible outcomes and mistakes. This playground will exist in the exhibition space as a process, an adventure, and as a moment for reflection and participation.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Camilo Leyva is an interdisciplinary artist and professor that lives and works in Bogotá, Colombia. Leyva makes participatory installations and sculptures that focus on how memory and stories stay latent within matter and context, how those memories can be articulated into or revealed through a material statement and its subsequent interaction with the public. Through his work he has investigated processes of communication and collective construction of meaning. Leyva has addressed questions of power, games, manipulation, corruption, façades, and lure strategies; also taking into consideration the tension between our digital and concrete realms. Leyva received an MFA at Parsons the New School for Design and an MA in Art History form Andes University in Colombia. He has shown his work in solo and group exhibitions in New York and Bogotá. Leyva is part of the Agoraphobia collective.
Supported by the UVA Arts Council and the UVA Department of Art
Thinking of Place iii
October 27 - December 15, 2023
Opening Reception: Friday, October 27, 5 - 7pm
Murmuration
August 25 - October 26
Opening Reception: Friday, August 25, 5 -7pm
Supported by the UVA Arts Council and the UVA Department of Art
Former art students, colleagues, and mentors of Elizabeth Schoyer are combining energy, moving through the air, connecting creative visions, and converging in Ruffin Gallery for six weeks this fall. This show is curated by Professor Schoyer, who has taught introductory and advanced drawing, as well as painting, in UVA’s Studio Art Program for many years.
Murmuration Artists:
Golnar Adili | Michael Bogin | Erin Crowe | Ellen Driscoll | Ellen Gallup | Rachel Lane | Kera MacKenzie | Andrew Mausert-Mooney | Sarah Morrison | Kristen Nyce-Reed | Danielle Riede | Martha Saunders | Sandy Williams IV
Anna Hogg: Every bit unrending, unreading
is a collection of works that examines the tension between that which is archivable and that which is not.
February 24 - March 24, 2023
Women in the artist’s family do the labor of preservation, as they hand-wash a quilt made by her great-grandmother, imagining and remembering fragments of its story. Uncertainty surges as faded ink-stains appear on the quilt only after being soaked in water. This collective work is posed alongside a film that imagines the perspective of an archive as it destroys—or erases—itself. Feeling around in the dark, one still senses its presence, but like the edges of burnt paper, it crumbles upon the slightest disturbance. One may only read the traces of memory backward, through absence. The viewer is invited to read the space, its images and its objects, differently, through failure. What remains, and what takes the place of an archive that is itself limiting and limited in how and what it preserves? Generously supported by the UVA Department of Art and the UVA Arts Council.
Anna Hogg is an artist and filmmaker whose work addresses the relationship between memory and the body archive. These investigations extend to the collective feminine that gathers memory, its objects and stories, the relationship between trauma and memory, and the intergenerational archive in contrast to that of the institution. Within these contexts, one finds that the act of remembering and forgetting, preserving and refusing—making into refuse—are often intimately connected, and the boundary that divides them more fluid.
Aesthetics of Undocumentedness
January 27 - February 17, 2023
Curated by Erika Hirugami, MA. MAAB.
Partners
CuratorLove • Visible/Records • Rasquache Residency
Sound Justice lab • UVA Arts Council
There is no easy way to define undocumentedness and no single definition that stands true across the globe. In the words of Jose Antonio Vargas, “If there are an estimated 45 million immigrants living in America, then there are 45 million ways of being an immigrant in America. Like all groups, we are not a monolith.”[1] Of those forty-five million immigrants, and as per the Department of Homeland Security, eleven million immigrants currently residing in the United States are unauthorized.[2] Borrowing Jose Antonio Vargas’ logic, there are eleven million ways of being undocumented in the United States. Thus, to completely comprehend undocumentedness, and in the words of Federico Cuatlacuatl, one must consider undocumentedness a spectrum.[3] To understand the complexity of belonging to the undocumented community, the undoc+ spectrum and undocumented diaspora emerge to tease out undocumentedness. Individuals within the undoc+ spectrum have lived or are currently living undocumented, whereas individuals in the undocumented diaspora are directly or indirectly affected by undocumentedness but have not embodied undocumentedness themselves. Examples of the undoc+ spectrum are current or former undocumented individuals, while examples of individuals in the undocumented diaspora are children or partners of individuals in the undoc+ spectrum.
Calista Lyon and Carmen Winant: Breaking Water
October 28 - December 9, 2022
The collaborative work of Calista Lyon and Carmen Winant examines the profound psychological impact of ecological breakdown, with a particular focus on the interconnectedness of the water crises and the body. Both artists share an interest in the ways in which feminist and posthumanist perspectives have the potential to intervene within patriarchal and capitalist norms to radically shift the personal and political. Working from a research-based approach, Winant draws heavily on 1960s and ’70s ecofeminist traditions and the lesbian feminist separatist movement to build alternative image archives that center women, collectivism, and care. Lyon, on the other hand, reflects on ecology, environmental precarity, and the historical and present-day human exploitation of land in installations and performances combining found images, obsolescent technology, and reclaimed materials.
For their installation at Ruffin Gallery, the artists mobilize water as a catalyst for thinking about transformation and societal paradigm shifts. Juxtaposing images of “water breaking” in the context of both childbirth and river restoration projects, the installation features videos played in rapid succession on a circular constellation of outdated CRT monitors resting on a custom table fashioned from recycled timber. Culling hours of footage from YouTube, television, and Hollywood cinema, Lyon and Winant assembled a living archive. Perhaps alluding to a shift in climate activism beyond pacifism or nonviolence, the clips feature dramatic footage of explosions and gushing water in the immediate aftermath of human-involved initiatives to liberate rivers and waterways from extractive dam infrastructure. This imagery is punctuated by kitsch, sometimes humorous portrayals of unsuspecting women in the process of labor when the amniotic sac ruptures and liquid pools on the floor. Altogether the installation presents a dizzying array of experiences, where, in the artists’ words, “water never really ‘breaks’ but rather shifts form, moving in and out of bodies, [and] acts as both a signal and an agent of embodied change.”
Drawing in part from Andrea Ballestero’s text A Future History of Water and Astrida Neimanis’s Hydrofeminism: Or, On Becoming a Body of Water Lyon and Winant seek to capture the moment of fundamental transformation that occurs when individuals are compelled to act in support of water’s protection and larger efforts combating climate change. A soundtrack features the artists in conversation, responding to the prompts that guided their process in developing the work, including: When have we experienced perspectival “breaking through”? How do we relate to water in and of our own bodies? What are the most frightening or sublime encounters we have had with water? What can we learn from water? How do we move past the myth of our own powerlessness? The narration seems to echo internal dialogues we might all have had in coming to terms with the overwhelming feelings of suspension and urgency that are associated with climate grief. By using the transition between life in the womb and life outside of it, and the liberation of waterways as metaphors for thinking about the kind of paradigm shift that is needed for individuals to become politically and socially mobilized, Lyon and Winant engage in a radical reorientation of values and ethics—and prompt us to imagine a reality where we, like water, embody new modes of survival and resistance that are ever fluid, adaptable, and empowered.
-Amara Antilla, Senior Curator at Contemporary Arts Center
Ruffin Distinguished Artist in Residence Program
Jackson Taylor: Only Nearness
New Works in Printmaking
September 30 - October 21, 2022
Currently the Assistant Professor of Printmaking and Drawing at the University of Virginia, Jackson Taylor was born and raised in rural Kentucky on a large intergenerational cattle and tobacco farm. He holds a BFA in 2D Studio Art from the University of Louisville and received his MFA in Printmaking and Drawing from the University of Iowa in 2021. He is a master of lithography and monotype processes, which he uses to generate multifaceted prints and drawings about growing up in the American South. Taylor has conducted printmaking workshops across the US and exhibited his work internationally.
Michelle Gagliano: The transubstantiation of shoepolish.
August 26 - September 23, 2022
The power of this marginalized material of shoe polish does not go unnoticed. It is difficult to find in the grocery store. It is set aside, dusty, almost forlorn, and always on the lower shelf; yet, it possesses the power to marginalize a race, to set aside and further push down with its history in creating the “black face.” This material has the dual nature to transpose into the ability to mock and suppress entire communities. The shoe polish by itself is innocent but once applied, becomes guilty. The idea to transform the material - give it another meaning and push it away from the suppressive and subversive undertones - ends ultimately with a transubstantiation of the material and a cleanse of its emotional volatile discourse. A change and shift in the view of the substance is the efficacious result.
Born in upstate New York, Michelle Gagliano currently practices from her studio in central Virginia. She has a MFA from American University and has completed residencies at the Chautauqua School of Art and Virginia Center for the Creative Arts and a fellowship with the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. She has held solo exhibitions and curated group shows throughout the US, Europe, and Asia.
The Transubstantiation of Shoe Polish is on view through September 23, 2022.
Pink
May 21 - July 1, 2022
In celebration of the community of fourth and fifth-year student artists of the University of Virginia’s Department of Art, the Ruffin Gallery presents a new group exhibition, Pink.
Emerging from a series of weekly thesis presentations by fifteen artists from the Studio Art program, the exhibition considers the color pink unbounded by the sticky connotations and associations of constructed contexts. Beyond its power to signify such disparate notions as queens and communists, innocence and excess, fleshiness and futurism, does pink have a material presence of its own? If so, what might a liberated pink make possible?
Exploring ideas including gender, disorientation, labor conditions, and trauma, the fifteen works on display in the Ruffin Gallery recreate the intimate environment of those Friday conversations. Pink combines the energies of those talks with the color’s physical manifestations – from far beneath the Sahara’s surface to an exoplanet 57 light-years away, from the fleshy organs of the body to the invisible edges of the rainbow.
Curated by Caroline Carter (Ph.D. candidate, Program in Mediterranean Art and Archaeology) and Brendan O’Donnell (Ph.D. student, Art and Architectural History), Pink is on view through July 1, 2022.
James Scheuren: I will never get tired and you will never get tired of me
February 25 - March 25 2022
The exhibition I will never get tired and you will never get tired of me. features new photographs and films by James Lam Scheuren including a collaborative series of silver prints with composer and intermedia artist, Alex Christie. The title, from an advertisement recited by the Edison Phonograph for itself, plays upon the never fulfilled utopian promise of technology with the new as the always same.
This exhibition is sponsored by the generosity of the UVA Arts Council.
James Lam Scheuren is an artist working in photography and motion picture whose work concerns how material culture exists to shape perception and the economy. He has had solo shows at the University of Vermont, Texas State University, and the University of Virginia and participated in national and international group exhibitions. Scheuren has been awarded residencies at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Vermont Studio Center, and Jentel Artist Residency. He teaches photography at the University of Virginia.
Sepideh Dashti: Counterpoint
January 24 - February 24, 2022
Counterpoint, includes recent and new photography, textile, and video installation work by Sepideh Dashti. Using personal and marginalized methods of research, as an artist Dashti performs her bodily material, stitching her hair and blurring the boundaries between languages, to challenge ideas of femininity and domesticity and depict the experience of her diaspora.
Not all diasporas are the same. Not all female experiences of oppression are the same. Dashti’s experience as an Iranian diasporic woman is fragmented along ethnic, religious, social, political, and class lines. These fragments pose challenges to her attempts to bind with others and find solidarity based in multiculturalism and ethnicity. Dashti establishes her body as an integral material in her art practices to make the explanation of her experiences and challenges possible. She seeks to claim her body across multiple media to question her identity with regard to the deplorable conditions of history, language, and culture existing between different spaces she has occupied.
About the artist:
Dashti is an emerging interdisciplinary artist who lives in Memphis, TN, USA. She got her MFA from Western University in London, Ontario, Canada in 2020. Her artistic practice is related to exploring her body by creating performance, video, photography, and installation. Through multiple discourses and contexts, she is always rediscovering, reinventing, and reinterpreting her Iranian identity, as a pivotal point for exploring her work in the multiple and heterogeneous context. She is also interested to cross field appropriation of the dominant philosophy and the technology of video with her lived experiences in the process of making art work. Dashti earned her BFA, Fine Arts Studio Practice-Intensive Studio Specialization, Honours Digital Arts Communication Minor, at the University of Waterloo in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada with the Dean’s Honours List. She is also a recipient of various awards such as the Lynn Holmes Memorial Award and Curator’s Choice Award during her BFA. She received the Joseph-Armand Bombardier Canada Graduate Scholarship in social sciences and humanities research in 2019. Her work has been showcased nationally and internationally.
Christian Camacho: The Caterpillar Set [El conjunto oruga]
October 29 - December 17, 2021
Opening reception: October 29, 2021, 5:00 - 7:00 PM
The Caterpillar Set gathers together a group of recent works whose signs occur within a shared imagination for sculpture, painting and light, as well as personal spaces and scales. Composed of materials of easy access and recurrent use in the representation of models and small-scale structures, each piece could function as a kind of brief station for sensations and scrutinies of different velocities, and for different types of expectations about the combination and recombination of a personal repertoire of treatments.
Elemental aspects within the realm of forms are what ultimately mobilize the intentions behind showing a world of integrated parts: compositions, relationships, figures, and backgrounds that are also in turn the objects and gestures of a life lived among close families of fragments—ingredients. Numerous forms that are constantly waiting to be able to construct the familiar from the unknown by reassembling the splinters that these small phenomena emit when they collide with one another.
Within this network of intentions we also see different lights flowing through openings: the appearance of constellations, colors, transparency, and other links among materials and their activity. We also find a transfer between the organic and the inorganic; the traces of tiny beings guided by appetite and nutrition, in coexistence with artificial supports, traditions of painting, and electronic beams.
This place-circuit invites us to look twice at the relationships among those things we use for calibrating our imagination, our gaze, and the immediate manipulation of the materials that surround our working days and nights. It is in this pursuit of sufficient amounts of energy that each piece presents its results, sharing them with the conscious understanding—both joyful and uncertain—that such calculations may never be exhausted.
I hope you enjoy the show.
Christian Camacho, translation by Byron Davies
The Caterpillar Set [El conjunto oruga] recoge un grupo de obras recientes cuyos signos ocurren entre una imaginación compartida para la escultura, la pintura, la luz, y los espacios y las escalas personales. Compuestas de materiales de fácil acceso y de uso recurrente en la representación de modelos y estructuras de la pequeña escala, cada pieza podría funcionar como una suerte de breve estación para sensaciones y escrutinios de distintas velocidades y para distintos tipos de expectativas sobre la combinación y recombinación de un repertorio personal de tratamientos.
Aspectos elementales dentro del reino de las formas son lo que ultimadamente moviliza las intenciones de mostrar a un mundo de partes integradas: composiciones, relaciones, figuras y fondos que a su vez son también los objetos y los gestos de una vida vivida entre cercanas familias de fragmentos: ingredientes. Numerosas formas que están todo el tiempo a la espera de poder construir lo familiar desde lo desconocido mediante el reensamblaje de las astillas que estos pequeños fenómenos emiten al chocar entre sí.
Entre esta red de intenciones vemos también a distintas luces correr por aperturas: la aparición de constelaciones, el color, la transparencia y otros vínculos entre los materiales y su actividad. Encontramos también una transferencia entre lo orgánico y lo inorgánico; la huella de seres diminutos guiados por el apetito y la nutrición, en coexistencia con soportes artificiales, tradiciones de la pintura y haces electrónicos.
Este circuito de lugares invita a mirar dos veces las relaciones entre las cosas que usamos para calibrar nuestra imaginación, nuestra mirada y la manipulación inmediata de los materiales que rodean nuestros días y noches de trabajo. Es en esta persecución de las cantidades suficientes de energía que cada pieza expone sus resultados y los comparte a consciencia de entender, jubilosa e inciertamente, que tales cálculos quizás nunca puedan agotarse.
Espero disfruten la muestra.
Christian Camacho
About the artist:
Christian Camacho (Estado de Mexico, 1985). Painting MA, Royal College of Art, London, UK. Visual Arts BA from ENPEG [National School of Painting, Sculpture and Printmaking] ‘La Esmeralda’ of the National Institute of Fine Arts, Mexico City, Mexico. His work has been shown in Mexico, Europe, the United States of America, and in South America in collaboration with institutions such as Museo Experimental El Eco, Museo de Arte Carrillo Gil as well as at the Royal College of Art and Imperial College in London, Palais de Tokyo in Paris, The Phoenix Art Museum and Museo Jumex in Mexico City. He has also been awarded grants from FONCA (National Endowment for the Arts, Mexico), and Fundación Jumex Arte Contemporáneo, where he designed and implemented education and public programs between 2014 and 2018. As part of his practice, Christian Camacho has also developed several formative initiatives –courses, seminars, workshops and readings– in collaboration with institutions and spaces such as Museo Tamayo, Museo Jumex, Instituto Alumnos, the International Symposium of Contemporary Art Theory PAC-SITAC in Mexico City, ESPAC, Colectivo Neter, Obrera Centro and Biquini Wax EPS among others. He is currently Professor at the Art Department of the University of Monterrey, in Monterrey, Mexico.
Emily Moores: Wild Whimsy
August 23 - October 15, 2021
Opening reception: August 27, 2021, 5:30 PM
An immersive installation adorned with colorful handmade textures and patterns; Wild Whimsy is a celebration of play. Using richly colored, large-scale sheets of paper, and hand cut patterns across space, Moores engages both the mind and body.
“When we look at play as a form of reducing stress and improving our memory, it’s something that’s really valuable on multiple levels.”
Temporality is centerfold to Moores’ installation. Rather than planning each detail beforehand, Moores let the space in Ruffin guide her, like a live drawing or a painting: “I think especially now where a lot of artwork is viewed online, installation brings a unique experience because it’s not something that can be fully captured in a photograph; you have to physically walk through the space and experience it. For me the temporary nature of the exhibition brings viewers into the space.”
The environment of bright blues, reds, and yellows and rich handmade textures invites movement and an engagement of the senses in the exhibition space. Wild Whimsy is on display in the Ruffin Gallery from August 21 to October 15. Wild Whimsy is the first exhibition in the Ruffin Gallery’s new Exhibition Proposal Program.
About the artist:
Emily Moores is a visual artist living and working in Cincinnati, Ohio. Her work consists of hand-cut and ornately layered materials, which create both wall works and large-scale installations. Emily’s work investigates the playful engagement of the body as essential to understanding and experiencing spaces or objects. Emily was selected as one of the Women to Watch 2020 by the Ohio Arts Council’s Riffe Gallery in collaboration with the Ohio Advisory Group of the National Museum of Women in the Arts. She created ‘Let’s Celebrate,’ a large scale installation consisting of wood, paper and fabric.Emily has shown her work regionally and nationally, including the Contemporary Arts Center (OH), the Riffe Gallery (OH), the Loudon House (KY), and the Dougherty Arts Center (TX). Emily Moores was a recipient of the Ohio Cultural Arts Individual Artist Award, the Summerfair Individual Artist Grant and the ArtPrize Seed Grant.
The Spaces Between
May 22 - June 18, 2021
Press release
This exhibition highlights the work produced by studio art majors during their final year at the University of Virginia. These artists responded to the uncertainty brought about by their personal circumstances and a global pandemic while on the cusp of entering the world beyond Grounds. During the shift to virtual learning, they physically created art with ephemeral materials that speak to the vulnerability of the ecosystems we inhabit and to the technologies that increasingly mediate our human interactions. They pictured the people who are at once present and absent from their lives. Through performance they explored feelings of belonging and alienation and confronted the larger systems that continue to oppress some and elevate others. They expressed their complex identities and family histories using dirt, paint, fabric, video, and photography. In the process of negotiating these apparent binaries, these sixteen artists drew from the gradations of their experiences to show that they––like all of us––exist in the spaces between. The exhibition was curated by Eleanore Neumann and Meaghan Walsh, PhD Candidates in Art and Architectural History at UVA. The Spaces Between will be on view through June 18, 2021.
4th and 5th Year Thesis Exhibitions
April 5 - May 7, 2021
For more information, view the press release.
Thesis shows in Studio Art are the culmination of not only one, but four academic years of undergraduate Liberal Arts at UVa. We, as faculty & staff, are incredibly proud of the hard work all our students put into their creative practices and exhibitions. This year is exceptional in the sense that we have been largely online in the continuing midst of a global pandemic - testament to our collective belief in visual art as a vital force in our communities and daily lives. Please join the Department of Art and rest of our community in congratulating our graduating students & 5th year Aunspaugh Fellows on the work they have done and the exhibitions we now get to enjoy at Ruffin Hall.
Neal Rock, Flesh Poems
March 1 - March 26, 2021
Flesh Poems takes its name from an essay by art historian Suzannah Biernoff on the life and work of artist and educator, Henry Tonks (1862 – 1937). Today Tonks is perhaps best known for his surgical drawings of WW1 soldiers whose faces underwent reconstructive surgery by one of the progenitors of modern-day plastic surgery, Harold Gillies. Tonks was himself a surgeon and longstanding teacher of drawing and anatomy at London’s Slade School of Art, where he taught amongst others painters such as Paul Nash and Gwen John.
Tonks’ surgical pastels, often depicting before and after renderings of Gillies’ operations, possess qualities of intimacy and horror, abjection and the irreducible materiality of flesh, skin and bone. These works stand not in art museums or galleries but in medical and surgical archives. As such their status as cultural artifacts remain open, porous, open to hermeneutic doubt and ambivalence. Their current resting place is then a frame of sorts, one that is internal and external to Tonks’ portraits.
In her essay Biernoff notes that Tonks referred to his pastels as fragments of the human. It should be clear that these are indeed literal fragments of war-torn faces. We could acknowledge torn psyches and bodies, irrevocably impacted by a carnage beyond words - here in these mute spaces Tonks’ poems find resonance. They are, in such wordlessness, provoking the invention of language or at least some kind of semiotic that might grasp hold of something approaching meaning. These fragments, held within blasted faces and folded reconstructions, are potentially an opening chapter for an abstraction that enters consciousness through disfiguration.
In a recent catalogue essay for MoCA’s Pattern & Decoration survey exhibition, LAXART curator Hamza Walker playfully inverts Clement Greenberg’s notion of homeless figuration, a term used by Greenberg for an emergent abstraction containing floating fragments of representation. Walker observes a homelessness rooted in the kind of work championed by Greenberg, and poses a question as to the cost of such insularity both then and now.
These faces bearing human brutality and tenderness are, in their very dislocation and disfiguration, a home of sorts - a focus on limits and boundaries as a means to regenerate meaning and value. Tonks was known for his privileging of the haptic as an art educator, his touch is just one of the many latent places where an ethics of abstraction could take root, face to face.
—David Edward. February 26th, 2021
2021 Studio Art Department Faculty Exhibition
February 1 - Feburary 19, 2021
With 14 contributing artists, this exhibition showcases the versatility of UVA’s Studio Art Department faculty members as both teachers and masters of their own artistic craft
The 2021 Studio Art Department Faculty Exhibition offers UVA and the Charlottesville community the opportunity to discover the recent artistic endeavors and professional accomplishments of faculty in the Studio Art Department. On view at the Ruffin Gallery for the month of February, this exhibit highlights the collective creativity of UVA faculty artists whose art-making practice is at the core of their teaching and scholarship. It presents current trends in contemporary art and the creative possibilities of a wide range of media, including photography, video, sculpture, printmaking, and painting.
“We’re excited to show recent work by the studio art department faculty and staff,” said William Wylie, current Director of Studio Art and photography professor. “There hasn’t been a department exhibition like this for over three years and it’s a great opportunity for students to see the work of their professors and for the greater community to see what we do in Ruffin Hall.”
The exhibition was curated by Lucia Colombari and Kelvin L. Parnell Jr., PhD Candidates in the Art and Architectural History Program at UVA. Participating artists include William Bennett, Amy Chan, Federico Cuatlacuatl, Kevin Everson, Carissa Kalia Heinrichs, Dan Hoogenboom, Megan Marlatt, Ed Miller, Lydia Moyer, Neal Rock, Akemi Ohira Rollando, James Scheuren, Elizabeth Schoyer, Matt Shelton, and William Wylie.
Barbara Campbell Thomas: Pneuma
October 12 - December 18, 2020
Equal parts collage, fabric, and sketchwork, Barbara Campbell Thomas couples paint with quiltwork in her contemplative study of where the spiritual meets the physical
For artist Barbara Campbell Thomas, “pneuma”, stemming from the ancient Greek word for “breath”, is a creative force and spirit which guides everything that she does. As an abstract painter, Barbara’s work is a meditation on giving form to that “breath”, a commitment to capturing what is unsayable.
Combining bright hues of color, layers of paint, and the technique of sewing, Barbara’s paintings are as much about the physical process itself as they are about the final product: “I am a physical being, and my engagement with paint, with painting, is an intensely physical act. But it is the physical engagement with material that has the potential to move into immaterial realms of inquiry. This has always been my experience as a painter.”
One process that is central to Barbara’s work in particular is sewing and creating patterns through quilting. Her connection to sewing came from her mother, who is a quilter herself. Learning from her mother how to quilt in 2014, Barbara immediately became attracted to the activity of what is called piecing, which is sewing together shapes side by side to create a seam. “I quickly started to see that this sewing could be the ground of the painting itself ... The sewn layer felt so rich; it almost felt like a missing part of the work was suddenly present.”
Another dimension of Barbara’s work is her sketchbooks, the covers of which are quilted by her mother. An intense record of her thought process for the past 20 years, the sketchbooks are an integral part of her studio practice. “My sketchbooks always predict what’s going to come.”
The linear aspect of her thoughts comes to life through her paintings. In particular, Pneuma, which the exhibition is named after, went through a drastic overhaul over the course of the pandemic. It was the first time she took a painting off and recut and resewed it back together. The development of her ideas is a testament to how being open to adapting is not only a part of being an artist, but also integral to shaping identity. “I think making a lot of work is a great way to figure out who you are. You just have to make a lot of work and sometimes a lot of it is going to be bad, and that’s okay. I think we live in a culture that doesn’t know what to do with failure. You have to engage with failure as an artist at any age because that is the way in which you figure out what’s working and what’s not.”
Barbara Campbell Thomas lives and works in Climax, North Carolina. Her work combines painting with quilting, overlaying their material vocabularies to create complex formal dialogues within each painting that resonate with the details of her own life and the history of each medium. She came relatively late to quilting, which she learned from her mother, but quickly realized its power as an art form traditionally practiced by women to inform and expand the range of painting.
Barbara Campbell Thomas’s paintings have been exhibited in museums and galleries across the United States, at the Weatherspoon Art Museum, The Painting Center, the Atlanta Center for Contemporary Art, The Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art and the North Carolina Museum of Art. She has been an artist-in-residence at the Hambidge Center for Creative Arts and Sciences, the Skowhegan School for Painting and Sculpture and, in 2021, she will attend the Elizabeth Murray Artist Residency. She is a recent recipient of a North Carolina Artists Fellowship.
Barbara Campbell Thomas is an Associate Professor of Art at UNC Greensboro.
Exploring Pneuma: A Conversation with Barbara Campbell Thomas
In conjunction with her exhibition, Ruffin Gallery Assistant, Olivia Pettee, sat down with Barbara to talk about her process, inspiration, and thoughts behind her show.