Events

Public Lectures, Visiting Artists & Scholars, Majors Events

Upcoming Events

New Frontiers in Black Placemaking

Monday, September 25, 2023

5 pm | Campbell 153

PANEL WITH DR. ASHLEY ADAMS, DENISE KADARA, DR. TIMOTHY E. NELSON, AND LA BARBARA JAMES WIGFALL; MODERATED BY DR. ANDREA ROBERTS

Part of the 2023 Sara Shallenberger Brown Cultural Landscapes and Sites Symposium

FOLLOWED BY A RECEPTION
This event is in-person only; a recording will be made available on UVA School of Architecture's YouTube Channel.

The notion of the Western frontier prompts recognition of the genocide and forced removal policies informed by notions of Manifest Destiny that dismembered Indigenous and Native communities. Native and Black landscapes of the West have historically lost population, been destroyed by development, and industry has extracted water and oil. Post-Emancipation, Black Western place makers sought a promised land in places like Nicodemus, Kansas, Blackdom, New Mexico, and Allensworth, California. During this event, descendant activists, planners, preservationists, and scholars from these towns will share their experiences preserving and planning in these emancipatory landscapes or Western Afrotopias. 

This symposium is a generative, re-memory project in which attendees share counter-narratives of Black Western placemaking, contemporary grassroots preservation efforts, and current movements to right the wrongs that led to the decline of Western Afrotopias. To shape practice and intellectual inquiry, the event showcases descendant leaders, practitioners, and scholars who historically frame Black settlement in the West as a contemporary reparative struggle and as a seat of speculative Black futures. The audience is invited to engage frontierism as being about expansive, new ways of increasing the capacity of Black folks to speak and plan in boundaryless ways about their pasts, presents, and futures.

A companion exhibition, Afrotopias of the West is on view in the Campbell Hall Corner Gallery, September 18–October 27. 

Next Cities Series: Next New York

Thursday, September 28, 2023

6:30 pm | FXCollaborative, Brooklyn, NY

BOOK TALK WITH CO-EDITORS MONA EL KHAFIF AND SETH MCDOWELL, MODERATED BY ILA BERMAN 

REGISTER FOR THIS EVENT

FOLLOWED BY A BOOK-SIGNING & RECEPTION
Celebrate the release of the School of Architecture’s newest title in its Next Cities series, Next New York—co-edited by Associate Professors Mona El Khafif and Seth McDowell—in the city that inspired its making. Join a conversation with the editors; Ila Berman, Elwood R. Quesada Professor and Director, Next Cities Institute will introduce and moderate the program. 

ABOUT THE BOOK:
Next New York (ORO AR+D, spring 2023) captures the city’s current momentum through the lens of three important urban actions: sharing, connecting, and partnering. Through 10 essays from scholars and practitioners working on pressing urban issues, a photographic essay portraying New York during COVID-19, and more than 35 design projects from graduate studios at the University of Virginia School of Architecture, Next New York reflects, comments, and speculates on New York City’s capacity to bring about new conceptions of city-making and collective cohabitation through architecture. Pre-order a copy of this book through the link below and pick it up at the event. 

PRE-ORDER YOUR COPY OF THIS BOOK

Application Deadline: Berlin Prize, American Academy in Berlin

Friday, September 29, 2023

12 pm ET | Online

The American Academy in Berlin invites applications for its residential fellowships for the academic year 2024/25. 

The Academy seeks to enrich transatlantic discussion in the arts, humanities, social sciences, and public policy through the development and communication of projects of the highest merit. Past recipients include anthropologists, historians, literary and legal scholars, philosophers, writers of fiction and nonfiction, journalists, translators, musicologists, sociologists, economists, political scientists, diplomats, and public policy experts. While the Academy supports projects from a wide range of disciplines, some fellowships are granted to projects covering specific topics, including those seeking innovative solutions to major global issues such as climate change or armed conflict; projects in political economy; biotechnology and public health; Jewish studies; and migration and social integration.

Approximately two dozen Berlin Prizes are conferred annually. Fellowships are typically awarded for an academic semester, but shorter stays of six to eight weeks are also possible. Benefits include round-trip airfare, partial board, a $5,000 monthly stipend, and accommodations at the Academy’s lakeside Hans Arnhold Center in the Wannsee district of Berlin.

For all projects, the Academy asks that candidates explain the relevance of a stay in Berlin to the development of their work. Proposals need not focus on German topics, but the Academy is interested in projects that will resonate with a Berlin public. The fellowship carries the expectation that recipients will engage with audiences in Germany on one or more occasions.

Fellowship candidates must be based in the United States. Candidates in academic disciplines must hold a PhD at the time of application. The Academy seeks to support both established and emerging scholars with strong records of peer-reviewed work beyond the dissertation, as well as writers and professionals who wish to engage in independent study. Writers should have published at least one book with an established press at the time of application. Candidates working in journalism, film, law, public policy, or related fields must have equivalent professional experience and a strong body of work. 

Following a peer-reviewed evaluation process, an independent Selection Committee reviews finalist applications. Recipients will be notified in March 2024. The 2024/25 Berlin Prizes will be publicly announced in May 2024. Please note that Berlin Prizes for visual artists, composers, and poets are determined in invitation-only competitions. 

The application deadline for 2024/25 is Friday, September 29, 2023 (12pm EST/6pm CET).

DEADLINE: J-Term in Prague

Sunday, October 1, 2023

5 pm | Online

UVA in Prague: Threshold of European Art and Culture 

In this course, students will learn the visual and cultural history of Prague and the Czech Republic, one of the most important Central European sites, and former seat of the Holy Roman Empire. At the intersection of eastern and western cultural roots and traditions, the art history of Prague from its earliest Romanesque roots to the fall of Communism and even current contemporary artistic exploration following the Velvet Revolution of 1989, constitutes a unique lens through which to explore all periods of European art and culture. This course focuses upon early and medieval traditions in week one and then continues with Renaissance, Baroque, fin-de-siècle, Communist, and independent Czech traditions in week two. Daily explorations of art historical topics are complemented by local lectures on culture, language, literature, and politics from the local Czech staff at Park Lane International School.

Prints and Narrative Paintings of the First Image of the Buddha in East Asia, 15th – 17th century

Friday, October 6, 2023

6 pm | Institute of Fine Arts, NYU

IFA CHINA PROJECT WORKSHOP FALL 2023 SCHEDULE

The in-person workshops will take place at the Institute of Fine Arts (1 East 78th St). Seating is on a first come, first served basis. In order to reserve a seat, RSVP by the morning of the event is required. The workshop will begin at 6:00 pm EST. Registration links will be sent out 1-2 weeks prior to the workshop.

October 6, 2023

Dorothy Wong (University of Virginia), present on the topic Prints and Narrative Paintings of the First Image of the Buddha in East Asia, 15th – 17th century.
The discussion will be moderated by Hsueh-man Shen (Institute of Fine Arts, NYU).


The China Project Workshop, founded in 2011, is open to anyone interested in premodern Chinese art or archaeology. It takes place monthly at the Institute of Fine Arts, 1 East 78 Street. The Workshop meets eight times each year, from September to December and February to May, attracting on average an audience of around 40 people. Presentations are usually in English but are occasionally in Chinese. 

All meetings of the workshop begin at 6:00 pm.

Add your name and email address to the mailing list

RSVP: chinaprojectworkshop@gmail.com

AIA Lecture: Human-animal-divine relationships in Cyprus: a social zooarchaeology of sacrifice

Thursday, October 12, 2023

6:30 pm | Campbell 160

Kathryn Grossman, Department of Sociology & Anthropology, North Carolina State University

In recent years, archaeologists have shied their aenon away from animals as passive parcipants in their own fate, and focused instead on animals as constuve members of mulspecies sociees. The intertwined lives of humans, animals, things, and divinies come together dramacally in the case of religious sacrifice, where boundaries between worlds are broken down and rebuilt through ritual, death, and consumpon. In a new project undertaken in collaboraon with Erin Avere (Creighton Univ.) and David Reese (Yale), we consider the fates of people and animals as together they pracce religious sacrifice in Cyprus in the Late Bronze and Iron Age. Cypriot religious and ritual iconography is rife with animal imagery, in vove offerings, depicons of deies, and zoomorphic masks, suggesng a broad role for animals in Cypriot religious life. This project considers animal remains from sanctuaries across Cyprus, along with art historical and archaeological evidence, and highlights the ways in which animals contributed to world-building (through the negoaon of earthly, liminal, and divine realms) and knowledge-creaon (through prognoscaon and divinaon).

Olle Lundberg on Enduring Design

Friday, October 13, 2023

12 pm | Campbell East Wing Gallery & Naug Lounge

2023 DISTINGUISHED ALUMNI OLLE LUNDBERG IN CONVERSATION WITH ROBIN DRIPPS AND LUCIA PHINNEY

Join the 2023 Distinguished Alumni Award Recipient, Olle Lundberg, AIA, (MArch '79) who speaks with the School of Architecture's Robin Dripps and Lucia Phinney about his four-decade career designing lasting, transformational works of architecture with Lundberg Design.

Presented in coordination with the exhibition Selected Works by Lundberg Design

Wild by Design: the Rise of Ecological Restoration

Friday, October 13, 2023

3 pm | Campbell 158

BOOK TALK WITH AUTHOR LAURA J. MARTIN, MODERATED BY BRADLEY CANTRELL + ELIZABETH MEYER

FOLLOWED BY A BOOK-SIGNING + RECEPTION

Restorationists grapple with the deepest puzzles of human care for life on earth: How to intervene in nature for nature’s own sake? What are the natural baselines that humans should aim to restore? Is it possible to design nature without destroying wildness? Laura J. Martin shows how amateur and professional ecologists, interest groups, and government agencies coalesced around a mode of environmental management that sought to respect the world-making, and even the decision-making, of other species. At the same time, restoration science reshaped material environments in ways that transformed what we understand the wild to be. 

In Wild by Design, restoration’s past provides vital knowledge for climate change policy. But Martin also offers something more―a meditation on what it means to be wild and a call for ecological restoration that is socially just.

Wild by Design is the recipient of a 2023 John Brinckerhoff Jackson Book Prize, presented by the UVA Center for Cultural Landscapes' Landscape Studies Initiative for its significant contributions to landscape studies.

Lix Ogbu & Jamelle Bouie on Repair

Monday, October 16, 2023

5 pm | Campbell 153

Panel
Supported by the Dean's Forum on Inclusion + Equity and the Harry Shure Visiting Professor Endowment.

Like the Waters We Rise

Monday, October 23, 2023

5 pm | Campbell Elmaleh Gallery

POSTERS FROM THE FRONT LINES OF THE CLIMATE JUSTICE MOVEMENT, 1968–2022
__________

EXHIBITION
FRI, SEPT 22 – SUN, OCT 29
CAMPBELL ELMALEH GALLERY
__________

POSTER WORKSHOP
MON, OCT 23, 5PM
CAMPBELL ELMALEH GALLERY

Like the Waters We Rise is a collection of culture, ephemera, and history charting early and recent waves in climate justice organizing, from 1968–2022. 

The scale of the climate crisis we are collectively facing is daunting. This collection of 23 posters and banners offers a portal to an inspiration, a victory, or a teaching about how people-powered action is the most viable strategy we have for building the future. Each screenprint provides viewers with an understanding of climate justice as a rich, intersectional movement of movements driven by a multitude of visions for a better world. Together, they are a call to action. 

Like The Waters We Rise was created as part of a larger exhibition and event series developed with both the Nathan Cummings Foundation (New York City) and Interference Archive (Brooklyn) in 2019–2020. The box set—recently acquired by the School of Architecture—was created in 2022 in collaboration with Booklyn, Inc., an artist-run non-profit that archives and distributes the work of artists and social justice groups, and organized by curator Raquel de Anda and artist-activist Josh MacPhee

Get inspired by this collection of climate justice posters, then make your own with Assistant Professor Jennifer Lawrence, whose work unveils the structures of environmental injustice through creative artistic forms. 

Red Skin Dreams: Twenty Years of Native Art Curation at La Biennale di Venezia 1997-2017

Thursday, November 2, 2023

6:30 pm | Campbell Hall 160

Lindner Lecture Series

Nancy Marie Mithlo, Professor  Departments of Gender Studies and American Indian Studies University of California Los Angeles

Elisabetta Frasca, independent curator, Rome, Italy

The "place" of contemporary Native arts in broader discourses of art history, visual culture and American Indian Studies remains contested, even twenty years after the opening of the Smithsonian's National Museum of the American Indian. While Indigenous arts receive more attention in the press than twenty years ago due to recent curatorial efforts, how sustainable is this inclusion given the lack of mainstream academic research needed to guide conversations?  Anthropologists Elisabetta Frasca (independent curator) and Nancy Marie Mithlo (UCLA) discuss the emergence of Indigenous arts in global contexts from 1997-2017 drawing from their work together curating exhibits at the Venice Biennale.

 

IMAGE CREDIT: Shelley Niro, The Show Off, from the series Toys Are Not Us, 2017

Family Weekend - A-School Open House

Friday, November 3, 2023

10 am - 2 pm | Various locations, Campbell Hall

We invite parents and families of our A-School students to join us at Campbell Hall to kick off Family Weekend (11.3– 11.5) with the School of Architecture. Meet Dean Malo A. Hutson, faculty, staff and student ambassadors, and participate in hands-on activities, career-focused programming, and student-guided tours. Light food provided. 

More details about the University's full weekend can be found here

Please note, the University is requesting registration for Family Weekend 2023 by October 8th, 2023. 

Max Page: Why Preserving Difficult Places Matters

Monday, November 6, 2023

5 pm | Campbell 153

In an increasingly diverse nation, one riven by class, race, and political division, including renewed battles over our nation’s history, historic places where our most difficult, tragic, violent, and controversial events have taken place matter more than ever. This talk will explore why preservation and interpretation of difficult places has the potential to be a tool for reconciliation and also advancement of a more progressive vision for the country.

Publications authored or edited by Max Page (l–r): The City's End: Two Centuries of Fantasies, Fears, and Premonitions of New York’s Destruction (Yale University Press, 2008); Why Preservation Matters (Yale University Press, 2016); Giving Preservation a History: Histories of Historic Preservation in the United States (Routledge, 2003, co-edited with Randall Mason).

Balthazar Korab: Portrait of a Nation

Friday, November 10, 2023

12 pm | Campbell Elmaleh Gallery

In 1994, the Hungarian-born architectural photographer Balthazar Korab was contacted by a Protocol Officer in Washington, D.C., and asked to send a selection of forty prints to the U.S. State Department, twelve of which would be personally selected by President William J. Clinton as a state gift to Árpád Göncz, the then-president of Hungary. The criteria spelled out by the State Department for the selection of the gift was rather straightforward: “A creative work by an American that contains a definitive link to Hungary.”  

Korab titled his selection, “The Mark of Man on the Land,” and chose images that reflected “the extraordinary urban development in the United States, which has occurred largely at the expense of rural life.” The set of images, on view as part of the exhibition Balthazar Korab: Portrait of a Nation, represent a broad spectrum of cultural expressions that range from America’s agrarian foundations to its urban and industrial growth. Examined more closely, however, and the images reveal a much more complex, if not complicated, narrative about America through an immigrant's lens.

Join the School of Architecture's John Comazzi, author of Balthazar Korab: Architect of Photography, for a gallery talk on Friday, November 10, at 12 pm in the Elmaleh Gallery.

Islamic Art History and the Global Turn

Saturday, November 11, 2023

NOVEMBER 11 - 13 | Doha, Qatar

Islamic Art History and the Global Turn, The Tenth Biennial Hamad bin Khalifa Symposium on Islamic Art 

November 11 - 13, 2023, Doha, Qatar

How have art history’s concerns with the global turn, and associated calls for decolonial, diverse, inclusive, and equitable histories, been taken up by scholars, educators, curators, and related practitioners of Islamic art history? The Symposium explores how the past two decades of debating these methodologies have shaped practices in classrooms, galleries, and related settings. It aims to highlight the challenges – and not just successes – of teaching, curating, and researching Islamic art history in a global context, while also contributing new perspectives to discourses on the global turn writ large.

Keynote Address | Finbarr Barry Flood, William R. Kenan, Jr., Professor of the Humanities; Founder-Director of Silsila: Center for Material Histories, NYU | Shifting Scales: Islamic Art History as Global Microhistory

Speakers include Nebahat Avcıoğlu | Sam Bowker | Aditi Chandra | Karen Exell | Talinn Grigor | Negar Habibi | Ranjit Hoskote | Noora Abdulmajeed Hussain | Ellen Kenney | Vasif Kortun | Aparna Kumar | Jenny Norton-Wright  | Anissa Rahadiningtyas | Kirsten Scheid | Mirjam Shatanawi | Sadia Shirazi | Suheyla Takesh

Chaired by: Hala Auji, Hamad bin Khalifa Endowed Chair for Islamic Art, VCUarts, Richmond, Radha Dalal, Director of Art History, VCUarts, Qatar

For more information and to register, please visit https://islamicart.qatar.vcu.edu/.  The Symposium will be held in person in Doha and live-streamed; registration is available for in-person attendance or for the live-stream.

 

Vinit Mukhija: Remaking the American Dream, a View from the Global South

Monday, November 13, 2023

5 pm | Campbell 153

The detached single-family home is synonymous with the American Dream. Although popularly associated with suburbs, single-family houses are also the basic building block of most U.S. cities and dominate their urban form. Join urban design and housing expert, Dr. Vinit Mukhija for a talk focused on how single-family housing neighborhoods are slowly but significantly changing through informal and unpermitted modifications by homeowners, in opposition to long-held norms and standards. Mukhija cites case studies in Los Angeles, Santa Cruz, Seattle, Portland, Minneapolis, and Vancouver to examine how homeowners’ economic interests are changing the rules of single-family living, while outlining the need for inclusive planning and public policies to expand the idea of housing as a social dream. 

Mukhija's research draws from Global South-dominated informal economy literature on informal settlements and housing to understand how homeowners change their single-family homes without permits and how they avoid enforcement action from local governments. He uses the Global South as an analytical framework to focus on less advantaged groups, their linkages with the market economy, struggles with market-based housing policies, and their responses of survival and resistance.  Through his scholarship, Mukhija challenges emerging conventional ideas in U.S. urban planning.

Publications authored or edited by Vinit Mukhija (l–r) Just Urban Design: The Struggle for a Public City (MIT Press, 2022, co-edited with Kian Goh and Anastasia Loukaitou-Sideris); Remaking the American Dream: The Informal and Formal Transformation of Single-Family Housing Cities (MIT Press, 2022); The Informal American City: Beyond Taco Trucks and Day Labor (MIT Press, 2014, co-edited with Anastasia Loukaitou-Sideris).

DEADLINE: The Center Predoctoral Dissertation Fellowship Program

Wednesday, November 15, 2023

5 pm ET | Online

Predoctoral dissertation fellowships support advanced graduate research in the history, theory, and criticism of art, architecture, urbanism, and photographic media. Each of the following ten fellowships has specific requirements and intents, including support for the advancement and completion of a doctoral dissertation, and for residency and travel during the period of dissertation research. Application for a predoctoral dissertation fellowship may be made only through nomination by the chair of a graduate department of art history or other appropriate department. To be eligible, the nominee must have completed all departmental requirements, including coursework, residency, and general and preliminary examinations, before November 15, 2023. Certification in two languages other than English is required. Candidates must be either United States citizens or enrolled in a university in the United States.

If you are looking for other fellowship opportunities, we are currently accepting applications for senior, visiting senior, and postdoctoral fellowships. Learn more.

 

Three Women From Wirrimanu

Sunday, December 3, 2023

10 am - 4 pm | Kluge-Ruhe

August 12 - December 3, 2023 • 10am-4pm  Kluge-Ruhe Aboriginal Art Collection

Three Women from Wirrimanu explores the remarkable painting practices of Aboriginal artists Eubena Nampitjin, Muntja Nungurrayi and Lucy Yukenbarri Napanangka. All three grew up living traditional lives in the outback, worked at the same time at Warlyirti Artists, and became widely successful in the 1990s. Despite shared influences and a love of bright colors, their deep knowledge of desert Country is expressed in different styles that assert their individuality and their own distinct voices.


 

Archaeology Brown Bag: A Scholarly Divide in Research in the Forum at Pompeii: Archaeological Basics Yield Dividends

Friday, February 2, 2024

4 pm | Brooks Hall Commons

John Dobbins, Professor Emeritus, Department of Art and Archaeology Interdisciplinary Program, University of Virginia
"A Scholarly Divide in Research in the Forum at Pompeii: Archaeological Basics Yield Dividends."

This talk presents the clash between archaeologists who adhere tenaciously to nineteenth-century views on the Forum at Pompeii and the Pompeii Forum Project (UVA), a late twentieth-century and early twenty-first century project that sees things differently because we use evidence. 

 

Performing Country Closes

Sunday, March 3, 2024

On view | Kluge-Ruhe

March 16, 2023 - March 3, 2024

On view in the Kluge-Ruhe Main Galleries

Performing Country, an exhibition highlighting never-before-seen works from the museum’s permanent collection, explores the ways Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander artists explore the complex idea of Country – the people, plants, animals, creator beings, and stories that all emerge from the place they call home.

Each work offers a different perspective on the performance of culture and Country. The artworks invite you to consider a constantly unfolding artistic tradition, performed anew in each pattern, song and ceremony. In the gesture and movement of these artworks, consider the moment of creation: when the artist’s hand moved across the canvas or when the ancestors danced across the earth. Just as every action performed in ceremony is simultaneously new and old, these works call you to be in both the present and the eternal everywhen

From the sweeping brushstrokes of Emily Kame Kngwarreye, to the body paint designs of Tiwi ceremonies reproduced on canvas, to the scarred surfaces of Tony Albert’s photographic series Brothers, to the palpable vibrations of Yukultiji Napangati’s desert dot paintings, Performing Country celebrates the indelible bond between embodied Indigenous identities and the land.

Performing Country was sponsored by the UVA Parents Program. It was curated by Emmy Monaghan and Brendan O’Donnell with Henry Skerritt.

 

Structures

Saturday, June 1, 2024

10am - 5pm | Fralin Museum of Art

August 28, 2021 - June 1, 2024

Fralin Museum of Art

Admission is always FREE

This dynamic selection of 20th- and 21st-century artworks from the Museum’s permanent collection explores the ways that art can speak to or question the formal, physical, environmental, social, and institutional structures of our world. Here you will encounter the work of Robert Reed, whose abstract paintings and collages contain coded references to his life and memories. The depopulated architectural paintings of Emilio Sánchez invite us to contemplate our built environment. DJ and visual artist Rozeal addresses racism and the complexities of cultural appropriation and globalization in our current times. Alberto Rey encourages viewers to consider their own ecological surroundings from which we are often disconnected. These connections to regional resources and materials are also seen in the work of Maria and Julian Martinez, who innovated upon ancient forms of pottery in ways that still inspire Pueblo artists. Oftentimes, multiple structures are present in the same artwork, providing pathways and opportunities for interpretation and inquiry. From paintings to collages, from pottery to jewelry, the artworks in this exhibition inspire conversations about how our world is structured. This exhibition is curated by Laura Minton, Curator of Exhibitions; Adriana Greci Green,Curator of Indigenous Arts of the Americas; Emily Lazaro, Docent Coordinator; and Rebekah Boggs, former Tour Coordinator and Education Assistant.

Emilio Sanchez, American, born Cuba, 1921–1999. Untitled (Looking West from My Studio), ca. 1985. Oil on canvas, 14 x 14 inches. Gift of the Emilio Sanchez Foundation, 2011.3.2. © Emilio Sanchez Foundation