Visual manipulation has been common in war photography, but in the digital age, correcting and colorizing vintage images has become pervasive. Projects like Random Acts of Photo Restoration on Facebook and Vintage Vietnam on Instagram use crowdsourcing to leverage the affordances of AI software to restore and colorize personal photographs, including those from the "Wall of Faces," a virtual memorial supported by the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund. In Vietnam, Project Team Lee is an initiative that deploys volunteers to digitize, colorize, and reunite portraits of martyrs with the revolutionary mothers who have long mourned sons sacrificed for the anticolonial cause. What drives this fascination with photographic restoration? How do practices such as colorization, influence the revolutionary spirit and elicit patriotism among the postwar generation in Vietnam and the U.S.?

This presentation examines the U.S.-based Wall of Faces project and contrasts it with the initiatives of Project Team Lee, situating their respective visual practices within a broader visual history of the Vietnam War. Specifically, I contrast the use of colored photographs in Vietnam Pictorial from the 1950s to the 1970s, which aimed to envision future socialist ideals, with today’s digital colorization, exploring how it seeks to revive revolutionary ideals in the context of late socialist capitalism. For those without direct war experience, vintage photographs offer a way to access memory, not just through displaying images but also through restoration and colorization, creating a poignant visual reunion as eyewitnesses age. However, these practices are controversial, especially in an era of deep fakes, raising concerns about the authenticity of heritage objects and history. I argue that an aesthetics of embellishment projects fantasies of the past to suit present needs as the U.S. and Vietnam grapple with the legacies of the war.

 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.

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.

Representatives from more than 50 majors, minors, and programs will be on hand!

No registration is necessary. Visit Hoos Involved to add this event to your calendar (Please stay tuned for more information)!

Additional details, including a map and list of departments attending will be posted prior to the event. Our office will start contacting all the departments this May; if you have any questions, please feel free to contact Junjun Yu, the Georges Student Center Coordinator, at my2hg.

The University’s Family Weekend 2024 will take place from Oct. 25-27.

National Liberty Museum Presents the Power of Art as Civic Dialogue as it Hosts an Ambitious New Exhibition Curated by Philadelphia Sculptors

Opening May 10, the National Liberty Museum is hosting an ambitious multi-media exhibition, In Pursuit: Artists’ Perspectives on a Nation, curated by Philadelphia Sculptors. The exhibition features sculptures and large-scale installations by seven internationally acclaimed artists displayed across three of NLM’s four floors.

For the exhibition, Philadelphia Sculptors invited works from cross-disciplinary artist Anila Quayyum Agha, sculptor Angel Cabrales, multi-disciplinary artist Nicholas Galanin, visual artist Arghavan Khosravi, social practice and fiber artist Aram Han Sifuentes, multi-disciplinary artist Artur Silva, and the UVA Art Department's own  Marisa Williamson.

Details forthcoming

This talk takes sculptor Nick Green's assertion that "clay is a trans material" as its starting point. In clay, the artist uses hand-making to study rituals of belonging and becoming, conveying construction as one iteration of commitment. The talk will engage the range of Green's practice as anchored in the ecstatic mysticism of the everyday.

Jeanne Vaccaro is a scholar and curator of contemporary art and public practice. Her writing and social practice trace the idiosyncrasy of the archive to activate liberation histories and coalitions. Jeanne’s book in process, Handmade: feelings and textures of transgender, considers the felt labor of making identity, and was awarded the Arts Writers Grant from the Andy Warhol Foundation. Jeanne received her Ph.D. in Performance Studies at New York University under the mentorship of José Esteban Muñoz. She is Assistant Professor of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and Museum Studies at the University of Kansas, and affiliate faculty at the Gunn Center for the Study of Science Fiction.