Events
Public Lectures, Visiting Artists & Scholars, Majors Events
Upcoming Events
Technologies of Silence
9 am - 2:45 pm | UVA School of Law; Purcell Reading Room
Exploring law, tactics and norms that silence essential voices.
This multidisciplinary conference, hosted by UVA’s Sound Justice Lab, will bring together lawyers, students, musicians, activists, journalists, artists, and academics to explore the law’s technologies and tactics that try to silence stories, individuals, and groups.
Non-disclosure agreements, defamation lawsuits, and evidentiary requirements, for instance, prevent survivors of sexual assault from speaking out against perpetrators. Norms of civility and etiquette may disproportionately discipline gendered and racialized others on the witness stand or in the public gallery, while trial transcripts and official records often fail to accurately hear and represent non-normative voices.
Technologies of Silence
9:30 am - 3:45 pm | Multiple Locations
Exploring law, tactics and norms that silence essential voices.
This multidisciplinary conference, hosted by UVA’s Sound Justice Lab, will bring together lawyers, students, musicians, activists, journalists, artists, and academics to explore the law’s technologies and tactics that try to silence stories, individuals, and groups.
Non-disclosure agreements, defamation lawsuits, and evidentiary requirements, for instance, prevent survivors of sexual assault from speaking out against perpetrators. Norms of civility and etiquette may disproportionately discipline gendered and racialized others on the witness stand or in the public gallery, while trial transcripts and official records often fail to accurately hear and represent non-normative voices.
Arts Council Reception
5 - 7 pm | Ruffin Hall
Details forthcoming
Lindner Lecture: Thy Phy, Photographic Restoration, Colorization and Historical Renovation in Vietnam and the U.S.
6:30 pm | Campbell Hall
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.
Elena Yu at New City Arts
New City Arts Welcome Gallery
In October 2025, New City Arts will present an exhibition of work by Elena Yu.
Elena Yu’s exhibition will respond to lichen-covered headstones and historically significant burial grounds. With this work, she aims to ask: “What constitutes care of burial grounds, and how might interspecies knowledge, respect and tending enable new ways of interacting with sites of human memorialization?”
Elena Yu is an interdisciplinary artist and arts organizer from Los Angeles, CA. Her practice weaves together many mediums and intentions including textiles, performance, drawing, sculpture, archival research and community practice. She has exhibited, performed, facilitated workshops and attended artist residences throughout the United States, and is the co-founder of The Firehouse (@thefirehousejt) and Sun Spot (@sun___spot), two artist-run spaces in Joshua Tree, CA.
Elena is currently a New City Arts Fellow, Artist-in-Residence at University of California Santa Barbara, an Incubator Artist at McGuffey Art Center, studio member at Visible Records, and the Ruffin Gallery and Visiting Artist Coordinator at UVA’s Department of Art.
CLOSING: The Threat, The
5 pm | Ruffin Gallery
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.
MORNINGSIDE Book Launch with Aran Shetterly in conversation with Andrea Douglas
6 - 7 pm | Jefferson School African American Heritage Center
Join Virginia Center for the Book for the launch of “MORNINGSIDE” with author Aran Shetterly, in conversation with Dr. Andrea Douglas, Executive Director of the Jefferson School African American Heritage Center. The event will include a 45 minute discussion with 15 minutes dedicated to audience questions. Book sales and book signings will take place immediately following the event.
“MORNINGSIDE” hones in on the long civil rights journey of Reverend Nelson Johnson and his wife Joyce Johnson, exploring their relentless fight for justice and community building in Greensboro. The book also highlights the city’s pioneering Truth and Reconciliation Commission in the early 2000s, modeled on the South African process, which has since inspired communities across the country.
As the 45th anniversary of the Greensboro Massacre approaches on November 3, 2024, “MORNINGSIDE” resonates with people everywhere in the US where painful, unresolved histories of race and class conflict, police corruption, and interactions with a biased legal system keep communities from more unified, secure futures. Despite the recent surge in racist violence, the Johnsons’ tireless fight for justice offers hope and a reminder of America’s promised ideals.
Dr. Andrea Douglas, holds an M.A. and Ph.D. in art history from the University of Virginia and an M.B.A. in arts management and finance from Binghamton University, NY. Douglas has taught graduate and undergraduate classes in African American, contemporary, and art theory, and has published exhibition catalogues and scholarly articles. From 2004 – 2010 she was Curator of Collections and Exhibitions and Curator of Contemporary Art at the University of Virginia Art Museum.
Majors Fair
1- 4 pm | Newcomb Ballroom & South Meeting Room
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.
American Modernisms Reception
5:30 - 7 | First Floor of Harrison/Small Library
American Modernisms: Modern Stories, Types, & Aesthetics, curated by the Spring 2024 graduate seminar ARTH 9545 led by Elizabeth Hutton Turner, is on view through October 29, 2024 in the First Floor Gallery of Harrison/Small. Find our hours and directions online.
During the spring 2024 semester, four graduate students enrolled in ARTH 9545 American Modernisms located and analyzed visual evidence of modern types and modern stories in a variety of print genres in the Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library. These included cartoons, caricatures, advertising illustrations for American periodicals, graphic novels, illustrated dust jackets, and playbills over a range of dates from 1900 to 1939.
There will be a reception on the evening of Tuesday, October 22nd from 5:30-7:00pm with gallery talks by student curators Leo Palma and Emmy Monaghan starting at 6:45pm.
Family Weekend
The University’s Family Weekend 2024 will take place from Oct. 25-27.
ArtLab Exhibition Opening Reception
5 pm | Ruffin Gallery
Details TBD
In Pursuit: Artists’ Perspectives on a Nation CLOSES
5 pm | National Liberty Museum
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.
American Modernisms: Modern Stories, Types, & Aesthetics CLOSES
5 pm | First Floor Gallery of Harrison/Small
American Modernisms: Modern Stories, Types, & Aesthetics, curated by the Spring 2024 graduate seminar ARTH 9545 led by Elizabeth Hutton Turner, is on view through October 29, 2024 in the First Floor Gallery of Harrison/Small. Find our hours and directions online.
During the spring 2024 semester, four graduate students enrolled in ARTH 9545 American Modernisms located and analyzed visual evidence of modern types and modern stories in a variety of print genres in the Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library. These included cartoons, caricatures, advertising illustrations for American periodicals, graphic novels, illustrated dust jackets, and playbills over a range of dates from 1900 to 1939.
Lindner Lecture: Suzanne Blier
TBD | Campbell Hall
Details forthcoming
Made in VA Biennial CLOSES
Virginia Museum of Contemporary Art
JULY 12, 2024-JANUARY 5, 2025
Since 1994, the Virginia Museum of Contemporary Art has celebrated the extraordinary talent of Virginia artists through its annual juried exhibition. Nearly 30 years later, this favorite tradition continues to thrive and evolve together with the immense creative talent found across the commonwealth. Now, Made in VA has transitioned to a biennial event featuring artwork created by Virginia artists in the preceding two years.
Every other year, we’re dedicating an expanded gallery space to the juried exhibition, enabling the Museum to showcase a wider range of artistic voices and visions. This expansion also means more prizes and professional opportunities for participating artists. Now as in 1994, Made in VA reflects the Museum’s commitment to enriching and supporting the artistic communities in our region. This momentous occasion marks a new chapter in the Museum’s long history of fostering creativity and innovation.
UVA Art Department artists: Anna Hogg and Federico Cuatlacuatl
Hank the Aquarian, Wash Me & Comb Me, 2023. Acrylic paint & latex house paint on canvas. Courtesy of the artist
Lindner Lecture: Jeanne Voccaro, Construction as Commitment: Nicki Green's Alchemical Clay
TBD | Campbell Hall
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.
Amy Chan's "Double Happiness" in Alderman CLOSES
Alderman Library 2nd floor lobby
To create the piece "Double Happiness", Amy Chan asked the UVA Asian / Pacific Islander / South Asian American community to submit greetings, proverbs, and colloquial sayings that are important to their cultural identity. Text left to right reads:
Ganbare, Japanese, to persevere
Double Happiness, Chinese, joy and unity
Hwaiting, Korean, you got this!
Padayon, Visayan dialect / Philippines, to carry on
Kya baat hai, Hindi, how amazing!
All places are ours, and all people are our kin, Tamil
Andamu, Telugu, inner beauty
Sudah makan, Malaysian, have you eaten?