Awarded Arts Endowment Grants

The Arts Endowment amplifies the UVA Arts experience for students and faculty, strives to attract major artists and scholars to the Grounds and develop robust, multi-disciplinary programs that engage students and faculty from all schools and units.

Dancers

The UVA Arts Endowment

Support UVA arts to expand their reach across Grounds and strengthen the University’s leadership in learning, teaching, and service.

Dance Group at UVA Performing

Arts Endowment Grant Call for Proposals

The Arts Endowment will fund one annual project up to $25,000 to an area/program/project that is competitive, demonstrates significant need, creates a meaningful impact, and also serve the purpose of the Arts Endowment. Application Deadline: February 23, 2026.

2025-2026

The World In Between: Reexamining the ‘Frontier’ between Egypt and Nubia in Africa. The Conference and Public Lectures.

A. Dakouri-Hild, Department of Art

The World In Between, Egypt and Nubia in Africa is a year-long exhibition (August 28, 2025-June 14, 2026), tapping into several metropolitan museums in the USA and Canada (Metropolitan Museum of Art and Brooklyn Museum in New York, Boston Museum of Fine Arts, Royal Ontario Museum), as well as numerous university museums with key collections (ISAC/formerly Oriental Museum at the University of Chicago, P. Hearst Museum at UC Berkeley, Fowler Museum at UCLA, Yale Peabody Museum, Johns Hopkins Archaeological Museum, Fleming Museum of Art at the University of Vermont, Penn Museum, Art Museum at the University of Memphis). Over 60 loans of ancient objects, including several famous works such as a reserve head from Old Kingdom Giza and a Predynastic terracotta ‘goddess’ from Thebes, have now been authorized by these museums representing two years of negotiations. The exhibition examines in detail the extent to which Egypt was of Africa culturally, i.e. what Egypt owes to other African cultures of its time and inversely what it bequeathed to them. It demonstrates the liminal qualities and permeability of the shifting ‘frontiers’ between Nubia and Egypt, the complex interactions across them, and the dynamic cultural interfaces of the ancient Egyptian and Nubian civilizations from early prehistory (ca. 3800 BCE) through the twilight of pharaonic Nubia (4th c. CE). 

Havivra

Caitlin McLeod, Department of Drama 

This project envisions a two-week development residency for UVA Alumni and theater artist Alexandra Déglise and jazz musician Maher Beauroy as they conceive and compose their piece Havivra, based on the life and time of Martinican emigrant Havivra Da Ifrile.

Da Ifrile was one of only three survivors of the historic eruption of Mount Pelée in 1902 in the north of the French territorial island of Martinique. The explosion laid waste to the capital city of Saint- Pierre, killing 30,000 people in mere minutes. The youthful Da Ifrile escaped by sea and was adrift in a canoe for several days. She moved through Ellis Island several years later, after which her story was lost. This jazz musical tale (“conte’ in French) will envision her mysterious journey to become an American, eventually settling in New Orleans. With a focus on historical and cultural accuracy, and exploration of New Orleans jazz and Antillean Biguine musical forms, this piece will be an ethnographic exploration of Antillean and American Creole history, told through the experience of forced emigration, from the perspective of an intrepid young woman, alone in the world, overcoming loss and displacement.

Through participation in DRAM 3652: Producing (Fall 2025 syllabus) the residency and culminating performances, Drama students will engage with Déglise and Beauroy at multiple levels as students facilitate rehearsals, songwriting and script development, digital media and lighting design, publicity, outreach and performance administration.

UVA Arts Endowment Visiting Artists: Woody De Othello, Cathy Lu, and Nicki Green

LaRissa Rogers & Elena Yu, Department of Art

Centering some of the most prominent contemporary art voices across the U.S, the Department of Art will host a series of programs by American artists for a weeklong residency at the University of Virginia during the 2025-2026 academic year. This initiative seeks to build on existing strong community partnerships and relationships with UVA entities across grounds through collaborative efforts to sponsor a public talk, classroom engagements, community gatherings, and public workshops.

The Department of Art will be inviting three nationally-recognized emerging artists: Woody De Othello, Cathy Lu, and Nicki Green. As the studio art program works to build it’s sculpture and clay program, this group of artists will provide our students with a unique opportunity to interface with a group of innovative ceramicists making large scale installations focused on fostering global awareness and cultural literacy. Bringing these ceramicists, who work at the intersections of sculpture, clay, and installation, to UVA enriches the learning environment by providing hands-on experiences, fostering interdisciplinary collaboration, enhancing cultural awareness, and contributing to our students’ growing interest in clay. The concurrent visits by three different artists will offer our communities an expanded dialogue on leading contemporary issues including cultural heritage, personal and collective histories, globalization, and diaspora. 

These artists will share their expansive practices to a broad UVA audience, covering a wide range of contemporary art practices: ceramics, sculpture, painting and drawing, public art, social practice, and installation. In addition, we foresee student and faculty interest from within the School of Architecture, Carter G. Woodson Institute, American Studies, East Asia Studies, Jewish Studies, Religious Studies, and Institute for Humanities and Global Cultures to name a few.

Stairhall Commissions– Pélagie Gbaguidi

The Fralin Museum of Art

In its 90th Anniversary Year, The Fralin Museum of Art at UVA will hold its inaugural exhibition in a series titled Stairhall Commissions, a new initiative that will bring top contemporary artists to Grounds and The Fralin to reimagine the stairhall at the center of the museum. For the first iteration of Stairhall Commissions in Fall 2026, The Fralin has invited internationally renowned artist Pélagie Gbaguidi to transform this space with a site-specific installation.

Every two years, new artists will be invited to reinvent the stairhall, and the project will be transferred to the new Center for the Arts to activate a prominent area of the new museum, setting the stage for The Fralin and UVA as a renowned arts destination.

About Stairhall Commissions: Built in 1935, The Fralin Museum of Art occupies a structure known as the Bayly building. It was designed by then Dean of the School of Fine Arts, Edmund S. Campbell and captures the neoclassical grace embraced by the university’s founder, Thomas Jefferson. At the center of the museum is a grand marble staircase with a landing on the ground floor and a mezzanine on the second. The landing is visible straight ahead as visitors enter The Fralin and serves as a real heart for the museum. Together, the landing, stairs, and mezzanine are called “the stairhall.”

About The Artist: Pélagie Gbaguidi is a Beninese artist born in Dakar, Senegal and currently living and working in Brussels, Belgium. The artist refers to herself as a contemporary griot—a west African word that describes traveling poets, musicians and storytellers. For Gbaguidi, being a griot captures her ongoing efforts to learn from those who have come before her and maintain an openness to the ancestors and spiritual realms while also using her artistry to share insights in ways that interrupt histories of trauma and violence. She works across painting, drawing, installation, and performance to reveal the complexities of colonial and postcolonial history. Her work has been featured in documenta 14 (2107), the Berlin, Dakar, Lubumbashi and Sao Paolo biennales and major exhibitions at such museums as the Centre Pompidou, Paris and the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art, Washington DC.

2024-2025

2024 UVA Arts Endowment Visiting Artists: Abraham Cruzvillegas, Rose Simpson, Sandra de la Loza

Federico Cuatlacuatl & Tatiana Flores, Department of Art

Centering the some of most prominent contemporary art voices across North America, the Department of Art will host a weeklong series of visiting artists of national and international artists for a visit to the University of Virginia during the 2024-25 academic year. This initiative seeks to work with strong community partnerships and UVA entities across grounds through collaborative efforts to organize and program public talks, classroom engagements, community gatherings, workshops, and seminars. 

The Department of Art will be inviting three world renowned artists: Abraham Cruzvillegas, Rose Simpson, and Sandra de la Loza. The combination of these visiting artists will offer our communities at UVA an expanded dialogue on leading contemporary issues by these artists, including: indigeneity, female voices, decoloniality, and social practices. These artists will share their extensive practices to a broad UVA audience, covering a wide range of contemporary art practices: video, sculpture, performance, ceramics, social practice, and multimedia installations. 

Rose Simpson is one of the most recognized female indigenous artists in the country, with her most recent participation in the 2024 Whitney Biennal. Abraham Cruzvillegas is one of Mexico’s most prominent artists with exhibitions across the globe and ongoing invitations to prestigious arts institutions. Sandra de la Loza is one of the most recognized female voices in chicanismo and contemporary issues of Latinx experiences. 

VAFF 2024 Artist-In-Residence with Abderrahmane Sissako - postponed due to scheduling conflicts

Virginia Film Festival

Mauritanian-Malian auteur Abderrahmane Sissako is widely considered one of the most important and influential African filmmakers working today. Active since the early 1990s, Sissako’s filmography has been defined by a singular blend of lush cinematography, naturalistic pacing, and compelling narratives that examine the impacts of globalization, migration, and displacement. His searingly beautiful films breathe humanity and individual perspective into complex discussions around the World Bank and the IMF (Bamako), jihadist conflict (Timbuktu) and the expanding gap in access to basic commodities in the developing world (Waiting for Happiness).

We are honored that Mr. Sissako has accepted an invitation from the Virginia Film Festival (VAFF) to visit UVA from October 30-November 3, 2024 for an artist residency, to be held during our 37th annual Festival. In addition to screening his latest film, Black Tea, which just premiered to major acclaim at the Berlin International Film Festival, the writer-director will participate in several classroom visits and masterclasses—organized in tandem with UVA’s French and Art departments—as well as be featured as a keynote speaker at one of VAFF’s free panels on Saturday, November 2. In aggregate, these events will give UVA students, faculty, and the broader Charlottesville community a rare and exceptional opportunity to engage directly with one of the leading filmmakers in African and international cinema.

2023-2024

Yolŋu Delegation programs for Madayin at The Fralin Museum of Art

Margo Smith, Director, Kluge-Ruhe Aboriginal Art Collection

The Kluge-Ruhe Aboriginal Art Collection seeks funding from the Arts Endowment to support the visit of a delegation of Yolŋu Aboriginal artists and scholars associated with the exhibition Madayin: Eight Decades of Aboriginal Australian Bark Painting from Yirrkala. In February 2024, we plan bring five Yolŋu artists and knowledge holders and one trip facilitator from Australia to Charlottesville for 10 days of ceremonies, tours and public discussions at The Fralin Museum of Art, the Rotunda and Second Street Gallery. The delegation will engage students in classes spanning multiple disciplines including anthropology, art history, music and studio art.

The Madayin touring exhibition organized by Kluge-Ruhe opened at the Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth in September 2022 and is currently at American University Museum in Washington DC. Madayin will open at The Fralin on February 3, 2024 and remain on view through July 14. The final venue is the Asia Society in New York from September 24, 2024 to January 5, 2025.

Madayin is Kluge-Ruhe’s most ambitious project to date. Developed over the course of seven years in collaboration with Yolŋu artists and knowledge holders from northeast Arnhem Land, it is the first comprehensive exhibition of Yolŋu bark painting to tour the United States. This project has been supported by the NEH, the NEA, the Mellon Foundation and The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, in addition to organizations associated with UVA such as The Jefferson Trust, the UVA Parents Program and UVA Arts Council. Madayin has garnered extremely positive reviews from the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post and was named as a case study in Australia’s National Cultural Strategy, Revive: A place for every story, a story for every place, in the area of engaging audiences.

UVA Arts Endowment Artist in Residence: Theaster Gates - postponed due to scheduling conflicts

Department of Art

In partnership with other the Charlottesville arts community and University of Virginia schools, units and Departments, the Department of Art would like to invite an internationally recognized living artist to the University of Virginia for a week-long residency that would include a public talk, classroom engagement with students, a public workshop in the artist’s area of specialty, and a small group conversation with the Arts Endowment Trustees and UVA arts leadership.

Theaster Gates’s creative work expands on social practices and inquires found in numerous departments and programs at UVA, including urban planning, sculpture, installation, film and music. His approach to visual conversation, theory and themes of installation brings his valued ideas to a broad audience. Gates’ recent exhibition at the New Museum of Contemporary Art (NY) paid homage to the radical, revolutionary thinkers who profoundly impacted American culture. A retrospective of his mid-career life was just published March 2023 by Phaidon Press “Young Lords and Their Traces.” Gates is currently a Professor at the University of Chicago and Senior Advisor for Cultural Innovation and Advisor to their Dean.

2022-2023

Power Play: Reimagining Representation in Contemporary Photography

Matthew McLendon, The Fralin Museum of Art

At the start of the 2022-23 academic year, The Fralin Museum of Art at the University of Virginia will present a new exhibition titled Power Play: Reimagining Representation in Contemporary Photography. This exhibition showcases photographs by Martine Gutierrez, Sarah Maple, Wendy Red Star, Cara Romero, and Tokie Rome-Taylor, five contemporary artists whose work critiques and combats dominant narratives of representation and the ways that feminine identities are constructed through material culture. Harnessing the medium of photography and drawing on a wide range of visual methods, these artists explore constructions of identity using pop culture references, the language of advertising, portraiture, satire, and a reimagining of history through a present-day lens to create fresh, poignant, and powerful representations of themselves and their communities.

Each of the five artists featured in Power Play possesses unique identities and perspectives that subvert the dominant narratives surrounding female representation and identity; however, the works selected all share a vibrant graphic presence in large scale that will make this an exciting destination for audiences of all ages. This engaging and informative exhibition will allow The Fralin to support the intellectual explorations of faculty and students from many disciplines across grounds at UVA, as well as drawing a diverse audience from the greater Charlottesville and central Virginia communities. To further advance The Fralin’s academic mission, the artists will be invited to UVA during the fall semester for residencies that will allow for a variety of programming, from artist talks to class visits. The Fralin has received very powerful feedback and support every time we have hosted artists who can dialogue directly with our audiences, so this project will once again provide opportunities for similar interactions.

2019-2020

Political Caricature in a Post-Newsprint World: A Symposium

Molly Schwartzburg, Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library

In conjunction with the upcoming exhibition Oliphant: Unpacking the Archive (September 2019-May 2020) The UVA Library will mount a symposium on the future of political caricature. As the most widely syndicated political cartoonist of the last half-century, Pat Oliphant has witnessed the genre change over decades. From Watergate to Pussy Riot, from Duoshade to digital delivery, Oliphant has not just adjusted to change as it comes, he has shaped the political aesthetic of our age. But even he could not anticipate the upheaval to news delivery that has dominated the last two decades, as newspaper publishers have consolidated, print publications have moved from page to screen, and, as Michael Cavna of the Washington Post reports, staff editorial cartoonists, who “numbered in the hundreds several decades ago…now have dwindled to dozens.”

In the News: 

2018-2019

sometimes.we.cannot.be.with.our.bodies.

The Fralin Museum of Art | 02/22/2019 to 07/07/2019
Curated by Matthew McLendon, J. Sanford Miller Family Director

Vanessa German is a visual and performance artist based in the Pittsburgh neighborhood of Homewood. Homewood is the community that is the driving force behind German’s powerful performance work, and whose cast-off relics form the language of her copiously embellished sculptures. As a citizen artist, German explores the power of art and love as a transformative force in the dynamic cultural ecosystem of communities and neighborhoods. She is the founder of Love Front Porch and the ARThouse, a community arts initiative for the children of Homewood.

sometimes.we.cannot.be.with.our.bodies. is an immersive installation of sculpture and sound that originated at the Mattress Factory, Pittsburgh, in 2017, and is being reimagined in The Fralin. In the artist’s own words, “this work is a dimensional living reckoning. the living reckoning is bold, erruptive, disruptive work against systems & pathologies that oppress & subvert overt & covert violence onto & into the lives & humanity of marginalized people on this land.” German will be in residence in March, working with students and community members, creating art, poetry, and understanding. The work will travel to The Union for Contemporary Art, as part of the annual Wanda D. Ewing Commission in September 2019.

In the News: 

2017-2018

Leonard Bernstein’s Mass

From Michael Slon, Associate Professor & Director of Choral Music; to be produced in the Fall 2018

The University of Virginia’s University Singers are getting ready to join in the national and international celebration of the Centennial of Leonard Bernstein’s birth by presenting one of the American cultural giant’s most ambitious and acclaimed works. On Saturday, October 13 at 8:00pm and Sunday, October 14 at 2:30pm at The Paramount Theater, University Singers Director Michael Slon will lead an extraordinary cast of more than 150 singers and musicians in the regional premiere of Leonard Bernstein’s Mass.

Leonard Bernstein’s Mass was commissioned by Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis to mark the occasion of the opening of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, and it made its world premiere there on September 8, 1971.  The piece furthers Bernstein’s previous exploration of what he saw as a critical “crisis of faith” in the 20th century, and particularly in the aftermath of President Kennedy’s assassination and in the midst of the national unrest surrounding the Vietnam War. (This “crisis” is perhaps most simply explained as a crisis both personal and societal in which, to his view, human capacities and institutions for belief of any kind – Bernstein himself was Jewish – struggled to keep pace with the implications of modernity, and therefore, needed updating if they were to survive.) Mass follows his previous Symphony No. 3 Kaddish (1963) and Chichester Psalms (1965). This time around, Bernstein turns his sharp mind and all-encompassing musical vocabulary toward the ritual of the Roman Catholic Mass, questioning and challenging its tenets while taking audiences on an unforgettable and genre-spanning journey that goes from doubt and struggle to newfound and hard-won faith. More >

In the News: 

2016-2017

Residency of Les Misérables Creators Claude-Michel Schönberg & Alain Boublil

From Marva Barnett, Professor Emeritus in French and Drama  Explore more at the UVA Arts Magazine >

2015-2016

[ I ] n q u i r y 

Inspired by 21st century perceptions, constructions and manifestations of Self within online and physical spaces. A multidisciplinary collaboration between Choreographer Kim Brook Mata, Digital Media Designer Mona Kasra, Composer Kristina Warren, and Costume Designer Debra Otte  (Montclair State University), this mixed-media performance integrates dance and media to explore notions of identity, self-representation, and self-presentation in our hyper-mediated networked existence. Read More >