2025 Annual UVA Arts Welcome Picnic
Come learn about curricular, extra-curricular, programmatic, and volunteer opportunities from the Visual & Performing Arts & Architecture departments, programs, and community.
Stories
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The Paramount Theater, Fralin Museum of Art at UVA, and Virginia Theatre Festival Join Forces This Spring and Summer to Celebrate Iconic Artist and Cultural Figure Frida Kahlo
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Meet the Students Behind the Sound: UVA’s Battle of the Bands Winners
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Finding Her Voice: Priyanka Shetty’s MFA Journey from UVA to the World Stage
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UVA Alumna Artist is Big into Miniature Artworks
Recent Stories
Showing 12 of 51 stories
2025 Annual UVA Arts Welcome Picnic
Come learn about curricular, extra-curricular, programmatic, and volunteer opportunities from the Visual & Performing Arts & Architecture departments, programs, and community.
UVA Alumna Artist is Big into Miniature Artworks
Jill Orlov is a cave-diver of sorts. “I go what I call ‘spelunking in junkyards,’” Orlov, a graduate of the University of Virginia’s School of Architecture, said. “I collect interesting things, just odds and ends.” Those odds and ends make their way into Orlov’s miniature sculptures – often miniature recreations of indoor spaces like game rooms, libraries or an artist’s studio. Her work has appeared in exhibitions at venues including the National Building Museum in Washington, D.C., and the Museum of Miniatures in Tucson, Arizona.
UVA Students Build Tiny Worlds to Tell Big Stories
When Matthew Rusten first read the play “A Number” aloud with his University of Virginia classmates, each voicing a different character, the 2022 British drama’s sparse and fractured language stuck with him. He decided his scenic model set should feel the same way. The fourth-year architecture major is enrolled in Scenic Design, a course that challenges students to transform a script into a fully realized physical world. Over the semester, students complete three increasingly complex projects, taking them through script analysis, visual research, sketching, rendering and building small-scale scenic models.
Soundscape Architecture Explores Listening as a Social and Political Act
Soundscape Architecture, a new book co-authored by former UVA School of Architecture Dean Karen Van Lengen, explores how architecture and art can enhance listening as a social and political act. “When we listen, we begin the first act of engagement and communication with others,” writes Van Lengen. “Listening is also critical when we consider our local natural habitats, and it can remind us, in a particularly visceral way, of the fragility of our lived environments, increasingly stressed by climate change. We ask, therefore, how the act of intentional listening can prompt us to engage more fully in the world and with the people in it; and how architecture and urban design can encourage this type of engagement.”
Buildings and Grounds Committee Approves Design Proposal for Center for the Arts
The Board of Visitors Buildings and Grounds Committee approved the schematic design plan for the new Center for the Arts, which is planned to be completed in fall 2029. The Committee also heard a construction report from Donald Sundgren, vice president of facilities management and chief facilities officer, in which he discussed updates on projects such as the Karsh Institute of Democracy, student housing in the Emmet Ivy Corridor and the Paul and Diane Manning Institute of Biotechnology.
BOV Approves Design for New UVA Center for the Arts
A home for the arts is taking shape on Grounds. The Board of Visitors Buildings and Grounds Committee on Thursday approved the schematic design for the proposed Center for the Arts in the University of Virginia’s development parcel on Ivy Road, sending it to the full board. The board on Friday likewise approved the design.
Charlottesville Arts Council Steering Committee
A diverse group of artists, cultural workers, and leaders will guide a community-driven process to explore a future Charlottesville Arts Council.
UVA Architecture Students Create Humpback Rock-Inspired Retreat
If you can’t go to the mountain to relax, just bring the mountain to you. University of Virginia architecture students and assistant professor Katie Stranix have created a Humpback Rock-inspired reflection room in Student Health and Wellness to offer students a little respite.
Explore the 19th-Century Blueprints that Reimagined UVA’s Iconic Rotunda
Fire destroyed the Rotunda, the most iconic feature of the University of Virginia’s Grounds, in October 1895. University officials immediately pushed to rebuild. In 1896, after a false start with McDonald Brothers architects of Louisville, Kentucky, the Board of Visitors hired the prominent New York firm McKim, Mead & White to redesign the historic center of the University. Stanford White, the artistic force of the firm, took the lead in the Rotunda redesign.
What’s in a Name? For UVA’s Architecture School, It’s Ethics, Aesthetics and Relationships
The lobby at the north entrance of University of Virginia School of Architecture’s Campbell Hall, where faculty, staff and students often meet, now has a name. School officials will soon christen the space the Van Lengen Lobby to honor Karen Van Lengen, the William Kenan Professor of Architecture and the school’s dean from 1999 to 2009. Van Lengen is stepping down from the faculty after 26 years at the school to continue leading her design practice and focusing on her groundbreaking work in sound and architecture.
‘Seeing Stars’: Exhibition Explores Early Observatories at UVA
Many in the University of Virginia community have taken the short journey to the top of Observatory Hill to visit the Leander McCormick Observatory, which was dedicated in 1885 and is still in operation. But how many are aware that two smaller observatories were constructed at the University and demolished by the mid-19th century? A new exhibition in the First Floor Gallery of the Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library explores the history of these little-known buildings.