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.
May 21, 2026
https://news.virginia.edu/content/meet-students-behind-sound-uvas-battle-bands-winners
https://as.virginia.edu/news/finding-her-voice-priyanka-shettys-mfa-journey-uva-world-stage
https://news.virginia.edu/content/uva-alumna-artist-big-miniature-artworks
Come learn about curricular, extra-curricular, programmatic, and volunteer opportunities from the Visual & Performing Arts & Architecture departments, programs, and community.
Drinking tea is one of the most common practices in the world, with Americans alone consuming 3.9 billion gallons in 2021. With instant tea bags and cafe matcha lattes becoming more prevalent around the world, it can be easy to forget the cultural significance that tea drinking has in the ease and convenience that these products provide. The Fralin Museum of Art’s latest exhibition, entitled “Crafted for Tea: Connecting Cultures with Teaware and Traditions,” highlights the skill, artistry and history behind the making of this common drink.
https://www.cavalierdaily.com/article/2026/03/the-fralin-explores-tea-making-as-a-form-of-global-connection-with-teaware-exhibition?ct=content_open&cv=cbox_featured
This week, thousands of American college students will descend upon beaches across the country, donning swim trunks and bikinis for what has become an annual tradition: spring break. It’s no surprise that today’s swimwear is a far cry from styles of decades past, even if tankinis are making a comeback. UVA Today went to the University of Virginia’s Historic Clothing Collection to explore a century of swim fashion with the collection’s manager, Marcy Linton.
https://news.virginia.edu/content/students-head-spring-break-beach-attire-has-dramatically-changed
Jacquelyn Kim first joined the Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library in 2022 as a student worker, where she helped build an exhibition that examined the 2017 “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville. The exhibition was curated by UVA alumni and community members and gave Kim a crash course in what she calls “the importance of co-creation.”
https://library.virginia.edu/news/2025/staff-spotlight-jacquelyn-kim-shares-magic-special-collections-library?mtm_campaign=em&mtm_kwd=sub
The Fralin Museum of Art is currently hosting “The World Between: Egypt and Nubia in Africa,” an exhibit which explores the juxtaposition of having sharp political boundaries, yet blurred cultural ones. The exhibit showcases this complex relationship through a variety of artifacts, such as pottery, statues and figurines, as well as 3D-printed replicas of certain statues that guests are allowed to touch. Anastasia Dakouri-Hild, curator of the exhibit and professor of art history, said she put the collection together to demonstrate the influence Nubia had on Egypt and educate visitors on how ancient people led normal lives.
https://www.cavalierdaily.com/article/2025/11/fralin-exhibit-explores-cultural-interactions-that-shaped-ancient-egypt-and-nubia?ct=content_open&cv=cbox_featured
You’re listening to WTJU Charlottesville.The Fralin Museum of Art is celebrating its 90th anniversary with a soiree on November 7, from 6 to 11pm, featuring great food, performance, music and interactive activities. For Arts This Week, we spoke with Director of the Fralin, Karen Milbourne, to learn more about the event.
https://www.wtju.net/arts-this-week-the-fralin-museum-of-arts-90th-anniversary-soiree/
In 2024, Julia Mathas, then an Editorial Assistant at the Virginia Quarterly Review (VQR), was conducting research on the literary magazine’s history in anticipation of its centennial anniversary the following year. While looking for a file on Ezra Pound in the correspondence archives of VQR’s longest-serving editor, Charlotte Kohler, Mathas stumbled upon a folder labelled “Sylvia Plath.” Within it she found a signed 1958 letter from Plath asking the editors to consider three of her poems for publication.
https://library.virginia.edu/news/2025/vqr-100-new-exhibition-explores-acclaimed-magazines-archives?mtm_campaign=em&mtm_kwd=sub
“The ABCs of the UVA Library” was also conceived as a way to give Leo S. Lo, the new Dean of Libraries and University Librarian, an overview of the Library’s collections. Lo’s tenure began two days before the exhibition opened. “What an extraordinary welcome gift!” Lo said. “I am deeply impressed by the scope of our collections and, even more, by the creativity and collaboration. The concept is playful and imaginative, the execution is stunning. I am telling everyone about it.”
https://library.virginia.edu/news/2025/learn-abcs-uva-library-through-its-new-exhibition?mtm_campaign=em&mtm_kwd=sub
n 1990, American historian Sue Peabody was researching her dissertation on enslaved peoples’ pre-revolutionary freedom lawsuits in France when she came upon an intriguing story. In 1817 on Île Bourbon (now Réunion), a French-colonized island in the Indian Ocean, a 31-year-old enslaved man named Furcy Madeleine brought legal proceedings before the Saint-Denis District Court against his master Joseph Lory. Furcy’s suit contested his status as a slave and claimed his “ingenuity” — his freedom of birth.
https://library.virginia.edu/news/2025/surprising-story-furcy-madeleine-new-exhibition-shannon-library-explores-contradictions?mtm_campaign=em&mtm_kwd=sub
In the Beginning: Paintings by Senior Artists of the Spinifex Arts Project presents the work of internationally renowned artists from the Spinifex Arts Project, a collective of Pitjantjatjara men and women in Tjuntjuntjara, 800 miles east of Perth in the Great Victoria Desert, Western Australia. Spinifex Arts Project began in 1997 when the artists realized that painting would be an instrumental tool in lobbying the Western Australian government to recognize their ongoing connection to their sacred Country so they could return to their homelands.
https://kluge-ruhe.org/all-exhibitions/in-the-beginning-paintings-by-senior-artists-of-the-spinifex-arts-project/
Ayuujk (Mixe), Nahua, Maya-Ch’ol, Ñuu Savi (Mixtec), Otomí, Maya-Kaqchikel, P’urhépecha, Diidxazà, Maya-Tsotsil, Zapotec, and Sarhua are but a few of the ancestral lineages that collide in Fuego Eterno: Soberanías Visuales. This project brings together the knowledge and aesthetic achievements of individuals Whose ancestral lineage predates Spanish colonialism and who center millennia of inherited epistemologies within their contemporary practices.
https://www.curatorlove.com/uvafesv
Mid Atlantic Arts partners with the National Association of Black Storytellers (NABS) and South Arts on the Black Appalachian Storytellers Fellowships. This program honors and promotes the understanding of Black Appalachian storytelling traditions that embody the history, heritage, and culture of African Americans in the region. The National Association of Black Storytellers awards one Fellowship per year in each of the six eligible states: Kentucky, North Carolina, Ohio, Tennessee, Virginia, and West Virginia.
https://www.midatlanticarts.org/opportunity/black-appalachian-storytellers-fellowship/