University of Virginia associate history professor John Edwin Mason and others, including scholars, students, and community members, are on a mission to share about 500 portraits of local African Americans.
When the only museum in the U.S. dedicated to Indigenous Australian art launches a national touring exhibition of bark paintings in fall 2022, we can fully expect that the museum world will radically change. Traditional ways of thinking about and exhibiting works of Indigenous art will never be the same.
The Memory Project of the University of Virginia’s Democracy Initiative and its co-sponsor, the Jefferson School African American Heritage Center, are pleased to announce the Charlottesville Civil Rights Bus Tour. Scheduled for June 19-26, 2022, the tour will traverse the American South to visit former plantations, Civil Rights historical sites, museums and memorials to inspire honest, inclusive narratives about the ongoing struggles for racial justice.
The Fralin Museum of Art at the University of Virginia announces the establishment of The Ruth C. Cross Endowment for Acquisitions and Collections Care. The $1 million endowment is created by the late museum donors’ family. The Fralin Museum of Art’s longstanding patron, volunteer, and friend, Ruth Cunningham Cross passed away in 2021.
Check out the current and upcoming exhibitions at The Fralin Museum of Art through July 2022.
“Language preservation and documentation were important before, but it has a new urgency,” Allison Bigelow, an associate professor in the University of Virginia’s Department of Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese, said recently.
The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Art Museum Futures Fund recently awarded a $200,000 grant to the University of Virginia’s Kluge-Ruhe Aboriginal Art Collection to expand the promotion of Indigenous Australian art and culture, as well as enhance the leadership of Indigenous people within the museum.
A new book and website tell the story of a small group of Aboriginal artists from Australia who changed the face of global art history – and the resources were produced by the only museum dedicated to Aboriginal Australian art in the United States, the University of Virginia’s Kluge-Ruhe Aboriginal Art Collection.
David J. Getsy is an art historian, art writer, and curator whose research examines the changing investments in the human figure in American and European art from the nineteenth century to the present. Working at the intersection of art history, queer studies, and transgender studies, his writings have addressed the ways in which non-normative genders and sexualities have been fundamental to the shape of art history’s narratives.
Reading an article about a famous computer-generated scene in the Hollywood film “The Matrix Reloaded,” University of Virginia art history professor Francesca Fiorani couldn’t stop thinking about Leonardo da Vinci. The article focused on a digitally created fight scene in the sci-fi film in which Keanu Reeves, as Neo, dodges a barrage of bullets. The artists and animators behind the 2003 film said the most difficult part of such scenes was realistically recreating the shadows on people’s faces in different, fast-changing positions. “That is the exact problem Leonardo da Vinci worked to solve, though of course, he worked with brushes and pigments instead of pixels,” Fiorani said.
