In the News

“Power Play: Reimagining Representation in Contemporary Photography,” the latest exhibit at the University’s Fralin Museum of Art, reimagines popular feminine figures like Disney princesses and American girl dolls to criticize mainstream media’s definitions of gender and social roles. Organized by Assistant Curator Hannah Cattarin, Curator of Indigenous Arts of the Americas Adriana Greci Green and Curator of Exhibitions Laura Minton, this photography exhibit features the work of five female artists — Sarah Maple, Tokie Rome-Taylor, Cara Romero, Martine Gutierrez and Wendy Red Star — that harness fashion, color, and staging to construct powerful messages. 

Each artist uses her cultural upbringings and individual techniques to criticize reinforced ideas of femininity, gender roles and identity. Together, their photographs aim to override the predominant narratives in media, challenging traditional standards and connecting the past to the present — an aim solidified by the written introductions placed next to each artists’ work in the exhibit. 

“I love the variety that’s shown,” museum-goer Glenna Ohlmes said. “I think the first time I came through it, I didn’t appreciate it until I read about each one.”

CHARLOTTESVILLE, VA.- The Fralin Museum of Art at the University of Virginia presents a new exhibition featuring artists that utilize portraiture, satire, pop culture references and advertising techniques to critique and combat essentializing representations of feminine identities. Power Play: Reimagining Representation in Contemporary Photography, on view Aug. 27-Dec. 31, features ten recently acquired photographs by contemporary artists Martine Gutierrez, Sarah Maple, Wendy Red Star, Cara Romero and Tokie Rome-Taylor, with additional loaned works. The artists’ inclusion of heirlooms, regalia and toys placed in meticulously constructed scenes highlights the role that objects and representation play in shaping our intersectional identities.

"Harnessing the medium of photography and drawing on a wide range of visual methods, Romero, Gutierrez, Maple, Red Star and Rome-Taylor counter erasure and underrepresentation and take an active stance with fresh, poignant and powerful representations of themselves and their communities," said the exhibition curators, Hannah Cattarin, Adriana Greci Green and Laura Minton. “These photographs reference dominant narratives that have been articulated in visual culture over time, from Renaissance portraiture, Disney princesses, store window displays, to children's dolls and fashion mannequins.”

Brooklyn-based performance artist Martine Gutierrez (b. 1989) uses consumer objects, such as mannequins, dolls and magazines, to create elaborate self-portraits that investigate her personal and collective identities. In Line Up 3 from the series Line Up (2014), Gutierrez stages a group of mannequins in matching clothing and hairstyles, and places herself among them.

The shadow boxes each contain a few items – a broken toy or a red rubber ball, a blue and white pottery shard or a row of tiny hooks, a seashell or a stone, tossed in a bed of blue sand or set with newsprint as a background.

Each box evokes fragments of dreams or summer memories, an alley far away or a carnival in the past, a trip in the imagination.

Joseph Cornell, an influential 20th-century American artist who died in 1972, used to wander around New York City where he lived, going to all kinds of shops – dime stores, used booksellers and secondhand shops – looking for small objects that struck his fancy or interested him in some way. He arranged them in wooden boxes, about the size of a shoebox, with other materials like sand, creating each one as if offering a small, mysterious world.

The New York-based Henry Luce Foundation—named after and established by the founder of Time, Fortune, Life and Sports Illustrated magazines—has awarded the Fralin Museum a $250,000 grant that will support new research into its Native American collection, conducted in collaboration with Indigenous scholars and artists.

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Reconnecting to Native communities

And now the news: The New York-based Henry Luce Foundation — named after and established by the founder of Time, Fortune, Life and Sports Illustrated magazines — has awarded the Fralin Museum a $250,000 grant that will support new research into its Native American collection, conducted in collaboration with Indigenous scholars and artists.

The grant will be paid out over three years. The additional resources will allow Green to more precisely document where the collection’s artifacts first were obtained and who made them, and use that information along with new photography to create print and online catalogs. These new publications also will include essays from Native American experts to provide even more insight and context.

“The point that’s really key here is shared stewardship and honoring the fact that these communities still have access,” said Fralin Museum Director Matthew McLendon. The project means to make the collection more accessible to all, but in particular to make sure “the source communities of these objects have access to them either in person or digitally or through scholarship or through catalogs, on as many different platforms as possible.”

The Fralin Museum of Art at the University of Virginia (UVA) has received a $250,000 American Art Program Responsive Grant from the Henry Luce Foundation to focus on the Museum’s Native North American Collections Project. The initiative will support new research and interpretation of the Native American collection to invigorate and advance the understanding and presentation of these artworks through engagement with Native scholars, artists and knowledge holders.

The work undertaken for this project will foster new approaches to presenting the collection that are informed by Indigenous perspectives, leading to the publication of a major scholarly text, enhanced online presence and the development of an innovative exhibition co-curated with Native collaborators.

“We are grateful to the Henry Luce Foundation for its support of this project and its recognition of the importance of the objects that have yet to be properly studied and made public,” said Matthew McLendon, J. Sanford Miller family director of The Fralin. “I know I speak for all at the Museum when I say we look forward to partnering with Native experts, learning from them so we can properly steward what is in our care.”

Since The Fralin Museum of Art at UVA was built in 1935, it’s had to close its doors a few times—once during World War II and again in the ’60s when the space was requisitioned for classrooms. In 2020, the growing pandemic shut the museum down for a third time.

“There’s certainly nothing in anyone’s living memory that could have prepared us or given us a guidebook on how to deal with a global pandemic, as a museum or any kind of institution,” says Matthew McLendon, the museum’s director and chief curator.

When The Fralin reopened its physical galleries on August 28, 2021, it was a changed world, and the museum found itself changed within it. “What we take from art depends on where we are in our own lives and what we need from it,” McLendon says. Art can be a source of change, a source of defiance, a source of beauty, or a source of renewal. 

The Fralin Museum of Art has four new exhibits that opened February 6. They range from contemporary to ancient, with one installation even exploring what the future may look like.

The Fralin wants to bring together a collection of art that comes from diverse artists and backgrounds. The four exhibits will be up until the end of July, so there is plenty of time to take a look.

“The main thing we want people to take away when they come to the Fralin is the diversity of perspectives and representation we are working to bring into our gallery, the diversity of voices,” said Matthew Mclendon, the J. Sanford Miller Director at the Fralin Museum of Art.

The Fralin is free and open to the public.

In 1921 the British painter and printmaker C. R. W. Nevinson declared that “The most beautiful products of the modern world are a Rolls-Royce car and a skyscraper.” Nevinson was not alone in making a connection between modern consumer products and the skyscrapers then going up in New York and other American cities. A current exhibition at the Fralin Museum of Art at the University of Virginia, Skyscraper Gothic, shows how Jazz Age skyscrapers with their characteristic stepped-back profiles grew, in part, from the emulation of Gothic architecture.

Not the first, but perhaps the most notable expression of skyscraper Gothic arrived with the Woolworth Building on lower Broadway in 1913, designed by New York architect Cass Gilbert. The exhibition features many highly detailed working drawings for the building, on loan from the collection of the Vanderbilt University Fine Arts Gallery, which will launch a scaled down version of the show in early 2022. Dubbed the “Cathedral of Commerce” by some critics, the Woolworth Building was equated with modernity and the commercial success of new multinational corporations such as dime-store chains. The tower built between 1923 and 1925 for the Chicago Tribune Company on North Michigan Avenue from a design by the firm of Hood and Howells, the winners of its international architectural competition, was the next great expression of skyscraper Gothic, but also the style’s swan song: in the 1930s, partly as a result of the immigration of European modernist architects fleeing an increasingly hostile political climate abroad, the use of such a historic style for a fundamentally modern building type came under increasing critical fire.

The Little Museum at the Fralin Museum of Art was a unique exhibit at the gallery that is like no other. Student writer Mariette Hollins interviewed the Special Projects Coordinator at the museum Lisa Jevack, who was more than happy to tell the students at CHS about The Little Museum and everything it has to offer.

“The Little Museum is quite literally a little museum made of six little galleries that are being used to showcase and exhibit little works of art. The Little Museum is outside on the plaza in front of the Fralin Museum of Art and one of the great things about it is unlike the big museum inside, it is open 24 hours a day. So you can come at any time, any day, and see the works of art.“

The first speaker of the night was Diane Kappa, a pattern designer who previously designed for Nordstrom and is now the founder of Diane Kappa Designs. Working with mediums like block printing and digital illustration, Kappa’s unique designs appear on everything from clothing to wallpaper in retail. 

Mili Suleman was the second speaker of the night. Born in India and raised in the Middle East, she started off as a graphic designer, later pivoting to exploring the world of textiles in the home space. Her “KUFRI” line was inspired by a visit to an Indian hill station which shaped her passion for handloom weaving. Suleman spoke about what textiles in her art mean to her, calling textiles a "connector."

Skyscrapers, in our modern imagination, are glitzy glass needles. It wasn’t always that way. The nation’s first towers were ornate and detailed. Intrinsically American, the designs embodied the qualities we like to associate with our national image: We’re can-do, bold, strong, technologically advanced, and audacious.

The Fralin Museum’s new show, “Skyscraper Gothic,” explores the history of these early skyscrapers. The curators, Lisa Reilly from UVA and Kevin Murphy from Vanderbilt, have brought together a wonderfully comprehensive assortment of prints, drawings, photographs, paintings, sculptures, furniture, textiles, toys, models, illustrations and decorative arts to showcase the prevalence of both the Gothic style and the skyscraper motif in contemporaneous culture.

Charlottesville residents have very strong opinions about food. When my wife and I moved there from Northern Virginia three years ago, every single person we met told us which restaurants we had to try. It was sort of a “Welcome to C’ville—now start eating” greeting.

Post-pandemic, the city remains a great place for DC foodies to spend a weekend away. Folks in these parts enjoy dining out, largely because there’s so much of it. Consider that Charlottesville and State College, Pennsylvania, both college towns, are roughly the same size. According to industry research published by the Barnes Report, Charlottesville has twice as many eating establishments—237 surround UVA, versus 119 around Penn State.

HuffPost has placed Charlottesville in the same ranks as New York and San Francisco for the most restaurants per capita.

CHARLOTTESVILLE, Va. (WVIR) - The Fralin Museum of Art at the University of Virginia is reopening Saturday, August 28.

The museum has undergone renovations, including replacing the roof and working to make the building more energy efficient.

Staff members say they’re excited to welcome the public back into the galleries after being closed for 17 months.

“We are so excited to hear voices in the galleries again, to see work back up on the wall and throughout the museum. You know, we’ve been spending the last 6 to 8 weeks really reinstalling the museum, getting ready for this moment,” J. Sanford Miller Family Director Matthew McLendon said.

Fralin Museum of Art at the University of Virginia, Charlottesville, Virginia

When you picture a skyscraper, what do you see? Presumably, sleek lines, walls of windows, and maybe an indoor waterfall. However, the architectural language of the most iconic skyscrapers in the US was defined in the early twentieth century by European Gothic models. Such soaring edifices as the Woolworth Building in New York or Chicago’s Tribune Tower became symbols of colossal national growth and immense cultural shift. An exhibition at the Fralin Museum of Art — Skyscraper Gothic — celebrates the illustrious history of these beautiful buildings. Examining a vast array of documents and artifacts — from prints, drawings, and photographs to toys, models, and decorative arts — the exhibition examines how Gothic design informed material culture in the early 20^th century. To see this monumental exhibition in person, check here to plan your trip.

The Little Free Libraries, those book-sharing boxes that have popped up all over the world in the last decade, have inspired another open-access method of sharing media: miniature outdoor art museums, such as the one now on display outside The Fralin Museum of Art in Charlottesville. WMRA's Randi B. Hagi reports.

By 6 p.m. on Friday, there were about 40 people milling around on the red brick terrace outside the Fralin Museum, each waiting for their turn to peer into six small cubicles that make up the Little Museum of Art. This was the first exhibit the Fralin has hosted since last March. Lisa Jevack is the museum's special projects coordinator.

CHARLOTTESVILLE, VA.- The Fralin Museum of Art at the University of Virginia has received a gift of $2 million from Dr. Carol R. Angle. The gift will supplement her previous gift establishing the Angle Exhibition Fund in 2016, the first named endowment to support exhibitions at the Museum. The fund is an example of sustained donor engagement that leads to thoughtful and mission-supporting philanthropy. 

This contribution marks Angle’s ongoing dedication to the Fralin. Most recently in 2020 she endowed the Carol R. Angle Academic Curator position currently held by Jordan Love. 

The Angle Exhibition Fund supports the Museum’s wide-ranging permanent collection and enhances the Fralin’s efforts to mount outstanding exhibitions. The Museum is committed to creating vibrant and intellectually engaging exhibitions that serve the university student, as well as increasingly diverse community and national audiences. 

It is an unusual feeling as a medieval art specialist for my subject to suddenly feel globally significant. I suspect some of my colleagues in Renaissance art feel this as well. For those of us who have studied art created after the Black Death of 1348, or the Plague of London in 1665, or during the wave of epidemics that washed over Italian cities every few years between 1500-1700, our current pandemic has felt familiar and brought our knowledge to the forefront.

Just before the museum closed, in fact, two epidemic-related objects from our permanent collection at the Fralin Museum of Art at the University of Virginia were on view—a processional cross and a sculpture of Saint Sebastian, both from the fifteenth century.

CHARLOTTESVILLE, Va. (CBS19 NEWS) -- Many facilities are offering online options due to the ongoing coronavirus pandemic.

These include the National Park Service, local governments, and museums.

The art museums at the University of Virginia have also turned to online outlets.

“In times of crisis, we usually do everything we can to keep the museum open, because we know how important it is for people to have a space for those contemplative experiences, a space where they can feel connected to something larger than themselves,” said Matthew McLendon, the J. Sanford Miller Family Director of the Fralin Museum of Art. “This time, though, the best way we could serve our community was to close our doors, so we immediately turned our attention to new online offerings that could provide some of those connections.”