Being Jewish in America Today: A Conversation with Adam KirschAd
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- Thursday, January 29
- 5:30pm to 7pm
Rotunda Dome Room
UVA Jewish Studies will host poet and senior editor at The Atlantic Adam Kirsch on Thursday, January 29th at 5:30 PM in the Rotunda Dome Room as the third installment of the "Being Jewish in America Today" series. Reception to follow. This event is presented by Jewish Studies.
iris yirei hu and Paula Wilson: We Dream of Life
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- Friday, January 30
- Artist Talk: 3:30pm to 5pm; Campbell Hall 160
Opening Reception: 5pm to 7:30pm, Ruffin Hall
Ruffin Gallery presents We Dream of Life, a 56-foot long textile installation by New Mexico-based artist Paula Wilson and California-based artist iris yirei hu. Born from the artists’ close friendship, shared dreams, and exploration of the natural world, this newly commissioned artwork limns a journey of night and day, embodied relation, and devotion to the creative path.
Made from painting, collage, and monotype, a monumental blue deity stretches across the sky, hands and feet planted in the earth, body flowing through the cosmos. Flowers, moths, teeth, and bones scatter like seeds, linking humanity to the infinite mysteries of time and space. The deity is a marriage of each artist’s personal iconographies as seen in their oeuvres: Wilson’s towering, multivalent forms and hu’s fluid and floating figures. The deity also echoes Nut, the Egyptian god who swallows the sun each night and births it anew each morning.
Wilson and hu often share their nightly dreams with one another, which they view as source material for their creative practices. The gallery’s deep blue walls evoke night itself—a space where subterranean wisdom, transformation, and the freedom of being alive come to light.
We Dream of Life is organized by Elena Yu, Ruffin Gallery Program Manager. The exhibition will be accompanied by a limited edition exhibition pamphlet designed by Leah Koransky, featuring an essay by curator and researcher Aurora Tang.
This exhibition is supported by the UVA Department of Art, the Peter B. and Adeline W. Ruffin Foundation, and an Arts Enhancement Grant from UVA Arts & the Office of the Provost & the Vice Provost for the Arts. Learn More.
Havivra: a Caribbean-Jazz Musical
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- Thursday, February 5 and Friday February 6
- 7pm to 8pm
Ruth Caplin Theater
Havivra, conceived by UVA MFA alum Alexandra Déglise is a one-hour cabaret-style musical tale which imagines Havivra Da Ifrile, castaway at sea in a canoe after the 1902 Mount Pelée eruption in Martinique, which destroyed the capital Saint-Pierre and killed 30,000 people. The piece draws on cultural research by doctoral student Eren Jaye to illustrate the ties between Antillean Beguine music and its developmental successor, New Orleans jazz. Rooted in Francophile and creole language, the piece will be presented in both English and French and is free and open to the public. The event is presented by the Drama Department with support from the UVA Arts Endowment.
Get Free Tickets Here. Contact Caitlin McLeod (hcm4t@virginia.edu) with questions.
Digital Democracy from Below
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- Friday, February 20
- 12pm to 1:30pm
Bond House, 600 Brandon Ave and Online
Digital Democracy from Below is a public conversation hosted by UVA’s Digital Technology for Democracy Lab that examines how democracy is rebuilt from the ground up, through data practices, infrastructures, and ecological struggle. This in-person and online event will feature speakers representing different communities around the world and bringing a wealth of experience at the intersection of research, community-building, policy, and practice. Lunch will be served at 11:45am EST for in-person participants; the conversation will be livestreamed at 12:00pm.
Register Here. Contact Jane Kulow (jbk9s@virginia.edu) with questions.
- An American Girl Anthology @ UVA: Finding Ourselves in the Pleasant Company Universe
- Tuesday, February 26
- 5pm
Wilson 142
Recent years have seen an explosion of critical and cultural work related to the American Girl brand, and to the thousands of young women who were influenced by the dolls, books, and movies it spawned. The first line of 18-inch historical dolls, released in 1986 by the Pleasant Company, were many girls’ first exposure to pivotal moments in U.S. History – the Revolutionary War, Emancipation, and the WWII Homefront. Today, those same millennials consume nostalgic images of the dolls on social media by the thousands. Online, the American Girl brand has become a vector for discussions about reproductive justice, the electoral college, and the legacies of slavery. More than one millennial historian or developmental psychologist has cited early (sometimes fraught) exposure to American Girl as the impetus for their current careers.
In an exciting new collection, editors Justine Orlovsky-Schnitzler and KC Hysmith have curated "an ode to the democratizing power of the internet and the intoxicating power of nostalgia" in the world of American Girl. The proposed panel with the editors will focus on the young scholars' path to creating the anthology, the company's influence on a generation of historians and cultural scholars, and the surprising new life of American Girl online.
Contact Carrington OBrion for more information: yvp5ng@virginia.edu.
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