Reconstruction
Hosted by the Department of Art & Art History in partnership with The Harnett Museum.
The 2025–2026 Tucker-Boatwright Festival of Literature & the Arts dissects and expands the idea of Reconstruction to highlight the complex relationship to ongoing cultural movements and revolutions that we study, experience, and manifest through the visual arts. Reconstruction considers the many social, environmental, and political crises that we are experiencing today and encourages us to look back at the histories that frame the urgent questions of our present for answers regarding our future.
The Department of Art & Art History, in partnership with The Harnett Museum, has invited two world-renowned artists to campus, Cauleen Smith and Abigail DeVille, to interpret this theme through two new immersive installations that engage with local histories to create a space for community dialogue.
Upcoming Events
Abigail DeVille: A Mourning
January 30 to April 25, 2026
Joel and Lila Harnett Museum of Art
Known for creating large-scale immersive installations with found objects, c is developing a new exhibition for the Harnett Museum of Art. The exhibition, A Mourning, reconstructs the death of DeVille’s great grandfather Luther Wilson at Central State Hospital in 1938. Central State Hospital was founded in 1870 for the treatment of “colored persons of unsound mind” and operated at a former Confederate hospital at Howard’s Grove. In 1885, the hospital moved to a new building in Petersburg, V.A., where it continues to operate today. The exhibition aims to distill some of the vapors of alleged abuse at the facility and the development of black mental health care.
Abigail DeVille: A Mourning is organized by the University of Richmond Museums in collaboration with the Department of Art & Art History, University of Richmond as part of the annual Tucker Boatwright Festival of Literature & Arts in the School of Arts & Sciences. The exhibition is curated by Orianna Cacchione, deputy director and curator of exhibitions. Major support for the exhibition is graciously provided by the Tucker Boatwright Festival of Literature & Arts and the Booth Endowment for the Arts.
Events
Exhibition Opening Reception
January 29, 2026, 6–7 p.m.
Joel and Lila Harnett Museum of Art
Join us for a reception to celebrate our new exhibitions. The new exhibitions include: Abigail DeVille: A Mourning, BLACK WORK: Absence/Absorption, and Politics of Place.
Free and open to everyone!
Exhibition Tour with Artist Abigail DeVille
January 30, 2026, 6–7 p.m.
Joel and Lila Harnett Museum of Art
Abigail Deville leads a walk-through of her exhibition, A Mourning. Learn more about her art practice of creating large-scale immersive installations and how the 1938 death of her great-grandfather Luther Wilson at Central State Hospital, Petersburg, VA, inspired this exhibition.
Free and open to everyone!
Resources
Reading Room
A reading room of books and materials associated with the Tucker-Boatwright Festival of Literature & the Arts theme.
Class Visits, Tours, & Gatherings
Museum staff can offer specialized exhibition and collection visits based on supporting the pedagogical objectives of academic curricula. Museum staff work with the faculty to identify desired outcomes for the student experience, and then discover intersections of the course content with museum exhibition/artworks. The class visit then becomes a space for intentional presence, layering that which students are exploring visually and conceptually with that which they are learning in class readings and discussion.
Faculty and students may also use exhibitions and objects in the collections for class papers and projects. Additionally, student groups are welcome to work with museum staff to design their own bespoke experience within the museum.
Please contact Martha Wright, curator for academic initiatives, to schedule a class visit, tour, or reserve the exhibition space for other gatherings.
Cauleen Smith: Dusk of Dawn
September 4 to December 6, 2025
Joel and Lila Harnett Museum of Art
In installation, video and drawing, Cauleen Smith exuberantly interrogates everyday images, objects, and histories to imagine other possible futures. Combining strategies from activism, science fiction, and experimental cinema, Smith’s artworks function as speculative devices that generate curiosity as a way of thinking beyond the status quo. In this exhibition, Smith directs her focus on reimagining the unfulfilled promise of reconstruction.
Cauleen Smith: Dusk of Dawn is organized by the University of Richmond Museums in collaboration with the Department of Art & Art History as part of the 2025-2026 Tucker-Boatwright Festival of Literature and the Arts in the School of Arts & Sciences. Through a series of programs, lectures and exhibitions, this year’s theme of “Reconstruction” is meant to highlight the variety of ongoing and historical cultural revolutions that we study, experience, and manifest (in art). The exhibition is curated by Orianna Cacchione, deputy director and curator of exhibitions.
Events
Exhibition Opening Reception
September 4, 2025, 4–6 p.m.
Joel and Lila Harnett Museum of Art
Learn more
Resources
Reading Room
A reading room of books and materials associated with the Tucker-Boatwright Festival of Literature & the Arts theme.
Class Visits, Tours, & Gatherings
Museum staff can offer specialized exhibition and collection visits based on supporting the pedagogical objectives of academic curricula. Museum staff work with the faculty to identify desired outcomes for the student experience, and then discover intersections of the course content with museum exhibition/artworks. The class visit then becomes a space for intentional presence, layering that which students are exploring visually and conceptually with that which they are learning in class readings and discussion.
Faculty and students may also use exhibitions and objects in the collections for class papers and projects. Additionally, student groups are welcome to work with museum staff to design their own bespoke experience within the museum.
Please contact Martha Wright, curator for academic initiatives, to schedule a class visit, tour, or reserve the exhibition space for other gatherings.
Frames of Reference
Annual Program of Artists’ Film & Video
With support from the Department of Art & Art History, University Museums, and the School of Arts & Sciences at the University of Richmond; Frames of Reference showcases some of the most creative, challenging, thoughtful and visionary artists working in film, video, and alternative media today. Programs feature artists and artworks that resist conventions and ideologies of mainstream media; explore creative, innovative approaches to narrative and experiments in time-based media; and embrace unique viewpoints, perspectives, or frames of reference.
Frames of Reference is organized, programmed, and presented by Jeremy Drummond and all programs feature in-person Q&A’s with featured artists and filmmakers.
Cassie Packard
Writing About Art: Through the Critic's Lens
Tuesday, Nov. 11, 2025, 3:30–5:30 p.m.
Joel and Lila Harnett Museum of Art
In this two-hour introductory workshop, we will discuss strategies for writing about art with an eye to incorporating your distinct perspectives, knowledge bases, and skill sets. After a brief overview of different art writing formats and a conversation about the qualities of compelling criticism, we will do a group exercise with Cauleen Smith's Dusk of Dawn exhibition.
Cassie Packard is a New York-based art writer and reviews editor at frieze. Her writing can be found in frieze and such publications as Artforum, ArtReview, BOMB, The Brooklyn Rail, Cultured, e-flux, Financial Times, and Los Angeles Review of Books. She is a recipient of the 2024 Rabkin Prize for art writing and the author of Art Rules (Frances Lincoln, 2023 (UK); Eyrolles, 2024 (FR); China Textile Publishing House Co., 2024 (CN)). Packard has contributed to artist books, exhibition catalogues, monographs, and anthologies and is a frequent guest lecturer/visiting critic at universities and artist residencies. Previously, she was an oral historian at Eyebeam and a researcher at Hauser & Wirth. She holds an M.A. with merit in art history from University College London and a B.A. with honors in art history from Brown University.
Bethany Collins: The Dixie of Our Union
September 4 to December 6, 2025
Joel and Lila Harnett Museum of Art
Bethany Collins: The Dixie of Our Union celebrates a new acquisition to the University Museums Art Collection and highlights the ways a single artwork can catalyze interdisciplinary programmatic collaborations across campus. The artwork comprises ten works on paper that appear at first glance to be framed pages of sheet music smudged with smoke.