Reconstruction
Hosted by the Department of Art & Art History in partnership with The Harnett Museum.
The 2025–2026 Tucker-Boatwright festival 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 towards 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
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.
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.