Art in libraries

In 1990, American historian Sue Peabody was researching her dissertation on enslaved peoples’ pre-revolutionary freedom lawsuits in France when she came upon an intriguing story. In 1817 on Île Bourbon (now Réunion), a French-colonized island in the Indian Ocean, a 31-year-old enslaved man named Furcy Madeleine brought legal proceedings before the Saint-Denis District Court against his master Joseph Lory. Furcy’s suit contested his status as a slave and claimed his “ingenuity” — his freedom of birth. 

April is National Poetry Month and UVA Library is pleased to announce that poet MaKshya Tolbert, the inaugural Art in Library Spaces Artist-in-Residence, will deliver a talk on place-based poetics and creative process on April 18.

On the second floor of Shannon Library, two massive mixed-media collages hanging side by side are catching the attention of passers-by. The art installation, titled “Free to Be, a Collective Virginia Landscape,” is the work of Maria Villanueva, an Assistant Professor of Art who arrived at UVA in August.

They are bright, eye-catching, inviting: eight colorful banners on the second floor of Shannon Library call out visitors with greetings and phrases in languages that represent the University’s Asian, Pacific Islander, and South Asian American (APISAA) community.