BUILDING NEW SOCIAL SPACES FOR ART is a one-day symposium taking place at UVA’s Brooks Hall Commons from 12-4:30pm on Wednesday October 15, 2025. Lunch will be provided. Please register by October 10.

“When the museum is a place of conversation, it is alive. It shares history and culture in an artistic way, not as something hidden in a history book in a library, but open to the  broader community. I want to make the museum space feel human, rather than just a place to view objects. The world has exported its own idea of our identity and of how we should relate to the world. Why not bring our own way; to show how people can relate as family? I want to make those objects come alive, because you can’t have art without having people, and you can’t have an exhibition experience without exchanging in different knowledge systems.”

– XOLILE ‘X’ MADINDA

Since the early 20th century, the curator has often been understood as the author of an exhibition. But in recent years artists, curators and museums have begun to reimagine the exhibition as more collaborative, dialogic, and open-ended. The curator is situated as a mediator and facilitator rather than autonomous author. Rather than “texts waiting to be read,” exhibitions have the potential to build new social spaces for engagement among diverse stakeholders: curators, artists, scholars and community members.

This one-day symposium brings together Indigenous and non-Indigenous scholars from Australia, Papua New Guinea, South Africa and the United State. By examining different approaches to exhibition making, the symposium seeks to reframe curatorial practice as more than a “one-way” art and culture delivery system, but a vehicle for community building that creates new knowledge, amplifies access, and expands educational and economic opportunities.

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BUILDING NEW SOCIAL SPACES FOR ART is convened by Lise Dobrin (Anthropology), Noel Lobley (Music) and Henry Skerritt (Art History) as part of the Collaborative Curation Lab at the Institute for the Humanities and Global Cultures at the University of Virginia. It is supported by the Kluge-Ruhe Aboriginal Art Collection of the University of Virginia and UVA Arts.

Speakers include Robert Fielding, Artist, Mimili Maku Arts (Australia); Nicolas Garnier, Director of the Research Centre in Social Sciences Divine Word University (Papua New Guinea); Xolile ‘X’ Madinda, Arts Activist, The Black Power Station (South Africa); Fred Myers, Silver Professor of Anthropology, NYU; Marlene Nampitjinpa Artist, Papunya Tula Artists (Australia) and John West Tjupurrula, Artist, Papunya Tula Artists (Australia).