From September 2022 to June 2023, the “Visions of Progress: Portraits of Dignity, Style, and Racial Uplift” exhibition at the University of Virginia brought 180 portraits of Black Charlottesville-area residents from the turn of the 20th Century that had previously been buried in an archive, to the public.
The exhibition was temporary, but a new print catalog — which includes a selection of the portraits, biographies of some of the subjects, and contextualizing essays — makes it last.
The “Visions of Progress” catalog will be released on Saturday, Oct. 25 at 3 p.m. at the Jefferson-Madison Regional Library Central Branch. Anyone who wants one can get one, said exhibition curator and UVA history professor John Edwin Mason. The catalogs will be given away for free, and will be available in public libraries throughout the area.
“My hope is that 65 years from now, when some 8th grader is assigned to do a project on the history of Charlottesville, she finds the catalog, and her eyes are opened,” Mason said. She stands to learn that yes, the portraits were taken during the Jim Crow era, but that was also the New Negro era — a time when Black people were working hard to uplift the race economically, educationally, and in terms of the rights of citizenship…