Museums

The University's natural sciences museum, the Lora Robins Gallery, will reopen on August 28, 2025, featuring a new design and refined focus. The latest installation will draw on the strengths of the permanent collection to showcase hundreds of minerals, rocks, fossils, and coins. In addition to our new exhibitions, a new classroom space will make thousands of objects in the permanent collection more accessible for teaching and learning. 

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 2025-26 Tucker Boatwright Festival of Literature and the Arts. 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.

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. 

University Museums support inquiry, discussions and engagement for all campus audiences. Working collaboratively with faculty from any field of study, Museums+ presents objects from the collection that inspire compelling conversations with students about key topics and concepts from their courses. Through this initiative, the Museums invite classes into the galleries to explore how collection objects spark conversation with the images, texts and data sets they study in the classroom. Museums+ also aims to give community visitors a behind-the-scenes glimpse at how visual objects can support the student learning experience across academic disciplines.