Vinegar Hill Logo

“New Negro” Pop-Up Portrait Exhibition Explores Hidden History

Charlottesville, VA: The Holsinger Portrait Project, a partnership between the University of Virginia and the Jefferson School African American Heritage Center, will present a pop-up exhibition, The New Negro in Charlottesville and Albemarle: Portraits from a Century Ago, at the Northside Library branch of the Jefferson-Madison Regional Library throughout the month of March. The exhibition is free and can be seen during the library’s regular opening hours.

This pop-up show is a preview of much larger exhibitions that will be open at the University of Virginia, in September 2022, and at the Jefferson School, in early 2023. Each of the exhibitions feature rarely seen portraits that local African Americans commissioned from R.W. Holsinger’s photo studio during the first decades of the twentieth century. This was the era of the “New Negro,” a national movement. As the influential African American philosopher Alaine Locke said, in 1925, a “new spirit is awake in the masses.”

Yet the New Negro movement in Charlottesville and Albemarle has received little attention. George W. Buckner, a civil rights activist and businessman who was born and raised in Charlottesville, captured this spirit better than most when he wrote that “the pussy-footing, ‘Me-too-boss’ and hat in hand Negro is gone!” and listed a series of demands that included the desegregation of street cars, the creation of a high school for Black students, and representation for Black people on city council and the school board.

The Holsinger Studio’s portraits demonstrate that the spirit of the New Negro was alive and well in Charlottesville and Albemarle County. They show members of African American community as they wished to be seen — as people of dignity, beauty, respectability, and strength. The portraits are silent assertions of equality and demands for the rights of citizenship. They challenge the crude racial stereotypes that were so common in American culture at the time.

A selection of the portraits is available to media outlets upon request.

The Holsinger Portrait Project is supported by grants from the Jefferson Trust and the 3 Cavaliers Grant Program.

The Northside Library is located at 705 West Rio Road and is open Monday through Thursday from 10am to 9pm and on Fridays and Saturdays from 10am to 5pm.

 For more information about the pop-up exhibition, contact Professor John Edwin Mason.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: March 3, 2022

 

MEDIA CONTACT:

John Edwin Mason

Co-Director, Holsinger Portrait Project

Associate Professor

University of Virginia

Department of History

jem3a@virginia.edu

(434) 422-0004

About Us

Vinegar Hill Magazine is a space that is designed to support and project a more inclusive social narrative, to promote entrepreneurship, and to be a beacon for art, culture, and politics in Central Virginia.

Categories

Recent News

Past Publications

You May Also Like

Strategies for Effective African American Genealogy Research

Strategies for Effective African American Genealogy Research

by Dr. Shelley Viola Murphy, Descendant Project Researcher, University of Virginia; featured photo by Emily Faith Morgan An avid genealogist for over 30 years, Dr. Shelley Viola Murphy, also known as "familytreegirl," was born and raised in Michigan, and is now living...

reReflector 03: Preserving the History of Black Education

reReflector 03: Preserving the History of Black Education

by Niya Bates; featured photo credit by author Thirteen miles northeast of Charlottesville, an unassuming, one-story, white school building with two front doors on either side of a gabled vestibule sits across a paved parking lot from the historic St. John Baptist...

The Charlottesville Freedom School

The Charlottesville Freedom School

by Naila A. Smith, PhD; featured photo provided by Barbara M. Fitch In the summer of 1964, a group of students coordinated the first Freedom School in the state of Mississippi and started a movement that continues to this day and takes place all over the country...

Pin It on Pinterest