The Library’s exhibitions program allows us to serve the UVA community and beyond as an evolving space for discovery and celebration of our shared cultural heritage, by showcasing to the public the rare and unique materials available to the University’s faculty, students, and visiting researchers in a controlled environment, and celebrating them in creative and edifying ways. Exhibitions also allow us to take advantage of partnerships with other institutions and guest curators to bring fresh insight and new treasures to our galleries.
In addition to current and upcoming exhibitions, “Declaring Independence: Creating and Re-Creating America’s Document” is on permanent display in the Declaration of Independence Gallery on the first floor of the Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library. “Declaring Independence” offers highlights of the Albert H. Small Declaration of Independence Collection, the most comprehensive collection of letters, documents, and early printings of the Declaration of Independence.
Exhibitions are open whenever the Harrison/Small building is open. Check Harrison/Small Building & Exhibitions hours on the Library locations & hours page.
Currently on view
“Anne Spencer: I Am Here!”
In 2008, the Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library at the University of Virginia acquired the papers of Anne Spencer — Harlem Renaissance poet, civil rights activist and organizer, librarian, and educator from Lynchburg, Virginia. The archives contain manuscripts and notebooks of poems, short stories, articles, prose works, correspondence, and photographs as well as financial ledgers and legal papers related to her husband Edward Spencer’s many businesses.
The papers are fragmentary in nature — Anne Spencer wrote on every available surface (scraps of paper, Christmas cards, electric bills, her husband’s business ledgers, even the walls of her house) — in describing her writing process to her close friend, writer and publisher James Weldon Johnson, she noted that “there are ‘leventy-leven bits stuck in as many different places that promise something if I ever get at them.”
“Anne Spencer: I Am Here!” is a deeply archival exhibition in partnership with the Anne Spencer House and Garden Museum that affirms Anne Spencer’s enduring legacy in her many avocations and roles: not only as poet, organizer, and educator — but also as mother, wife, grandmother; creator and caretaker of the only restored garden of an African American in the United States; and, alongside Edward Spencer, maker of her home at 1313 Pierce Street, today the most intact house museum in the country.
The exhibition is open in the Small Special Collections Library’s Main Gallery through June 14, 2025. Read more about the exhibition in UVA Today and the Cavalier Daily.
“The Gift: Edgar Finley Shannon, Jr. — Celebrated Scholar of Alfred, Lord Tennyson”
“The Gift” is an exhibition featuring the remarkable collection of the greatest and rarest works of Alfred, Lord Tennyson, given by the University of Virginia Alumni Association to the UVA Library in honor of UVA’s fourth president, Edgar Finley Shannon, Jr.
Shannon was a professor of English, a Rhodes Scholar, and a scholar of Victorian literature with a life-long interest in the literary career and letters of Tennyson. He published numerous articles, reviews, and books on the poet, including “Tennyson and the Reviewers, 1827-1851” and “The Letters of Alfred Lord Tennyson,” a three-volume work which he co-authored with professor Cecil Y. Lang, also of the University of Virginia.
In 1961 — two years into Shannon’s tenure as president of the University of Virginia — the Alumni Association acquired the Tennyson Collection of the late Charles Templeton Crocker as a mark of their support of President Shannon and their recognition of his prominent position in Tennysonian scholarship.
“The Gift: Edgar Finley Shannon, Jr. — Celebrated Scholar of Alfred, Lord Tennyson” is on view through July 5, 2025, in the Flowerdew Hundred Gallery of the Small Special Collections Library.
“Life, Liberté, and the Pursuit of Lafayette: Our French Hero's Final Tour of America”
In celebration of the bicentennial of the Marquis de Lafayette’s 1824-1825 farewell tour of America, “Life, Liberté, and the Pursuit of Lafayette” is a retrospective to commemorate Lafayette’s revolutionary influence, his friendship with Thomas Jefferson, and the legacy of his final visit to Central Virginia.
Created in in coordination with the American Friends of Lafayette, “Life, Liberté, and the Pursuit of Lafayette” is now open through March 8, 2025, in the First Floor Gallery of the Small Special Collections Library.
Coming soon
In mid-March in the First Floor Gallery, we’ll open an exhibition on the University's early observatories — an exploration of Jefferson’s unrealized plans as well as the several structures built (then demolished) that preceded the McCormick Observatory. In the fall, we’ll partner with the Virginia Quarterly Review to celebrate the centennial of the founding of the VQR, one of the most esteemed literary journals in the country.
We’ll welcome a new University Librarian to our community with our next major exhibition, “The ABCs of the UVA Library,” opening in mid-September 2025. “The ABCs of the UVA Library” will showcase the Library’s rich and assorted collections and will be curated by the Library staff who make those materials discoverable and accessible. The exhibition will extend beyond the galleries of the Small Special Collections Library to every Library location. Topics to be featured include P for pandemic books, S for sea monsters and Z for zines.