Spirits of the Forest: A&S Students Bring Global Art to UVA

By Lorenzo Perez and Evan Kutsko

The idea for the art exhibition first occurred to professor Lise Dobrin in December 2024, after she received an email message from a French anthropologist in Papua New Guinea.  

Dobrin met Nicolas Garnier, who has lived and worked in the Pacific island nation for over 30 years, during her research trips there. Now Garnier was emailing Dobrin to let her know about a collection of drawings that his villager friends were making. Something special was going on, Dobrin recalled Garnier writing, and he wanted her help sharing these vividly drawn scrolls of artwork with the world. 

Months of collaboration between Garnier and Dobrin, associate chair of the University of Virginia’s Department of Anthropology, culminated in an exhibition of the collected artwork, curated by the students in Dobrin’s fall 2024 “Curating Culture” seminar, that debuted on Feb. 6. 

Titled “Spirits of the Forest,” the exhibition’s debut drew more than 100 people to Grounds to see the collection of drawings from Papua New Guinea stretched across the walls of Brooks Hall Commons.  

The exhibition was supported by the Institute of the Humanities & Global Cultures’ Collaborative Curation Lab, a Faculty Research Grant for the Arts and assistant professor of art history Henry Skerritt, who serves as the curator of research for UVA’s Kluge-Ruhe Aboriginal Art Collection. 

In her remarks at the opening, Dobrin credited the 15 students in her “Curating Culture” course for bringing the exhibition to life. Their work started last fall with a collection of carefully rolled-up scrolls that arrived at UVA in the hand luggage that Garnier brought for an academic residency that Dobrin arranged. 

“I know this was a huge, huge lift,” Dobrin said to her students at the exhibition’s opening. “I hope you’ve learned a lot and feel proud of what you’ve accomplished.” 

For the art pieces, Garnier invited the villagers to draw their experience of walking through the forest as a way of expressing what their lands mean to them. The villagers used contemporary media — ballpoints pens, glue, acrylic paint, even coffee— as they worked alongside each other on long scrolls of ordinary paper, and the resulting artwork conveys a sense that the forests they depict are, in the words of the exhibition’s interpretive text, both “animate” and “volatile.”  

For student Liv Galbreath, being entrusted to mount the exhibition added to the learning experience. 

“I think that it helped us to get a lot more out of the class,” said Galbreath, a fourth-year majoring in anthropology and creative writing. “It forced us to spend a lot of time with the artwork. We had to be really creative with how we mounted it, especially on a lower budget. We didn't have the traditional materials that an art museum would have, so we had to keep in mind the integrity of the artwork and its format as long pieces of multiple pages of paper. Being involved in that part of it was a creative challenge that allowed us to appreciate the artwork that much more.” 

Many of the works are longer than the walls available in Brooks Hall Commons to display them, so some of them remain partly rolled up. 

For most of Dobrin’s students, who continued working on the project last month, well after the conclusion of the fall seminar, this was their first experience mounting an art exhibition. Second-year student Riley-Paige Belisle said they learned from  Dobrin’s class about the concept of “slow curation.”  

“Slow curation is learning before doing, soaking up as much information about the artists and their values as you can before going to curate their work through a cultural and ethnographic lens,” she said. “This idea of ‘learning before doing’ didn’t just guide our collective approach, it also reshaped how I thought about curatorial responsibility and intent. For me, working on this exhibition revealed the strong relationship between museums and disseminating knowledge to the public.” 

First-year Owen White said he was nervous at first about taking Dobrin’s upper-level anthropology seminar, but he found its “hands-on” approach very satisfying.  

“As a seminar class, it gives you the full experience,” White said.  “We were putting things up, meeting outside of class, in class... meeting with experts in the field. We got to learn how to actually do something, not just learn about people who did something.” 

The “Spirits of the Forest: Contemporary Art from Papua New Guinea” exhibition is open to the public and is available for viewing in Brooks Hall Common through May 17, 9 a.m. to 5 p.m.