How students navigate the barriers and doors to mental health access at the University. A picture-perfect image of a student at the University exists within the minds of other students as someone they constantly have to live up to or strive to become — a student who is double-majoring in rewarding and rigorous subjects, excelling in their classes, leading on-Grounds organizations, having fun every weekend and making it all look easy.
“At this place, on the site of Catherine Foster’s home, this ‘Shadow Catcher’ links the visible with the unseen even as it pulls the eyes to the sky; it creates a shadowy, grid-like outline of the house that once stood at this location,” reads a plaque directly outside the Shadow Catcher Memorial honoring the household of Foster, a free black woman who bought the property in 1833.
What it looks like to start a second life in Charlottesville. A security guard intently studies a scribbled-on napkin pulled from his pocket on the bus headed home. Across town, a custodian clocks into work and prepares to clean the floors of a medical school much like one he had dreamed of attending since childhood. At her kitchen table, a single mother balances a wistful pride as her son tells her the new English phrase he learned at school that day — one that she has never heard.
Families in medical crisis finding housing. Sephida Artis-Mills, a 36-year-old mother of five boys from Virginia Beach, waited for the ultrasound results 31 weeks into her pregnancy. When the doctors said there was bad news, she figured she was having another son.
Jazz Performance Director John D’earth discusses his musical career, life in Charlottesville and what jazz has to teach America.
Charlottesville’s murals illustrate a city wrestling with its identity. Charlottesville’s most popular mural could not be more straightforward: “I LOVE CHARLOTTESVILLE A LOT,” reads the wall of Fitzgerald’s Tires in Belmont. The jauntily spaced red and black letters are a pilgrimage site for residents and students alike, a focal point in a town that loves art and loves itself.
How an outdated science manifested into racism and discrimination the University still contends with. As the University of Virginia marks its Bicentennial, the laying of its cornerstone will be celebrated by old and new Hoos alike. The University’s history is long and rich, as is with any any premier institution of learning almost as old as the United States itself.
