Sara Shallenberger Brown Events + Programs
The fund supports a broad array of activities including research roundtables, symposia, lectures, funded seminars and design studios, publications, graduate fellowships and events. The Sara Shallenberger Brown Cultural Landscapes and Site Initiative Endowment strives to catalyze new intellectual and creative communities across UVA Grounds and UVA generations, linking students, faculty and expert professionals to disseminate the work of the UVA community to the broader public and to propel UVA as a global leader in cultural landscape theory, scholarship and practice.
The Sara Shallenberger Cultural Landscape and Sites Initiative funds symposia, lectures, panels and workshops focused on critical and contested issues in cultural landscape scholarship and practice.
TOWARDS A CHARLOTTESVILLE CULTURAL LANDSCAPE ATLAS COLLOQUIUM (09.13 - 9.14, 2019)
RACE AND PUBLIC SPACE: COMMEMORATIVE PRACTICES IN THE AMERICAN SOUTH (03.24 - 03.25, 2017)
ANDREA ROBERTS, Associate professor of planning, texas A & M university
Curating Freedom Making Hidden Black Publics Visible With Descendant Communities (02.15.2019)
Caitlin DeSilvey, Associate Professor of Cultural Geography at the University of Exeter
Curated Decay: Subtle Ambush or Slippery Slope? (04.10.2018)
To view upcoming CCL Research Roundtables, see our events.
digital technologies (2018-2019)
Led by CCL Co-Director Jessica Sewell (Urban + Environmental Planning) and CCL Affiliate Andrew Johnston (Director of Historical Preservation), 2018-2019's Research Roundtables Series focused on the role of digital technologies in cultural landscape studies and practices. The conversations explored digital humanities projects, atlas databases and digital approaches to historic preservation.
| October 2018 | Luke Pecoraro, Director of Archaeology, George Washington’s Mount Vernon; Matthew Reeves, Director of Archaeology and Landscape Restoration, James Madison’s Montpelier | Landscapes and Viewscapes at Mount Vernon and Montpelier |
| November 2018 | Lecturer Waitman Beorn, UVA Department of History | Visualizing the Holocaust |
| February 2019 | Associate Professor Andrea Roberts, Texas A&M University | Texas Freedom Colonies Project, Atlas and Study |
| April 2019 | Will Roark, UVa Scholar's Lab; Shayne Brandon, IATH; and Garth Anderson, Facilities Historian | Digital Scan of U-Hall |
restoration (2017-2018)
Led by CCL Affiliated Faculty Lisa Goff (American Studies + English; Director, Institute for Public History), 2017-2018's Research Roundtable Series examined the theme of restoration as a theoretical concept and a professional practice. The roundtables analyzed restorations of places, politics and cultural products, and the debates that accompany these decisions.
| September 2017 | Kat Imhoff, President & CEO, Montpelier; Elizabeth Chew, VP of Museum Programs Montpelier | Montpelier and "Mere Distinction of Color" |
| October 2017 | Keith Bowers, FASLA, Biohabitats | Restoring the Future |
| November 2017 | Professor Dana Nelson, Vanderbilt University | Making the Commons Real |
| April 2018 | Associate Professor Caitlin DeSilvey, University of Exeter | Curated Decay |
SARAH SHALLENBERGER BROWN
Sarah Shallenberger Brown (1911-2011) was a renowned philanthropist and activist for historic preservation and environmental conservation causes across all scales. She attended Sweet Briar College (Outstanding Alum, 1991) where she studied art and graduated in 1932. She resided in Louisville for over seventy-five years, where she and her husband W.L. Lyons Brown (1906-1973) raised four children.
Sarah (Sally) Brown's life-long interests in the arts as well as the conservation and curation of historic sites and natural places was accompanied by extraordinary generosity to many institutions and organizations. Sally's causes ranged from the Kentucky landscape to those of national and global import. She contributed her intellect, political support and financial backing to land acquisition in and around Louisville, to the designation of the Artic National Wildlife Refuge, and research that supported the Kyoto Protocols. Over her lifetime, she supported organizations such as the Audubon Society, the American Farmland Trust, the Nature Conservancy, Woods Hole Research Station and the World Wildlife Fund as well as the Louisville Waterfront Park planned and designed by Hargreaves and Associates in the 1980s-90s. Sally's connections to UVA were initially through her husband, a UVA alumnus. Since the 1950s, several of Sally and Lyons’ children and grandchildren have also attended the University.
The scope and reach of Sally Brown’s concerns and passions map squarely onto the aspirations of the University of Virginia School of Architecture’s cultural landscapes and sites initiatives that range from research, interpretation, preservation, planning and design of sites that are full of both history and nature, memories and living systems, contested narratives and disturbed ecosystems.
For additional information on Sally Brown, see the 2006 Kentucky Educational Television produced a program narrated by Joanne Woodward titled “Sally Brown. Force of Nature.”
CaRY BROWN EPSTEIN
Cary Brown, a University of Virginia alumnae (College 1984), is a Charlottesville artist, philanthropist, and sustainable farmer. She endowed the Sarah Shallenberger Brown Cultural Landscapes and Sites Initiative at the University of Virginia School of Architecture in 2009. Cary’s decision to honor her grandmother Sally Brown with the UVA Cultural Landscapes and Sites initiative is a fitting tribute for such a renown environmental philanthropist whose interests spanned the historic and biophysical landscape.
This endowment also resonates with Cary’s personal interests from her art practice to the management of her rural landscape. Cary has been exhibiting her paintings at Les Yeux du Monde in Charlottesville since 1995. In the 2014 show, Visions of Spring, Cary’s work depicted birds, a nod to her naturalist grandmother. She and her husband run a foundation, the Fiddlehead Fund, that supports arts that exploring environmental issues such as global warming. Recently, Cary and her cousins supported the production of a film documentary on novelist, poet and environmental activist Wendell Berry, a Kentucky native whose book, The Unsettling America. Culture and Agriculture (1977), influenced contemporary concerns for small-scale farming, local food production and food urbanism.
Cary serves as a Board member of the Audubon Society and the W.L. Lyons Brown Foundation, as well as a trustee of BOMB-Artists in Conversation Magazine. She served on the UVA Fralin Museum of Art Advisory Board from 1995-2014.