Event brings museums together, honors women heroes

Emily McCauley, Spectrum Editor

The Third Annual Intersecting Museum Crawl and Community Conversation brings six Richmond museums together around one theme: “Yes She Can!,” which honors women heroes throughout history. The event hopes to engage residents in conversations about history, memory, healing and justice, according to the Initiatives of Change United States website, which produced the event. 

The event’s community conversation is open to the public and will occur on Jan. 25 at 6 p.m. at the Virginia Museum of History and Culture. The community conversation includes a panel of women leaders and a discussion revolving around women within the arts, culture and the modern-day freedom movement, according to the IofC website.  

The free-of-charge Museum Crawl will occur on Jan. 28 and includes the American Civil War Museum, the Branch Museum of Architecture and Design, the Virginia Holocaust Museum, The Valentine, the Virginia Museum of History and Culture and the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, according to the IofC website. 

“We like to do the Museum Crawl so we can go into each of the museums and we can promote a lot of different pieces of these museums for the good of the overall community,” said Samuel Asher, the executive director at the Virginia Holocaust Museum.

A wall of women will be featured in an exhibition at the Virginia Holocaust Museum, according to Asher. Many of these women risked everything to save Jewish people during the Holocaust. 

“We talk about upstanders, bystanders and people who unfortunately did the work of the Nazis who were collaborators — and the upstanders took lives in their hands — took their own lives in their hands to stand up, but they did,” Asher said. 

Asher hopes that the event shows participants how brave people can be and how we all have to stand up and help each other, he said. 

The exhibition at the Branch speaks to the crawl’s theme “Yes She Can!,” with an international poster show about the fight for women’s rights, or human rights, according to Lucy Northup, marketing director for the Branch Museum of Architecture and Design.

“It is about 70 to 80 posters that are from around the world — this is where intersectionality really comes in — the posters come from all different cultures,” Northup said. “It’s kind of like screenshots within the movement in different places.”

The Branch will also have a documentary screening occurring throughout the day titled “Some American Feminists” about the women’s movement in America, specifically New York City, in the 1960s and 1970s, according to Northup. 

“I hope people come out of this with a better understanding of how other peoples’ experiences may be different but we all have that common line that goes between us,” Northup said. 

The Branch aims to spark conversation on more modern topics in society, Northup said. 

“The Branch is really about taking history — being in this historic house — and breathing new life into it and thinking about more modern things like design and how that affects us,” Northup said.

The Valentine will have four exhibitions on display during the Museum Crawl exploring the theme “Yes She Can!,” according to Christina Vida, Elise H. Wright curator of general collections at the Valentine. 

The Valentine has many exhibitions honoring Richmond women over the centuries and sharing their stories, one of the main exhibitions being “This is Richmond, Virginia,” according to Vida.

The exhibitions feature individuals such as Eleanor Parker Sheppard, Richmond’s first woman mayor; Maggie Walker, civil rights leader and bank president in Richmond; and Betsy Christian, who was enslaved by the Wickham family at Hickory Hill estate in Ashland, according to Vida. 

The Valentine will also host an exhibition downstairs in the museum titled “An Unfinished Museum,” which is a history of the Valentine Museum over the past 125 years, according to Vida. 

“Of course, so many women had such major influences on the Valentine Museum, but in particular, we wanted to call out the work of Laura Bragg, who was our first woman director, and she took over the museum between 1928 and 1930,” Vida said. 

Laura Bragg was a forward-thinking woman director and she once said in a letter between her and the chairman of the board at the time, Granville Valentine, “A finished museum is a dead one. There will always be work left to do,” according to Vida. This has become the Valentine museum’s motto since Vida joined the team in 2019. 

“We are always evolving, histories are always changing, we are always learning something, always growing and trying to better ourselves,” Vida said. 

The Valentine will also host conversations in the studio during the crawl with the key question, “How does a false narrative become an accepted truth?,” according to Vida. 

Vida hopes that visitors will leave with a new understanding or a different perspective of their current lives, thinking about the current Richmond community and how they can use their powers to help sculpt a better future, according to Vida. 

Sign up for the Museum Crawl through the Initiatives of Change’s website.