Sally Hemings became Thomas Jefferson’s property when she was a toddler and he was a newlywed. Fourteen years later, she would be in Paris, pregnant with his child, and free under French law. Sally Hemings exercised the full extent of her limited agency to craft a legacy of liberation for her descendants. Her son Madison wrote that his mother negotiated “extraordinary privileges” in exchange for returning to Virginia slavery. Taking Hemings’ role as an enslaved seamstress seriously, Sally Hemings University Connecting Threads interrogates the ways in which aesthetic practices (art, craft gestures) can operate within and alongside liberatory strategies.

The Sally Hemings University Connecting Threads exhibition encapsulates the semester-long work of the students of Sally Hemings’ University, a higher-level English course offered at the University of Virginia that interrogates how aesthetic practices can operate within and alongside liberatory strategies. The course is taught by Dr. Lisa Woolfork who is an artist and English professor at UVA and Tobiah Mundt, a local fiber artist and founding member of the Charlottesville Black Artist Collective. SHUCT artists have read several works by phenomenal scholars and artists such as Audre Lorde’s The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House, Kevin Quashie’s Black Aliveness, and Jocelyn Johnson’s My Monticello.