A rendering by architect Burt Pinnock depicts the reconstructed Skipwith-Roper house (right), part of The JXN Project’s Jackson Ward education and interpretive center.
Richmond’s cultural landscape is evolving. Coming to the city in the near future is a fine arts museum along Arthur Ashe Boulevard bursting to grow and providing a prominent stage for ballet. The displaced home of a Revolutionary War-era Black man is receiving a historic Jackson Ward homecoming, interpreting his legacy within the split-in-two community in which he resided in an unprecedented way. And a vast space along Main Street is soon to become a significant portal through which visitors can gain a larger picture of Richmond’s role in the domestic slave trade and the effect of the “peculiar institution,” not only here, but throughout the world.
Prepare for experience.
Expansion and Contraction
After four previous expansions, in fall 2024 the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts announced its largest development to date: the 173,000-square-foot McGlothlin Wing II. Originally scheduled for a late 2025 groundbreaking and a 2028 completion, those plans may alter due to constructional concerns raised by the commonwealth’s Art and Architectural Review Board. With the consideration of 3,500 surveyed patrons taken into account and $261 million approved by the General Assembly for the state-supported institution, the SmithGroup was enlisted to design the south-and-west facing addition. The momentum slowed in December 2024 due to a 3-1 negative vote (with two abstentions) by the AARB.
Concerns raised by the board included size and the visual impact it may have for the corner of Grove Avenue and Arthur Ashe Boulevard. The design incorporates a vertically striated surface “that plays with natural light, changing throughout the day and across time,” SmithGroup’s lead designer Dayton Schroeter said in a press release. “It recalls the past while reflecting our present and anticipating our future.”
The challenges faced include limiting expansion into the E. Claiborne and Lora Robins Sculpture Garden and a water table that restricts underground depth. The VMFA, sent back to the drawing board, as of press time needs to meet again with the AARB. The final green light depends on the decision of the director of Virginia's Department of General Services.
The museum’s director and CEO Alex Nyerges, quoted in Richmond BizSense, stated, “We’re going to build the building. We’ll do what we have to do and we’ll keep moving.”
The project is, in fact, already in motion, involving the renewal of 45,000 square feet of existing space to allow for important additional exhibitions of photography, works on paper and conservation.
The VMFA's Leslie Cheek Theater is nearing completion of renovations made possible by $5.3 million in private funds for use by the Richmond Ballet as its main stage. These elements are well on their way and the ballet is slated to open at the Cheek in March.
Nyerges in a written statement described this renewal as the Cheek’s first major upfit in 70 years. The work aims to enhance the flexibility of events that can be held there while improving the theater experience for audiences and performers.
The proposed expansion will double the VMFA’s size and provide more gallery space for the museum’s permanent collection, including African and contemporary American art. Plans for the McGlothin Wing II also include a special events space to seat 500 people, meeting rooms, a cafe and a bar. Nyerges added in the statement, “A second special exhibition gallery suite of 12,000 square feet will mean the museum will always have a special exhibition on view.”
The original Skipwith-Roper house in the neighborhood that would become Jackson Ward
Small House, Big Story
Through its “Skipwith-Roper Homecoming” program, The JXN Project is interpreting the legacy of Abraham Peyton Skipwith, who, after building his house in 1793, became Jackson Ward’s first known Black homeowner. Alongside this effort, the Library of Virginia on July 15, 2025, will publicly open an exhibition titled, “Abraham Peyton Skipwith: From House to Highway,” detailing the Skipwith legacy and the rupture caused in Jackson Ward by the 1950s construction of the tolled “Richmond-Petersburg Turnpike” section of Interstate 95.
The LVA, backed by a $282,975 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities and in partnership with The JXN Project, is curating the exhibit. A traveling version will visit public libraries, small museums, community centers and other sites throughout Virginia. Further, through Virginia Public Media, a documentary about the “Homecoming” project is being directed by award-winning filmmaker Stacey L. Holman.
The “House to Highway” exhibition forms an unprecedented examination of Jackson Ward using a timeline of more than 250 years (1767-2026), as told through a combination of records, maps and photographs from the LVA’s collection.
“Of great significance is [Skipwith’s] 1785 petition for freedom,” explains Sarah Falls, the library’s director of public services and outreach. “Further records will tell the story of Skipwith, his descendants, the history of the house, and of the Jackson Ward district. In particular, our significant holdings of the Richmond-Petersburg Turnpike Authority Records from 1955 to 1958 tell the story of the highway, the splitting of the neighborhood and the removal of the Skipwith-Roper house.”
The exhibition appropriately fits into the 250th anniversary of the drafting of the Declaration of Independence.
Skipwith, while enslaved in Williamsburg, is first recorded in 1767. He filed a 1785 legislative petition for his freedom but ultimately purchased freedom for himself around 1789 and later manumitted his wife and family members.
In 1793, Skipwith purchased parcels of land on the northern edge of Richmond. He was one of the first known Black Richmonders with a fully executed bequest, and his 1799 will conveyed the cottage and his possessions — including a gun, gold brooch, silver watch, livestock, and horse and buggy — to his descendants, as he put it, “to them and their heirs forever.”
Maria, a Skipwith granddaughter, married Peter Roper, and the family retained ownership until 1905. Renowned architectural historian Maria Wingfield Scott noted in her classic, “Houses of Old Richmond,” that the descendants of Skipwith maintained “a longer tenure in one family than almost any in the history of Richmond.”
The cottage was among the residences that through 1871 gerrymandering ultimately became Jackson Ward. The boundaries were drawn to deliberately suppress the Black vote. Enforced segregation created a close-knit community and birthed important civic and commercial enterprises.
Then came the Richmond-Petersburg Turnpike.
Two separate public referendums failed to stave off its slicing through Jackson Ward. This section of I-95, tolled at the time, swept off schools and businesses and displaced 1,000 families.
The assumption, until recently, was that the highway’s trench took away that piece of Duval Street and the Skipwith-Roper house with it.
Enter The JXN Project, founded by Sesha Joi Moon, who was appointed the Chief Diversity Officer within the U.S. House of Representatives for the 117th and 118th Congresses, and her sister Enjoli Moon, founder and creative director of the Afrikana Independent Film Festival.
The research undertaken by The JXN Project, in cooperation with the Richmond Times-Dispatch’s Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist Michael Paul Williams, led to the discovery that the Skipwith-Roper cottage was uprooted and moved for $25 to the Sabot Hill estate in Goochland County.
A 1959 Richmond Times-Dispatch article about the cottage recounted, “The house was photographed, carefully inventoried, moved, rebuilt and painted pink. It now stands on a rise of ground to the right of Sabot, with a street sign saying ‘Duval Street,’ pointing the way.”
Successive families remodeled the cottage into a weekend playhouse. Sesha Joi Moon says that a Department of Historic Resources inspection determined that only the stairs remained of the original structure.
In September 2024, The JXN Project, joined by city officials, broke ground on the Skipwith-Roper house and education center.
The JXN Project and Moon determined then to honor the Skipwith-Roper legacy and reconstruct the cottage at 303 E. Bates St. as the centerpiece of a Jackson Ward education and interpretive center. The JXN Project received a gift of approximately 0.275 acres of land from the Richmond Redevelopment & Housing Authority and Maggie Walker Community Land Trust.
The total cost for the project is $5.68 million and comes from a variety of public and private sources. Architect Burt Pinnock, the designer of “Hearth: Memorial to the Enslaved” at the College of William & Mary, is partnering with the Richmond Habitat for Humanity and Team Henry Enterprises in the phased construction.
The reconstructed Skipwith-Roper cottage is anticipated to open during Jackson Ward’s anniversary week in April 2026.
For more information, visit thejxnproject.org.
A Change at the Station
“You can walk it,” Marland Buckner, president and CEO of the nonprofit Shockoe Institute, says of Richmond. “I frequently visit New York and Philadelphia, and unlike those two cities, in Richmond it’s all there: the Capitol, Tredegar, St. John’s Church, the African Burial Grounds, all practically within sight of each other. In that respect, there’s no place else in the country like Richmond. It is the best place to tell this story.”
Shockoe Institute’s mission is to educate and amplify public understanding of the American slave trade and its lasting effect on today’s society. With that goal in mind, the organization is planning to open its first phase at Main Street Station toward the end of 2025, serving as a place to exchange ideas in the same building that functions as a hub. The landmark Beaux Arts structure stands in the middle of what was the center of the domestic slave trade.
With an $11 million grant from the Mellon Foundation, the institute secured for 10 years 12,300 square feet on the north end of Main Street Station’s first floor. “This isn’t a pop-up,” Buckner notes. Nor is it a museum. The institute isn’t collecting, but presenting and invoking. What will be done there, Buckner believes, will be transformative for understanding Richmond’s central role in one of the most fraught aspects of the nation’s history, one that spans from the first collision of European and native cultures to the systemic operations of slavery. The institute will tell the history of not only how the domestic slave trade became a primary industry in the city, but its connection to the Northeast and worldwide consequences.
“Visitors are going to learn about the complex financial system that attended these developments, the ways in which Black people worked to resist these developments, and the ways in which all of this constitutes our shared history,” Buckner says. “It’s essential to our mission that people understand this isn’t about white history and not Black history but a shared history, a Richmond history, an American history — it’s all of ours.”
To develop the experience, the institute engaged Local Projects, the world-class exhibition design firm that created New York City’s 9/11 Memorial and Greenwood Rising, commemorating the 1921 Tulsa, Oklahoma, race massacre. Plans for the Main Street Station center include not only text and picture materials, but also a mashup of book talks, music, and dramatic performances and presentations within the exhibition’s environment. During normal hours, the institute will be open to the public.
Buckner concedes that, given the subject matter, it may sound odd, but he wants to plant the flag of moral optimism. The institute makes the public commitment to intellectual rigor and discipline.
“We can use the historical record to demonstrate where accountability lies,” Buckner says, “but we can do those things and also be generous in our welcome and open in our invitation. We must maintain the optimism that if we do the first thing right, we can keep people here long enough to help more folks turn a corner in their understanding.”
For more information, visit theshockoeproject.com.
