The University of Virginia Art Museum celebrates the opening of a new exhibit, "The Museum: Conditions and Spaces" — which invites visitors to progress through its galleries in the same fashion that one walks around sacred spaces, offering both a visual and physical experience.

The exhibit of works from the museum’s collection puts theory into practice and offers a new way to look at art based on the museum’s collections handbook, "The Museum: Conditions and Space," featuring more than 100 major works in the collection, accompanied by entries by curators, faculty, graduate students and other art historians. Edited by Andrea Douglas, U.Va. Art Museum curator of collections and exhibitions, the catalog takes as its inspiration the new book, "Real Spaces: World Art History and the Rise of Western Modernism," by David Summers, William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of the History of Art, U.Va. McIntire Department of Art.

The exhibit, a collaboration between Douglas and Summers, tests the theories Summers sets out in his book. Divided into two parts — "Museum, Conditions, Places, and Spaces" and "The Art of the Modern Western Subject" — the exhibit is designed in a way that invites visitors to progress through the gallery space in the same fashion that one walks around sacred spaces, offering both a visual and physical experience. As with the collections catalog, the exhibit places works in the context of the human conditions of art production across cultural borders, emphasizing similarities in purpose.

Summers will give a Gallery Talk on two successive Sundays, Oct. 3 and Oct. 10, at 2 p.m. in the museum.