On Wednesday, Feb. 22, the museum will present a Black History Month Gallery Getaway at 11:30 am and again at 3:30 pm. Rebecca Jones, VMFA's coordinator of statewide exhibitions programming, will focus on American artist iona rozeal brown's a³ blackface #59. The event is free and open to the public.

Also on Feb. 22, poet Natasha Trethewey will read from her works at 6 pm as part of the Poetic Principles series in VMFA's Pauley Center (formerly Center for Education and Outreach).

Trethewey was born in Gulfport, Miss. Her first poetry collection, Domestic Work, won the inaugural 1999 Cave Canem poetry prize, selected by Rita Dove. The Cave Canem Prize is awarded annually for the best first collection of poems by an African-American poet.

She also won a 2001 Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Book Prize and the 2001 Lillian Smith Award for Poetry. Her second collection, Bellocq's Ophelia, received the 2003 Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Book Prize and was named a 2003 Notable Book by the American Library Association. She was a recipient of a 2003 Guggenheim Fellowship.