The Spring Exhibitions are open March 29 - May 10.

Join us on Friday, April 19 for an artist talk and reception with Robin Jebavy


 

Spring 2024 Exhibitions

March 29 – May 10

Both sides of a gold Roman coin; the bust of Emperor Nerva facing right on one side, vessels and staffs with the words CONSUL III PATER PATRIAE on the other
Gold Aureus of Nerva, 97 CE, 91.156, Ottilia M. Buerger ’38 Collection of Ancient and Byzantine Coins

Prosperity and Power: The Coins of the Five Good Emperors

Leech Gallery

The “Five Good Emperors” - Nerva, Trajan, Hadrian, Antoninus Pius, and Marcus Aurelius - ruled during the second century of the Roman Empire, known as the Pax Romana due to the relative stability and lack of external threats. One of the emperor’s many powers was control over currency, and Rome’s coins changed every year. Designed to highlight imperial power and reinforce messages of peace and stability, high value coins were one of the ways that the emperors maintained centralized power and communicated ideas over such a vast empire. Art History major Rachel David ’24 curated this exhibition of ancient Roman Imperial coins from the Ottilia M. Buerger '38 Collection. Building on her capstone research, the exhibition interrogates the coins as primary examples of material culture that conveyed information about leadership in the ancient world.  

Portrait of a woman in blue shirt and long dark ponytail looking down and over her shoulder on the diagonal
Jan Serr, Self Portrait Looking over shoulder with diagonal, 1966, oil on canvas, on loan from the artist and the Warehouse Art Museum

Jan Serr: Face It

Hoffmaster Gallery

Milwaukee-based artist Jan Serr repeatedly returns to the human figure in her work. This exhibition explores her substantial body of work in self-portraiture in painting, drawing, and print mediums from different moments in her prolific career. In addition to demonstrating Serr’s deft touch and command of visual forms, the self-portraits reveal her ability to convey multiple aspects of her own personality and a wide range of emotional responses.

Collage of glassware
Robin Jebavy, Plate with Wreath (Starry Night), detail, acrylic on canvas, 84 x 80 inches, 2023-24

Robin Jebavy: Expanding Fields

Kohler Gallery

Focused on representations of light, reflection, and lustrous surface, painter Robin Jebavy experiments with glassware imagery to reference the fragile and often precarious human condition and ask questions about our intimate relationship with the external world. Through multiplication, fragmentation, repetition, and expansion of patterns, each composition moves from an initial reference of inert still life objects toward something immersive and infinite—an embroidered, animated, reverberating network of shapes and colors into which the viewer can fall and get lost. The painting process transforms a third-person viewpoint of objects into a first-person perspective of the world, expressing moments when seeing is being and the boundary between self and other is lost.