Spring 2024 Exhibitions
March 29 – May 10
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.
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.
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.
2024 Senior Art Show
May 24 – June 15
Leech, Hoffmaster, and Kohler Galleries
The annual exhibition of artwork by Lawrence University’s senior studio art majors.
Fall 2023 Exhibitions
September 22 - November 17
Maria Martinez Ceramics
Leech Gallery
This exhibition features LU’s collection of blackware ceramics created by Maria Martinez (San Ildefonso Pueblo, born Maria Poveka Montoya, 1887-1980), her husband Julian, her son Popovi Da, and other family members. Drawing on traditional Pueblo pottery forms and techniques, Martinez revitalized the black-on-black decorative style created by pit firing and burnishing the pots with stones. The result was strikingly modern-looking vessels rooted in indigenous method from the 17th century.
Jorge Ariel Escobar, I Think We Could've Been Something
Hoffmaster Gallery
Jorge Ariel Escobar explores ephemeral but beautiful moments of queer intimacy created through short-term romances. I Think We Could've Been Something considers hookup culture within the LGBTQ+ community with a specific focus on the queer man experience, including use of dating apps like Grindr, which Escobar deploys as a tool to seek out subjects for the series. The intimate scenes in the staged portrait photographs are captured in domestic spaces and then printed as silver gelatin lumen prints, producing the pink colors on the print’s surface. The dreamy color palette suggests a rose-tinted lens, further idealizing these short-term romances that "could've been something.”
Mapping Climate Change
Kohler Gallery
On loan from the Berman Museum of Art at Ursinus College, Mapping Climate Change features two innovative textile art projects that give visual and tangible presence to our warming world at a crucial moment of environmental precariousness: The Knitting Map (2005-23) and The Tempestry Project (2017-present).
In this exhibition, textile becomes the medium through which climate data is translated, but also inevitably interpreted through the personal calligraphy of makers’ stitches. The process of handknitting and the resultant textiles thus map the motions of makers’ hands, as much as they transmit data relating to climate and locale. These projects integrate science and art, technology and handwork, and authorship and collaboration to visualize a developing public consciousness of environmental justice issues.
Winter 2024 Exhibitions
January 12 – March 8
Cori Nakamura Lin, The Night Parade
Leech Gallery
What is an identity, but a story of self? As an artist with cultural ties to multiple empires, I am unwinding the mythologies of United States and Japanese nationalism that I’ve been taught, and am weaving new stories to tell about myself and my people. In the diaspora, I both yearn towards the past, longing for a stronger connection to my ancestors, and towards the future, desperately envisioning a future where me and my communities are rooted deeply enough in order to withstand the coming climate hardship. In this tension between past and future, I paint yōkai, the strange spirit creatures of Japanese myth.
Yōkai are not exactly ghost, or monster, or spirit, but a wide umbrella category holding all of these and more. I am drawn to these creatures' tendency to inhabit in between space, and I paint them to help me release rage, evoke cycles, channel joy, and remember what’s been lost.
These paintings were originally commissioned as a set of 16 chapter headers for my sister Jami Nakamura Lin’s debut memoir The Night Parade (2023), published by Mariner HarperCollins. My goal in illustrating The Night Parade was to depict yōkai that had escaped the idealized, frozen concept of ancient Japan, and had re-rooted in the complexities of my second-and-fourth-generation Taiwanese, Japanese, and Okinawan American experience. Cori Nakamura Lin - Artist Statement
Kayla Bauer, The End of Somewhere
Hoffmaster Gallery
The End of Somewhere uses San Francisco as a vehicle to explore multiplicities of identity, memory, and history; Kayla Bauer works with photography, text, and found imagery to create fragmentary narratives that may or may not be rooted in reality. Bauer is currently completing a Ph.D at UW-Madison and her MFA thesis exhibition, I Left My Heart…, was awarded the 2022 Russell and Paula Panczenko Prize.
Organic / Inorganic
Kohler Gallery
An exhibition of sculptural works curated around Senga Nengudi’s multi-part A.C.Q. (Air Conditioning Queen), on loan from the Art Bridges Foundation. A.C.Q. is a mixed-media installation, composed of found metal refrigerator parts and donated second-hand nylon pantyhose. This juxtaposition of the rigid-industrial-abstract and the elastic-intimate-human give us a means to think through ideas about gender and resilience. Sculpture and installation pieces by Monty Little, Anna Campbell, and Callie Kiesow present similarly startling juxtapositions, with isolated elements of the human body paired with and disrupted by pattern and abstraction; they also offer expansive ways of thinking about how these formal cues signal larger ideas about identity and survival.