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
The Night Parade
Leech Gallery
Kayla Bauer, photography
Hoffmaster Gallery
Kayla Bauer interrogates nostalgia, kitsch, cute, and reflective memory through photographs, text, and installations. Her current research examines these ideas in connection with place through photography and the object: she documents the streets of San Francisco, CA and collects artifacts ranging from postcards to midcentury souvenirs and contemporary kitsch related to the city. This work formed the basis of her recent MFA thesis exhibition, I Left My Heart…, which 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) sculpture, 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. Works by Monty Little and others 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.
Spring 2024 Exhibitions
March 29 – May 10
Roman Coins
Leech Gallery
Classics and Art History major Rachel David ’24 curates an exhibition of ancient Roman Imperial coins from the Ottilia M. Buerger '38 Collection. Based on her capstone research, the exhibition interrogates the coins as primary examples of material culture that conveyed information about leadership, labor, and belief in the ancient world. .
Jan Serr, portraits and self-portraits
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 portraiture and self-portraiture in painting, drawing, and print mediums from different moments in her prolific career. In addition to revealing Serr’s deft touch and sensitivity in representing her sitters’ personalities, this exhibition allows viewers to observe how an individual artistic practice expands and grows over time.
Robin Jebavy, still life paintings
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.