Past Exhibitions at Picker Gallery

Please use the links below to navigate the Picker Art Gallery’s past exhibitions.

2024 | 2023 | 2022 | 2021 | 2020 |2019 | 2018 | 2017 | 2016 | 2015 | 2014

March 21–May 19, 2024

Core / Collections: Let's Talk About It

This exhibition wants visitors to have conversations with works of art. It encourages asking questions, getting to know an artwork deeply, bringing others into the conversation, and perhaps learning a little more about oneself. Featuring a selection of recent acquisitions that highlight Picker Art Gallery’s current collecting strategy, the exhibition models itself on Colgate’s revised Core curriculum by creating a space for open-ended inquiry, multiple ways of knowing, and generative dialogue. The artworks on display present diverse creative perspectives on historical and contemporary issues, ranging from resistance to state authority to the challenges of modernity to addressing environmental crisis. What will you add to the conversation?

Curated by Emma Barrison ’24, Cindy Chen ’24 and Wendy Wu ’25.

September 21, 2023–March 3, 2024

Tales of Terra: A Lee Brown Coye Retrospective

Grotesque. Macabre. Horrific. These are words frequently used to describe artworks by Central New York artist Lee Brown Coye (1907–1981), recognized mostly for his unsettling illustrations in horror anthologies and pulp magazines. His creations for popular pulps such as Weird Tales and stories by the likes of H. P. Lovecraft, Ray Bradbury, and Manly Wade Wellman earned him a place in American illustration history as the ghoulish face of the “weird fiction” subgenre. Coye’s uninhibited depictions of the macabre would go on to inspire future masters of horror, magical realism, and science fiction.

But Coye was far more than an illustrator. He was a prolific self-taught artist who worked in many mediums, including drawing, painting, sculpture, and silversmithing. Coye drew on his love for stories, history, and the buildings and landscapes around his home to produce thousands of lyrical, comical, mysterious, and haunting scenes and characters. Featuring examples from Picker Art Gallery’s vast collection of artwork by Coye, along with loans from other regional museums and private collections, Tales of Terra brings into focus the less gruesome side of Coye’s artistic output and puts these works in dialogue with his published illustrations. This retrospective exhibition includes artworks that span Coye’s lifetime, examining his regionalist roots, his fascination with architecture, and his relationship to the places he lived, all of which found a place in his unique takes on the grotesque.

September 13, 2023–November 12, 2023
Clifford Gallery, Little Hall

This exhibition features a newly-commissioned mural alongside a selection of comic-inspired prints and digital animations by multimedia artist Chitra Ganesh (b. 1975). Images of monumental, hybrid female bodies that exceed the boundaries of accepted ideas of femininity are placed alongside Ganesh’s imaginative visual interpretation of Sultana’s Dream, a visionary story of a feminist utopia written by Bengali author Rokeya Sahkawat Hossain in 1905. The Scorpion Gesture, a suite of five digital animations, relates Buddhist cosmology and teachings to present social concerns. In her vibrant, otherworldly works, Ganesh combines the visual languages of contemporary popular culture, especially science fiction and mass-produced Indian comics, with traditional Hindu and Buddhist mythologies to collapse the past, present, and future, presenting time as cyclical and parallel trajectories rather than linear. Drawing from her extensive studies in social theory, semiotics, literature, and science fiction, Ganesh envisions narratives of the future that center female protagonists and queer relationships.

Ganesh is currently based in Brooklyn. She holds an MFA in Visual Arts from Columbia University and a BA in Art-Semiotics and Comparative Literature from Brown University. Her work has been widely exhibited nationally and internationally, including in solo shows at MoMA PS1, the Brooklyn Museum, Gothenburg Kunsthalle, Sweden, and Frieze London as well as group shows at the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Walker Art Center, the Bronx Museum, and the Kochi- Muzuris Biennial, India. Museums that have acquired her works include the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Kiran Nadar Museum in Delhi. Ganesh has been invited to numerous residency and fellowship programs, including those at Princeton University, the Rhode Island School of Design, Yale Law School, and New York University. She is represented by Gallery Wendi Norris and Hales London and New York.

February 24–May 21, 2023

gestalt [ɡəˈSHtält] n. something that is made of many parts and yet is somehow more than or different from the combination of its parts.

This exhibition examines how perception and the observation of individual parts contribute to our understanding of our whole identities, communities, social groups, and the shapes in the world around us. The exhibition features photographs and prints by artists who explore time, space, gender, and cultural identity to convey ideas of physical, psychological, and social fragmentation. Curated by MUSE 300: Museum Studies students.

September 22, 2022–May 21, 2023

Philadelphia-area artist William Earle Williams (b.1950) uses his camera to expose the obscured histories of chattel slavery in the US and transform how everyday places are understood and experienced. His most recent body of work examines this history within a global context and how the development, growth, and malevolent persistence of slavery intersects within Great Britain, the US, and the British West Indies.

A Wicked Commerce presents Williams’s examination of the transatlantic slave trade in forty- three photographs, many exhibited for the first time. Featuring sites in British port cities, Caribbean islands, and the US—south and north—these pictures reveal the infrastructures that fueled the triangular trade and positioned Britain and the US as industrial powers, simultaneously creating an institution that damaged innumerable lives and continues to persist in their physical and social landscapes.

The exhibition is accompanied by a Picker Laboratory for Academic Engagement (PLAE) Space installation, presenting research into lesser known local stories of this history and additional photographs from Williams’s Underground Railroad series.

William Earle Williams is the Audrey A. and John L. Dusseau Professor in the Humanities, Professor of Fine Arts, and Curator of Photography at Haverford College in Haverford, Pennsylvania. His photographs have been widely exhibited, including group and solo exhibitions at the Cleveland Museum of Art, the George Eastman Museum, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, the National Gallery of Art, Smith College, and the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University. His work is represented in many public collections, including the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Cleveland Museum of Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and the National Gallery of Art. Williams has received individual artist fellowships from the Pew Fellowships in the Arts, the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.

October 13, 2022–May 21, 2023

This exhibition presents seven large-scale photographs from Brooklyn photographer Nona Faustine’s acclaimed White Shoes series, a personal, provocative, and unflinching examination of the largely overlooked history of slavery in New York City.

Over the last decade, Faustine has traced places around New York’s five boroughs where enslaved Africans were bought and sold, lived and died, and were buried. Through self-portraiture, Faustine powerfully inserts her own body into these sites, standing in as a monument to the lives of New York’s Black and Indigenous populations and to the largely obscured and unacknowledged history of displacement and human trafficking that built the city.

Nona Faustine is a native New Yorker, award-winning photographer, and public speaker. Her work focuses on history, identity, and representation, evoking a critical and emotional understanding of the past. Faustine's photographs have been exhibited both nationally and internationally, and have been collected by the Studio Museum of Harlem, Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh, and the Brooklyn Museum. In 2021 Faustine’s photographs were acquired by the North Dakota Museum of Art in Grand Forks, the Frederick R. Weisman Art Museum at the University of Minnesota, the Rose Museum at Brandeis University, the Minneapolis Institute of Art, Baltimore Museum of Art, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and the Lumber Room in Portland, Oregon. In 2022 her work was acquired by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Her much acclaimed White Shoes series was recently published by MACK Books.

Faustine’s work has recently been included in exhibitions nationally at the Baltimore Museum of Art and the Afro-Atlantic Histories exhibition at the National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C. She is currently debuting at the Armory Show in New York with Higher Pictures Generation and internationally at the Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg, Germany.

February 10–June 26, 2022

Living Legends: The Indigenous Art of Storytelling draws on artworks in the collection of Colgate’s Longyear Museum of Anthropology by Native artists working in a range of media. Focused on artists from the Great Lakes region of what is now the United States and Canada, the vibrant imagery of the Woodland Style pioneered by Anishinaabe artist Norval Morrisseau (Copper Thunderbird) mixes with politically charged messages incorporated into prints and photo collages. For many of the artists, stories–both ancient and contemporary–become the foundation for new forms of creative expression. The resulting artworks look inward to culture and community in celebration of Native resilience while forcefully pushing against a dominant historical narrative to address the continuing impact of colonialism on Indigenous communities. By asserting their place within the broader discourse on global contemporary art, these artists compel critical discussion and debate about how artworks made by Native peoples have been received and perceived in museum and gallery spaces.

February 10–June 26, 2022

What is lost and what is gained when form triumphs over function? In Rounds, a new installation created for Picker Art Gallery and part of the ongoing ar.ti.fact series, Cannupa Hanska Luger uses clay and absurdity to probe this question. Responding to a long history of the removal and appropriation of Indigenous cultural forms, the artist transforms devices enmeshed in contemporary militaristic and extractive American culture. In doing so, Luger negates the destructive function of such devices and offers up a world in which they have become objects of pure form.

Saturday, April 9, 10am-4pm
Community Art Workshop: Bison Bead Project
Hamilton Village Green
A collaborative art workshop led by Luger. The artworks created in this workshop will be incorporated into Luger’s current social collaborative project, the Bison Bead Project. Participants will create 1” clay beads that will later be fired, stained in ink, and strung together by Luger to create a new monumental ceramic sculptural installation.

In the US during the 1800s, bison were slaughtered to near extinction by settlers in an attempt to eradicate a natural resource vital to Indigenous communities of the Great Plains. Today, there are approximately 20,000 plains bison managed as wildlife. Each bead will represent one bison, and the installation will shed light on the importance of wild bison conservation and how environmental destruction continues to impact Indigenous communities.

This is the third project in Luger’s Counting Coup series, which aims to utilize social collaboration to re-humanize large and abstract data through the process of creating handmade clay objects.

September 24 – December 19, 2021

Breaking down the barrier between photographer and subject, Larry Fink gives an intimate, in-the-moment look into the electrifying, bloodthirsty, vulnerable, and glory-filled world of men’s competitive boxing. Looking beyond machismo displays, Fink’s black-and-white photographs are deeply complex, highlighting the tender homosocial interactions that permeate life around the ring. These bold photographs reveal how race relations and social inequality in America are on display through modern-day sanctioned violence, while simultaneously giving a glimpse into the gentle moments that constitute the world of boxing as much as the fights themselves do.

February 18 – March 23, 2021

During its 30 years of operation, Manhattan-based alternative art space, Exit Art was a place for underrepresented and outsider artists—including many minority, LGBTQ, and women artists—to come together, create, exhibit, perform, and ultimately, to advance the story of what constitutes art and who can make it. EXXIT: Prints for the 21st century presents 50 prints by artists such as Sanford Biggers, Chitra Ganesh, Catherine Opie, and Do Ho Suh who contributed to Exit Art for their benefit print portfolios. The entire collection of prints donated by Exit Art to the Picker Art Gallery after its closure in 2012 are on view for the first time. Addressing many contemporary issues surrounding race, inequity, and identity, the variety in images and themes, identities and techniques, perfectly captures the spirit of collaboration, experimentation, and inclusion that Exit Art was founded upon.

Generous support for the exhibition was provided by the Robert J. Gerberg ’59, P’85 Endowment for the Visual Arts.

January 30, 2020 – March 14, 2021

The exhibition Works in Progress: Original Materials from the Netherlands opened at the Picker Art Gallery on January 30, 2020. As a response to the global COVID-19 pandemic, the Picker closed its doors to the public on March 14, 2020. This digital resource was created to provide continued access to the main themes presented in the exhibition. Viewers are invited to follow our investigation of the works’ original significance and centuries-long journey before coming to the Picker by looking closely at the objects themselves, as well as their recorded traces in archives and literature. Research remains a work in progress and the website—which will be updated through June 30, 2020 to share new insights with the public—considers both the potential and the limitations of art historical, archival, and object-based methods to shed light on all that remains unknown about museum collections.

Digital Exhibition: worksinprogressexhibition.com

January 30, 2020 – March 14, 2021

Digital Exhibition: worksinprogressexhibition.com

January 15 – November 29, 2020

The Picker Art Gallery continues its in-depth look at the past, present, and future of the art collections at the Picker Art Gallery in Original Materials II: The Picker Art Gallery and the Building of a Collection. Drawing from the museum’s holdings, the exhibition combines works on view during the fall 2019 semester with many new selections—along with material from Colgate’s University Archives. The exhibition highlights some of the principal sub-collections that have shaped the museum, considers the people who helped to build the collection, and examines the ways in which the Picker has contributed to a Colgate education.

January 24–March 10, 2019

What constitutes an “authentic” work by a master? What can we learn from frames and the backs of paintings? Who is the mysterious woman in red? These questions and others are pursued in this exhibition, which presents the results of ongoing research on Dutch and Flemish artworks in the Picker Art Gallery’s collection. This small but significant group features paintings by artists such as Pieter Brueghel II, Isaac van Ostade, and David Rijckaert III, many of which are being publicly displayed for the first time since the early twentieth century. By looking closely at the objects themselves, as well as their recorded traces in archives and literature, the exhibition investigates the works’ original significance as well as their centuries-long journey before coming to the Picker. Research remains a work in progress and the exhibition—which will be updated regularly to share new insights with visitors—considers both the potential and the limitations of art historical, archival, and object-based methods to shed light on all that remains unknown about museum collections.

Research on the Picker Art Galley’s collection of Dutch and Flemish was carried out by Dr. Suzanne van de Meerendonk and was supported by a grant from the Kress Foundation.

September 5 – December 15, 2019

Original Materials draws from the museum’s holdings to present an in-depth look at the past, present, and future of the art collections at the Picker Art Gallery. The exhibition explores significant moments in the museum’s development, considers those who helped to build the collection, and examines the ways in which the Picker has contributed to a Colgate education.

January 24–March 10, 2019

The Dr. Luther W. Brady H’88 Collection at the Picker Art Gallery is one of the museum’s richest. For nearly four decades, gifts of artwork to the museum from Brady have greatly enhanced the museum’s holdings and have become invaluable resources for teaching and learning with art at Colgate. Even more remarkable, Brady’s philanthropic relationship with the University was not that of an alumnus, but grew from his penchant for developing personal relationships with artists — including Colgate professor Eric J. Ryan, whose untimely death was the catalyst for Brady’s first donation in 1981. Throughout his illustrious medical career, Brady demonstrated a strong commitment to arts patronage — in Philadelphia, where he began practicing medicine in 1956, and elsewhere — and an abiding belief in the value of art as part of a well-rounded education.

This exhibition honors Brady, who passed away in 2018, by presenting two dozen artworks that tell the story of how his attitude toward artists, arts patronage, and collecting helped to shape the Picker Art Gallery’s collection. A disciplined, deep collector who acquired South Asian, East Asian, pre-Columbian, Native American, and modern and contemporary art, Brady greatly expanded the museum’s holdings of works by abstract expressionists. Works by leading figures of this and other postwar art movements, such as Richard Diebenkorn, Barbara Hepworth, Jasper Johns, Robert Motherwell, and Fritz Scholder, are included in the exhibition. Also featured are works by several Philadelphia-based artists, many of whom found an avid and active patron in Brady, who was also a loyal patron of the Picker. As Colgate celebrates its Bicentennial, this exhibition recognizes Brady’s legacy and a collection that has become foundational as part of the museum’s teaching mission.

The exhibition is partially funded by the Dr. Luther Brady Endowment for Art Maintenance, the Robert J. Gerberg ’59, P’85 Endowment for the Visual Arts, and by the Friends of the Picker Art Gallery.

March 21–June 30, 2019

Koolanga Boodja Neh Nidjuuk (Children Listening and Looking on Country), a traveling exhibition organized by the John Curtin Gallery of Curtin University in Perth, Australia, features thirty-eight artworks made by the Aboriginal children from the Carrolup State School at the Carrolup Native Settlement in the late 1940s.

The children artists made use of a vibrant palette to depict the world from their own experiences and started a pictorial landscape tradition that would gain international attention. The works once formed part of a donation to Colgate in 1966 by Herbert Mayer ’29 and remained in the collection of the Picker Art Gallery until 2013 when they were returned to Western Australia. Oversight of the exhibition, education, and research regarding the collection at Curtin University is the responsibility and authority of the Carrolup Elders Reference Group. The Elders have encouraged broad access to the collection through exhibition of the drawings throughout Noongar country in the southwest of Western Australia. This international exhibition honors the enduring relationship between the Noongar community, Curtin, and Colgate in the University's Bicentennial year.

A symposium on the role of museums and galleries in reconciliation, repatriation, and reparation will accompany Koolanga Boodja Neh Nidjuuk on April 12. Dr. Margo Smith, director and curator of the Kluge-Ruhe Aboriginal Art Collection at the University of Virginia will deliver a keynote talk. Colgate Associate Professor of Art and Art History Elizabeth Marlowe and Curator of the Longyear Museum of Anthropology Christy DeLair will also present. Professor of Anthropology and Africana & Latin American Studies Michelle Bigenho will moderate.

The symposium will be immediately followed by a celebratory welcome reception and remarks at the Dana Arts Center with representatives from the Carrolup Elders Reference Group, Curtin University, Oneida Indian Nation, and Colgate University.

In its final gathering of the spring semester on April 24, Museum Conversations: Moving Beyond Repatriation, will provide an opportunity for the Colgate community to engage in an informal discussion about issues of reconciliation and repatriation.

Koolanga Boodja Neh Nidjuuk (Children Listening and Looking on Country) is presented with the guidance of the Carrolup Elders Reference Group and support of the John Curtin Gallery’s JCG Founders Club, Curtin University. The exhibition is partially funded by the Robert J. Gerberg ’59, P’85 Endowment for the Visual Arts, the Tim ’82 and Alexandra Murphy Endowment to Promote the Arts, and by the Friends of the Picker Art Gallery.

March 21–June 30, 2019

Now in its third year, Colgate Alumni Collect presents the personal collections of Tim Keny ’77 and Bruce Silverstein ’89. Featuring textiles and photographs from the twentieth-century, each alumnus has carefully built a focused collection that is a reflection of his own personal expression. Curated by Michael Quinan ’19.

March 21–June 30, 2019

A selection of artworks from the permanent collection will be on display accompanied by labels written by students in Professor Moure Cecchini’s Fall 2018 class, ARTS 238: Transatlantic Avant-gardes, 1880–1920.

January 24–March 10, 2019

Three Acts features installations by three American artists who have had a lasting impact on contemporary art through performance, use of nontraditional media, and experimental modes of display. For each of these artists, community advocacy and activism have been central to their practice and embedded in their work. This exhibition puts single installations by the artists — Untitled (LA) (1991) by Felix Gonzalez-Torres; A.C.Q. – Cross Eyed, A.C.Q. – Cross Ban, and A.C.Q. – Cross Waves (2016–17) by Senga Nengudi; and Boxes (1970) by Joe Overstreet—in conversation to encourage interdisciplinary and intersectional conversations about gender, race, sexuality, and social practice in contemporary art.

Special events to accompany Three Acts include a candy-making workshop series at the Hamilton Public Library led by local confectioner and owner of Maxwell’s Chocolates and Ice Cream Jennifer Jury. This workshop series will result in a collaboratively created candy sculpture temporarily installed on Colgate’s campus and inspired by Felix Gonzalez-Torres’ art practice. An interdisciplinary program led by Colgate Visiting Assistant Professor of Theater Casey Avaunt will bring students in the Advanced Contemporary Dance class together through visual art, dance, and music, in response to the work of Senga Nengudi. In collaboration with Sisters of the Round Table (SORT), a student group dedicated to promoting the voices of women of color on campus, Los Angeles-based artist Uzumaki Cepeda will install her artwork at the Picker and lead a public workshop, both in conversation with Joe Overstreet’s installation.

Generous support for this exhibition and related programs provided by Art Bridges.

February 6-March 10, 2019

In partnership with Art Bridges and Sisters of the Round Table, the Picker Art Gallery presents Making Space, a new installation by Uzumaki Cepeda. As part of a new generation of artists who are embedding community advocacy and activism in their artistic processes, Cepeda contributes an additional intergenerational dimension to the dialogue existing between the works in the exhibition Three Acts. The artist’s process finds particular resonance with that of Joe Overstreet, whose colorful canvases strikingly claim space and whose work with Kenkeleba House has tirelessly focused on creating spaces for artists of color and others who have been overlooked by the mainstream art establishment.

Cepeda’s installations are spaces for people to feel safe and comfortable, especially those for whom these feelings may be regularly denied—people of color, women, LGBTQ people, those suffering from mental trauma, and “anyone who steps out of their home and feels like it’s a battle to just exist.” Enveloped in a soft, vibrantly colored world, visitors are encouraged to get in touch with their inner child, to absorb the bright colors, touch the soft faux fur, relax, and revel in these simple pleasures.

Generous support for this program is provided by Art Bridges.

February 1–May 20, 2018

Photograph of two men in suits with baby

This Place comprises the work of twelve photographers who, between 2009 and 2012, spent extended periods of time in Israel and the West Bank. Frédéric Brenner, Wendy Ewald, Martin Kollar, Josef Koudelka, Jungjin Lee, Gilles Peress, Fazal Sheikh, Stephen Shore, Rosalind Fox Solomon, Thomas Struth, Jeff Wall, and Nick Waplington each brought their own expertise and perspective to bear in developing their individual projects. Brought together in This Place, their photographs reveal a portrait of a land and its peoples that is complex, fragmented, and paradoxical.

The Picker Art Gallery will present works by four of the twelve photographers: Josef Koudelka, Rosalind Fox Solomon, Thomas Struth, and Nick Waplington. The exhibition is part of a collaborative project with the Wellin Museum of Art at Hamilton College, the University Art Museum at SUNY Albany, and the Tang Teaching Museum at Skidmore College. Each museum is exhibiting their portion of This Place concurrently. This experimental presentation underlines the intention of the organizers and institutions to offer the exhibition as a space of experimentation, questioning, and dialogue.

Black and white photo of woman dancing with a cane

Thanks to a grant from the Teagle Foundation, the Picker Art Gallery is working closely with faculty at Colgate to encourage interdisciplinary and cross-campus collaborations and creating new ways of thinking about learning and teaching with museum exhibitions. This Place provides a unique occasion for documenting and assessing the rich pedagogical potential of museum exhibitions.

This Place is organized by Chronicle of a People Foundation, Inc., New York, and the tour is managed by Curatorial Assistance, Pasadena, California. The project was conceived by Frédéric Brenner and curated by Charlotte Cotton. This Place is supported at the Tang Museum at Skidmore College, the Picker Art Gallery at Colgate University, the Wellin Museum at Hamilton College and the University Art Museum, University at Albany, State University of New York, by the Teagle Foundation.

Images

Rosalind Fox Solomon, Untitled, from the series THEM, 2011. Archival pigment print. 16.75 x 16.75 in. (42.55 x 42.55 cm). © Rosalind Solomon. Courtesy of Bruce Silverstein Gallery.

May 31–July 1, 2018

Labor and Literature is an exhibition curated and produced by Colgate students featuring prints from the permanent collection donated by alumnus Robert Gordon ’50. The selected artworks include prints by primarily British and American artists that explore the theme of labor, whether visible or unseen. The exhibition also investigates the work involved in printmaking itself and the close relationship between the printed image and the written word, in the process revealing Gordon’s own tastes as a collector.

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Julian Trevelyan, Stonehenge, 1961. Etching and aquatint on paper. © The Estate of Julian Trevelyan/Bridgeman Images. Photo: Richard Walker

May 31–July 1, 2018

Colgate Alumni Collect '18 features artworks from the collections of three alumni — Andrew Brozman ’72, William P. Carl ’74, and Jane Shapiro ’76 — who have acquired works of art throughout their lives and have developed a passion for preservation. With objects ranging from prints, drawings, and oil paintings to clay sculpture and textiles, this exhibition focuses on artistic interests and explores how personal expression is intimately connected with the process of caring for and collecting art.

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September 19–December 16, 2018

Drawing from the Picker Art Gallery’s permanent collection along with selected works from the Longyear Museum of Anthropology, this exhibition explores how artists have engaged with the body as subject and as metaphor. Embodied considers the social and political meanings of the body, particularly issues of identity, gender, and race. How have external structures shaped our perceptions of the body, and what are the implications for how we interpret bodies in contemporary society?

The exhibition will include works on paper, sculpture, and photography by artists such as Diane Arbus, Alexander Archipenko, Paul Cézanne, Claude Cahun, and Philip Pearlstein, as well as African and Pre-Columbian objects depicting the human form.

Embodied features artist-in-residence Jessica Posner. Major support for the residency is provided by the Colgate Arts Council, and additional support is provided by the Department of Theater, Core152, and the Department of Art and Art History.

September 19–December 16, 2018

This exhibition presents photographer Lee Friedlander’s images of the Prayer Pilgrimage for Freedom, a critical yet generally neglected moment in American civil rights history. On May 17, 1957 — the third anniversary of the landmark Supreme Court decision Brown v. Board of Education, Topeka, which outlawed segregation in public schools — thousands of activists, including many leaders from religious, social, educational, labor, and political spheres, united in front of the Lincoln Memorial, in Washington, D.C. At this first large-scale gathering of African Americans on the National Mall, an event that was a forerunner of the 1963 March on Washington at which Martin Luther King, Jr., delivered his famed “I Have a Dream” speech, protesters called on federal authorities to enforce desegregation, support voting rights, and combat racial violence. Friedlander photographed many of the illustrious figures who attended or spoke at the march, such as Martin Luther King, Jr., Rosa Parks, Ella Baker, Mahalia Jackson, and Harry Belafonte, and he wove among the demonstrators on the ground to capture the energy and expressions of the day.

Exhibition organized by LaTanya S. Autry, Curator of Art and Civil Rights at the Mississippi Museum of Art and Tougaloo College and former Marcia Brady Tucker Fellow, Yale University Art Gallery. Made possible by the Janet and Simeon Braguin Fund and the James Maloney '72 Fund for Photography.

The exhibition is partially funded by the Robert J. Gerberg '59, P'85 Endowment for the Visual Arts and by the Friends of the Picker Art Gallery.

January 26 – May 21, 2017

Opportunities to view Indigenous peoples through the eyes of Indigenous photographers are rare and recent. This photographic exhibition features works by Indigenous artists from the United States, Canada, Peru, and New Zealand. Our People, Our Land, Our Images is distinctive in its historical reach, including newly discovered nineteenth-century pioneers, established contemporary practitioners, and members of the next generation of emerging photographers. Reflecting contemporary trends, the photographs vary in style, from straightforward documentary accounts to aesthetically altered images combining overlays and collage. However, the images stand united in exploring their makers’ connections to their lands, communities, and traditions. The multiplicity of perspectives represented by this exhibition and accompanying texts demonstrates the longevity and continuing vitality of Native traditions of photography and answers the overdue and continued need to expand the knowledge of Indigenous self-presentation in photography.

Guest curator Veronica Passalacqua of The C. N. Gorman Museum at the University of California, Davis, originally organized this exhibition in conjunction with a conference for international Indigenous photographers held at the museum. For the past fifteen years, Passalacqua has been active in the field of Native North American art as a writer, curator, and scholar. Most recently, she facilitated the donation/repatriation of a significant private Lakota collection of artifacts to the Buechel Memorial Lakota Museum, Pine Ridge Reservation, South Dakota. Previous curatorial work includes exhibitions at the Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford, England; the Navajo Nation Museum, Window Rock, Arizona; and the Barbican Art Gallery, London.

The exhibition is toured by ExhibitsUSA, a national program of Mid-America Arts Alliance. ExhibitsUSA sends more than twenty-five exhibitions on tour to more than one hundred small- and mid-sized communities every year. Mid-America is the oldest nonprofit regional arts organization in the United States. More information is available at www.maaa.org and www.eusa.org.

Our People, Our Land, Our Images has previously been on view at Tarble Arts Center, Eastern Illinois University, Charleston, IL (2011–2012); Sordoni Art Gallery, Wilkes University, Wilkes-Barre, PA (2013); Fred Jones Jr. Museum of Art, University of Oklahoma, Norman, OK (2014); Museum of the Southwest, Midland, TX (2014); and Oklahoma State University Museum of Art, Stillwater, OK (2016–2017).

Portrait of black man in front of paisley background

Colgate Alumni Collect features diverse art works from the collections of four alumni — Anne Huntington ʼ07, Paul Jacobs ʼ67, Oscar Seikaly ʼ83, and Rick Stone ʼ81 — who have acquired art from all corners of the globe throughout their lives. With objects ranging in origin from Lebanon and the United States to Tanzania and the United Kingdom, this exhibition focuses on collecting trends and investigates how the practice of collecting can serve as a form of personal expression. Selected works from the Picker Art Gallery’s permanent collection generously given by alumni will also be on view.

Colgate Alumni Collect is curated by Natalie Bryt ʼ17, Kally Mott ʼ17, Natalie Ramirez ʼ19, and Julia Wolf ʼ17. The exhibition and its accompanying catalogue are generously sponsored by Rick ’81 and Lesley Stone and Family and also partially funded by the Friends of the Picker Art Gallery.

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September 21–December 17, 2017

Arm holding ruler out to horizon with mountains

Featuring paintings, drawings, prints, and photographs from the Picker Art Gallery’s permanent collection, this exhibition examines how artists—from the seventeenth to the twenty-first centuries—have depicted natural and built environments and how, in turn, their perceptions of landscape were structured by the philosophical, social, political, and economic contexts within which they operated. Addressing themes that resonate with current debates about environment, land use, and identity, the artworks on view reveal many of the complex ways in which people and land influence each other, as well as how these relationships continuously shift and change.

Image:

Kenneth Josephson, Wyoming, 1971 (from the History of Photography series), 1971, gelatin silver print. Purchase of the Gary M. Hoffer ʼ74 Memorial Photography Collection Fund, 1979.110. Photography by Warren Wheeler. © Kenneth Josephson, Courtesy of Gitterman Gallery, NY and Stephen Daiter Gallery, Chicago.

September 15, 2016 – January 8, 2017

Illustration of Marko Mäetamm's face as the flowers on a plant

The Picker Art Gallery at Colgate University announces the opening of its new exhibition, Marko Mäetamm: I Want to Tell You Something, which features work by internationally acclaimed Estonian artist Marko Mäetamm. Mäetamm has exhibited in galleries in the United States and abroad, and he represented Estonia at the Venice Bienniale in 2003 and 2007. The works featured in Mäetamm’s solo exhibition—drawings, paintings, videos, sculptures, and installations, some of which were created specifically for the Picker—demonstrate the artist’s satirical perspective on life that is informed by his own experiences. This exhibition is part of Mäetamm’s four-month residency at Colgate University as the 2016 Christian A. Johnson Endeavor Foundation Artist-in-Residence.

This exhibition is a collaboration with the Departments of Theater, Art and Art History, Music, and the Picker Art Gallery, and it is funded in part by the Friends of the Picker Art Gallery.

Image:

Marko Mäetamm, Psychotropic Self-Portrait With One Dead Head, 2016, acrylic paint on paper, 39 x 28 in. Courtesy of the artist and Temnikova & Kasela Gallery.

June 2–July 3, 2016

Converging Perspectives presents eight examples of faculty and student approaches to the permanent collection of the Picker Art Gallery across the four academic divisions at Colgate University: Arts and Humanities, Social Sciences, Natural Sciences and Mathematics, and University Studies. Featuring more than forty works of art — including prints, drawings, photographs, paintings, and sculpture from the fourth to the twenty-first centuries—this exhibition highlights the interdisciplinary ways in which Colgate University students, faculty, and alumni have utilized collection objects for teaching and innovative research.

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Andō Hiroshige, Okazaki, from the series Fifty-three Stations of the Tōkaidō, 1831–34. Color woodblock print. Picker Art Gallery, Colgate University, gift of Henry Colgate, 1955.1.39. Photography by Richard Walker.

January 21–May 15, 2016

Renowned South African artist William Kentridge experiments with a broad thematic repertoire using diverse media. Featuring more than seventy-five linocut prints, this exhibition highlights recurring themes in Kentridge’s oeuvre—coffee pots, typewriters, trees, birds, and nude figures—and explores the artist’s creative process. The Picker’s presentation also includes the sculpture, Nose II (Walking), by Kentridge as well as a video recording of his Norton Lectures, Six Drawing Lessons, delivered at Harvard University in 2012. In addition, two documentary films, Drawing the Passing and The End of the Beginning, are on view.

William Kentridge: Universal Archive is organized for tour by the Gund Gallery at Kenyon College and is made possible, in part, by contributions from Alva Greenberg ʼ74, the Gund Gallery Board of Directors, and the Ohio Arts Council.

Additional support comes from Colgate University’s Robert J. Gerberg ʼ59, Pʼ85 Endowment for the Visual Arts.

Image:

William Kentridge, Ref 2, 2012, from Universal Archive series, linocut printed on non-archival pages from The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary. Image courtesy of Gund Gallery, Kenyon College and David Krut Projects, Johannesburg/New York.

September 17, 2015–January 3, 2016

ballet dancer in empty studio looking onto city skyline

Contemporary multimedia artist Jaye Rhee embraces a myriad of disciplines within the visual and performing arts, including photography, film, dance, and music, to address themes concerning the body’s movement through space, the relationship between aural and visual perception, and the role of memory in recreating the past. The artist’s solo exhibition at the Picker Art Gallery features a selection of video installations and photography from key points in her career and debuts a new two-channel video created specifically for the Picker’s presentation.

Jaye Rhee is supported in part by generous funds from the AHL Foundation and Susan Baik/Baik Art.

Image:

May 28–June 28, 2015

Black and white are fundamental to the story of art. Found in the toolkits of most artists, these achromatic colors are considered basic for formal experimentation, yet their usage also reveals insight into the cultural context in which a work of art was made. Featuring selections from the Picker Art Gallery’s permanent collection — over 60 prints, drawings, photographs, paintings, and sculptures from the 15th to the 21st centuries — this exhibition explores the way in which myriad applications of a dramatically reduced palette, predominantly one in black, white, and combinations thereof, reflect historical changes in artistic technologies and methodologies and impart contextually-specific and deeply metaphorical meanings.

Image:

Albrecht Dürer, Samson Rending the Lion, c. 1496-97 Woodcut. Gift of Norman H. Strouse H'58, x17

January 22–May 17, 2015

Piece of coral used as a rack to hang jewelry and household objects

In conjunction with Mark Dion’s new collaborative installation to be created in the Department of Art and Art History’s Clifford Gallery, the Picker Art Gallery presents a partner exhibition of more than 40 works by the artist to serve as a touchstone for students, faculty, staff, and the community at large.

Throughout his artistic career, Dion has consistently interrogated the ways in which knowledge — particularly our understanding of nature, science, and history — is and has been constructed and presented in academic and public institutions across time and place. The Picker Art Gallery’s exhibition brings together works by Dion — including sculpture, prints, and artist books spanning from the early 1990s to the present day — that employ aspects of museum practice and scientific study to complicate dominant narratives about topics including the environment, politics, activism, and consumer culture.

Image:

Mark Dion, Blood Red Coral, 2013. Resin and assorted objects; 33 1/4 x 17 x 9 in. (84.5 x 43.2 x 22.9 cm). Courtesy the artist and Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York.

September 18, 2014–January 10, 2015

Twenty-seven photographs by Diane Arbus (1923–1971) from the collection of John Pelosi ’85 and Susan Manly Pelosi ’85 are featured in one of the largest exhibitions of the artist’s work ever to be held at a university museum. Arbus, who revolutionized the art she practiced, found most of her subjects in New York City, particularly during the 1950s and 1960s. Studying the complexities of the human experience through powerful photographic portraits of couples, children, carnival performers, and transvestites, among others, her engaging work encourages self-reflection and continues to resonate today. The accompanying publication features a conversation between Jeff L. Rosenheim, curator in charge, Department of Photographs, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, and Jill Shaw, senior curator of collections, Picker Art Gallery.

September 18, 2014–January 10, 2015

Richard Serra’s Venice Notebook etchings, lent through the generosity of trustee emeritus Paul J. Schupf ’58, highlights the artist’s virtuosic work outside of the realm of monumental sculpture, the medium for which he is typically known. This series of 20 intimately sized prints by Serra originated after he revisited and made sketches of his sculptures installed at the 2001 Venice Biennale. The drawings of the sculptures Serra made in his notebook informed these textural — even sculptural — etchings that he executed with master printmakers from Gemini G.E.L. (Graphic Editions Limited). Accompanied by three additional prints by Serra from Schupf’s collection, the exhibition reveals the skillful and innovative use of printmaking by the artist to rejuvenate and perpetuate his artistic invention. An illustrated catalogue, featuring an interview with collector Paul J. Schupf and Xavier Fumat, the master printmaker who collaborated with Serra on the works featured in the exhibition, accompanies the show.