Multi-media artist Ronny Quevedo occupied the arched walls of the museum’s main galleries in a newly commissioned work, fuera de lugar (2021), comprised of diagrammatic vinyl lines that recalled both dress patterns and gymnasium floors. This work was inspired by his mother’s and father’s respective careers—a seamstress and a professional soccer player. Throughout this exhibition, which included artwork from 2012 to the present, Quevedo’s own family’s emigration from Ecuador to New York served as a catalyst for work reflecting on socio-political issues of migration, Indigenous architecture, and communal spaces.

Rodrigo Valenzuela: Video Works, presented in the Nancy Hyatt Liddle Gallery, featured two video works by multi-disciplinary artist Rodrigo Valenzuela. A former day laborer in landscape, construction, and other sectors, Valenzuela frequently draws an analogy between soccer goalkeepers and his former job on an overnight cleaning crew in office buildings. In the two videos Prole (2015) and El Sísifo (2015), sports provide a backdrop for investigating issues of race, labor, solidarity, and workers’ agency.

Photographs from the University at Albany Fine Art Collections by Photorealist painter Audrey Flack and recent 3D printed sculptures by artist Gracelee Lawrence shared unexpected commonalities in the Collections Study Gallery. Using an intricate three-layer (cyan, magenta, yellow) dye-transfer process, Flack’s photographs explore color saturation and also function as sources for her groundbreaking vanitas still lifes from the 1970s and early 1980s. Printed in multi-colored, reflective filaments, Lawrence’s objects—which begin as 3D scans of bodies and fruit—exist in a transfigurative space between physical and digital reality. Paired together, Flack’s and Lawrence’s works provided meditations on time and subjectivity, mechanical and digital reproduction, and capitalist consumption in our contemporary world.

The 2022 Master of Fine Arts Thesis Exhibition featured work produced by candidates for the University at Albany Department of Art and Art History’s two-year, 60 credit hour program of intensive training and study in traditional and contemporary fine art practices.

Sara Alonge, Alicia Barton, Juliana Haliti, Maddie Hinrichs, Tara Holmes, Minling Lin, H.C. Tiffany Lo, Jeanna Mead, and Dani Ruf

“This time of social upheaval has re-invigorated language as it performs publicly, in posters and protest signs, tweets, captions, chyrons and political speeches,” writes artist, poet, and filmmaker Sara Magenheimer. Magenheimer sublimates her own poetic language into the work in her commissioned solo exhibition Dailies. Turbulent distortions of vinyl texts spanning the museum walls, still and animated text in her video works, and intimately scaled wire and found object sculptures embody the major themes of the exhibition—rest, absence, motion, stillness. Ever sensitive to architecture and the body, Magenheimer has created a contemplative environment inviting viewers to move with and through language and subtly reflect on power, politics, and poetics.

16 large-scale screenprints by Chryssa (1933-2013) from the University at Albany Fine Art Collections, on view in the Collections Study Gallery, celebrate the letterforms and neon lights of Times Square. Emerging from the Coenties Slip group in Lower Manhattan in the 1950-1960s, alongside Agnes Martin and Ellsworth Kelly, Chryssa drew inspiration from her immediate urban environment, as well as ancient Cycladic sculpture from her native Greece, and became a forerunner in the use of neon in the fine arts. These 1978 screenprints—including tangled patterns of saturated red and blue and nested lines in unexpectedly meditative formations—demonstrate Chryssa’s life-long investigation of text as image.

The museum welcomed back the First Year Experience seminar Why Museums? which examines how museums have transformed and continue to transform our interpretation and construction of contemporary culture. Students interacted with guest artists, museum professionals, current students, and other campus professionals to gain first-hand knowledge about how museums have become active social spaces that engage visitors in critical conversations about vital issues affecting us all. Throughout the course, students kept an ongoing visual journal and inserted their own voice and perspective in the form of exhibition labels surrounding artwork on view at the museum.

Our intern and work-study programs offer students first-hand experience in the museum field including research, art handling, condition reporting, database entry, assistance with program planning, development of student outreach fliers, as well as administrative and technical support. Our recent Collections interns have graduated and gone on to promising careers in the museum and library fields: Iszzy Hernandez ’22 is now the Assistant to the Deputy Director at the Museum of Modern Art, New York City; Lily Hopkins ’20, ’21 is employed at the Schaffer Law Library, Albany Law School, Albany, New York; and John Epp ’20 is a Curator at the USS Slater (DE-766), Albany, New York. In addition, Graduate Assistant Jackie Mendez ’19 is now the Education Coordinator at One River School, Clark, New Jersey.

The museum hosted numerous exhibition-based interactive class visits this year, including Culture and Power in the Americas; Narrative Journalism; Photography and Related Media; Contemporary Immigration; Beginning Painting; Topics in Art History: Latin American and LatinX Art; Writing and Critical Inquiry; Three-Dimensional Design; Futbol in Latin America: The Politics; Intermediate Drawing; and Research Seminar in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies; among others.

The museum team has been hard at work developing the upcoming Spring 2023 Collections-based exhibition Near & Far: Six Photography Portfolios from the University at Albany Fine Art Collections. Our curatorial team has spent the past few months reviewing the extensive photography-based works in our Collections, making connections and constructing themes among artists. The museum team has been working to mat and frame the artworks, culminating in an exhibition that will highlight an intimate selection of photographs from our holdings.

A behind-the-scenes look at the Collections Study Space with our interns and Collections team was featured in UAlbany Magazine’s first-ever Fine Arts Issue. In addition, alumni museum directors Ian Berry ’95 (The Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery, Skidmore College) and Corinna Ripps Schaming ’84 (University Art Museum, University at Albany) discussed questions facing academic art museums today. 

Artist Tanja Hollander donated a selection of photographs from Ephemera Project, 2020-21, which were featured in Well/Being: An Exhibition on Healing and Repair(2021).

View the online Collections database

Our Spring exhibitions served as the starting point for conversations amongst artists, students, faculty, and the community.

Exhibiting artists Ronny Quevedo and Rodrigo Valenzuela joined in conversation about their work with art historian and critic Robert R. Shane. Quevedo returned with Johana Londoño, UAlbany Associate Professor, Department of Latin American, Caribbean, and U.S. Latino Studies, to delve into topics of art and socio-political issues of migration, Indigenous architecture, and communal spaces. 

Exhibiting artist Gracelee Lawrence presented a talk on her work and shared her explorations of the mental space between digital and physical reality.

Led by Sydney Pennington ’23, UAM Social Media and Student Outreach Intern, and Jaci Yong ’24, Intercultural Specialist for Asian Heritage, Multicultural Resource Center, UAlbany students gathered to discuss the Spring 2022 exhibitions and explored what it means to live authentically.

This Fall we hosted exhibition walkthroughs with exhibiting artist Sara Magenheimer and with curators Corinna Ripps Schaming and Robert R. Shane.

We also hosted lively receptions, during which students, exhibiting artists, alumni, and community members gathered, reconnected, and formed new connections.