Past Exhibitions

Nine Years of Detangled Afro Hair
Art exhibit by Stephanie J. Woods

Thursday, September 16 – Tuesday, October 26
Opening reception Thursday, September 16 / 7-8 PM
East Gallery, Porter Fine Arts Building


Stephanie J. Woods is a multimedia artist from Charlotte, NC, currently based in Albuquerque, NM, where she is an assistant professor of interdisciplinary art at the University of New Mexico. Her work fuses a relationship between photography and fiber. Additionally, her passion for interdisciplinary practices and material language is evident through her collaborations and implementation of symbolic materials that examine performative behavior, domestic spaces, and alternative realities that reference Black American culture and her experiences growing up in the American South. This exhibit is free and open to the public. Gallery hours 1-5 daily, or by appointment. View Gallery Guide to read more about this exhibiton.


Painting of woman by Belinda Person

I, YOU, US, UNITED TO TRANSFORM
Paintings by Belinda Person

Thursday, September 2 – Friday, October 1
Closing reception Thursday, September 30 / 7-8 PM
McCrary Gallery, Murphy Art Building 

Macon artist whose art focuses on Afro cultural heritage. Belinda’s talents include photography, drawing, contemporary art, visual arts, and painting. This exhibit is free and open to the public. McCrary Gallery hours 1-3pm, Monday-Friday daily.

 


Two pots from the FLUX exhibition

FLUX: Esther Mech

McCrary Gallery
Through October 4

Esther Mech (BA Art Wesleyan '17) recently graduated from UGA with a Masters in Fine Arts concentrating in ceramics. Join us to see her recent work and to welcome her back to Wesleyan. 


Several pottery pieces by Artist Lora Rust

Lora Rust: Quilts, Copper, and Candles

Exhibition: Thursday, October 3, 6-7pm
McCrary Gallery, Murphey Art Building


Lora Rust has an eye for elegance, fluidity and movement. Working in porcelain, her signature technique is a process of pushing the surface of the clay. She carefully textures each piece with her personally designed wooden tools, creating lush patterns with graceful, flowing lines. The designs and patterns found in Gothic Architecture mixed with the fluidity of the Art Nouveau period are strong influences in her work. Inspiration from textiles and fashion design provides movement to the texture on the form. She finishes each piece with beautiful glazes and captivating soda-fired color schemes that uniquely highlight the surface. Free and open to the public.


Three paintings of women from the She tells a story exhibition.

She Tells A Story:
Portraits from Wesleyan’s Collection

Porter Family Memorial Fine Arts Building, West Gallery
August 22 through December 20, 2019

Wesleyan has a choice collection that spans from a 15th century Italian Renaissance altarpiece to an Andy Warhol silkscreen. This exhibition highlights portraits of women: alumnae, friends of the college, beloved professors, donors, commissioned portraits and friends of the artists. The paintings and drawings capture all the  complexities of a contemporary woman’s life. The styles range from American realist to highly stylized layered portraits. View the paintings and read the stories of the artists and their subjects.   


Quilt in the Common Thread exhibition

Common Thread:
Contemporary African American Quilts

January 24 – March 1, 2019

The four Macon-area artists’ work ranges from representational to abstract but common threads of narrative, gender, identity and justice connect them. While the quilts employ contemporary techniques such as image transfer, much of the sewing and weaving techniques connect to historical American quilting as well as African designs and techniques such as kente.

The exhibition opened with a panel discussion with the artists and moderated by Tubman African American Museum director of exhibitions, Jeffrey Bruce, and an opening reception in the evening.


Seizing Life exhibition photo of Fernando La Rosa with his camera.

“Seizing Life: Through the Lens of a Photographer”
Fernando La Rosa - 1943-2017

Jan 25 – Feb 26, 2018

This memorial exhibition celebrates the life and artistic oeuvre of Fernando La Rosa, who taught photography at Wesleyan College from 1998 through 2017. The exhibition offers a glimpse of his photography from his earliest work in his home country of Peru, to his most recent work. 

The exhibition celebrates his dedication to teaching, to the sharing of knowledge, skill, and technique. As a student in the 1960's at the Escuela de Bellas Artes in Lima, Peru, a visiting speaker ignited Fernando’s interest in photography. In the early ‘70’s he studied photography at MIT. When he returned to Peru, Fernando started Secuencia, a photography school and gallery, the first in Latin America dedicated to photography and creating a powerful legacy.

Fernando moved to New York, taught at Parsons School of Design, and at their affiliated art school, Altos de Chavon, in the Dominican Republic. It was here that he met Frances, to whom he was married for 32 years. 

Before settling at Wesleyan as Art faculty, the two artists lived in Atlanta, New Orleans, and in Frances’ home area of Alabama. This exhibition is specifically  a photographic “road map” of Fernando's life. But, art transcends more than the specifics of just one life. It offers a portal to each viewer, to seize their own life, in this case, through the lens of a Photographer.


Group of Women look at images in the Iran Women exhibition.

Iran: Women Only
Photographs by Randy H. Goodman

October 16 – December 14, 2018

During this critical time, the contemporary photographs by Randy Goodman reflect change, especially in the role of women in Iran. The remarkable and provocative images captured by Goodman in Iran during four trips spanning thirty-five years provide insights into a new cultural landscape. This powerful exhibit of 35 photographs and the compelling story of Goodman’s reports from Iran will challenge the perception of the everyday life of women in Iran.

Her black and white photographs of the early 1980s capture the conservative values and traditions in the country at that time. In contrast, her color images of present-day Iran show women openly testing the boundaries of the Islamic Republic’s social norms. 


Bowl, plate and cup made from artist for the common table exhibition.

Common Table
November – December, 2018

Wesleyan College Artist-In-Residence, Jeni Hansen Gard, is a community-focused ceramic artist and a founding member of the Socially Engaged Craft Collective, a craft and social practice organization. The Common Table experience brought together a group of twenty-two diverse women—faculty, students and staff-- who share the physical space on the campus to build community through a series of events and a shared meal that took place on handmade dishes within the gallery. The exhibit included the portraits and personal essays written by the twenty-two women who participated in The Common Table.


Artwork by Benjamin Britton.

This Unfolding Idyll: Paintings by Benjamin Britton

Porter Family Memorial Fine Arts Bldg, East Gallery
Opening Thursday, September 5 through October 2, 2019
Galleries are free and open to the public: M-F, 1-5PM

The paintings in this exhibition propose a loss of coherency between the knowledge of where and when our body is located in the landscape and the sensation of our location in space and time. In brief, the paintings use the sensation to explore human relationships to ecological conditions. Like emotional relationships with other humans, these relationships are often deeper and more complicated than one normally ends up accounting for, and are often revealed just at the moment our emotions get the best of us. The ability of the painted object to frame an experience can speak to our facility for fantasizing the past and projecting future roles upon the landscape, reframing the present in view of the future, and can help to reconcile our inner experiences with our surroundings.

Artist Statement

My work appears at first to function like a dense and colorful abstract painting, but contains representations of nameable things and places. I work with color and space to reflect the mechanisms of sensation in the body, to inspire a feeling of motion, and to continually reward the investigation of pictorial space. The paintings are first about the pleasure of looking; I’d like to make paintings that make the viewer feel as though they have super powers.

I am inspired by experiences of landscape where the present is marked by intense but indeterminate sensations of beauty mediated by the plasticity of memory, cognition, sensation and future intentions. By representing how memory is constructed and perceived, there’s an opportunity for a painting to show how the feeling of one’s location is actually always the feeling of multiple locations. We make the present out of the sensed, residual and formative.

Biography

Benjamin Britton was born in Palo Alto, CA and raised in the Pacific Northwest. He received his BFA from the School of Visual Arts, New York in 1999 and his MFA in painting from UCLA in 2008. He is assistant professor of drawing and painting at the Lamar Dodd School of Art at the University of Georgia in Athens, Georgia.

His work has been shown in commercial galleries and alternative spaces in New York, Los Angeles and Atlanta and is included in the collections of the High Museum in Atlanta and the West Collection in Oaks, Pennsylvania. Britton has had solo shows at Marcia Wood Gallery, Atlanta, Ruth Bachofner Gallery in Santa Monica and Frederieke Taylor Gallery, New York. Britton’s work is represented by Marcia Wood Gallery.

His work has been reviewed in Art in America and the LA Times and included in New American Paintings magazine. He is the recipient of the Chiaro Award in painting, recipient of the Artist Fellowship from the Ballinglen Arts Foundation, Ballycastle, Ireland, awardee of the a J.B. Blunk Residency from the Lucid Art Foundation, Inverness, California, and awarded Artist-in-Residence at the Headlands Center for the Arts, Sausalito.

 

Calendar of Events

Wesleyan College is privileged to steward many arts and cultural events and share them with the community. Most are free and open to the public. Wesleyan art galleries are open M-F 1-5PM and on Wesleyan Market Saturdays from 10AM-2PM.

Event listing

Visit our Campus

Tour our beautiful 200-acre campus featuring Georgian architecture, lush green spaces, recreational facilities, residence halls, and worship center.

Vist Wesleyan Virtually

NCAA Division III Athletics

Wesleyan College is home to five NCAA Division III sports: soccer, basketball, volleyball, tennis, and softball. In addition, we offer an award-winning Intercollegiate Horse Show Association (IHSA) Equestrian program.

View More

Join our email list