Visual Arts Department

Visual Arts invites you to join us for a visiting artist lecture!

Mark Armijo McKnight
Feigenbaum Center for Visual Arts Room 204
Thursday October 29th 12:50 PM
Lunch will be provided.

Open to the entire Union community - please come if you are interested in art, ecology, queerness, photography or are looking for a place to think through the heartbreak of living through endless crisis.

McKnight is a 2023 Guggenheim Fellow in Photography and Assistant Professor of Expanded Photography at Rutgers Mason Gross School of The Arts. He presented a solo exhibition of his work Decreation at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 2025 and his current exhibition Cut The World is on view at Klaus von Nichtssagend Gallery in New York City.

"Mark Armijo McKnight’s work expands the traditions of his photographic predecessors: shooting in the landscape of Southern California, New Mexico and Arizona with a formalist eye towards the textures and patterns of rock, sky, water and grasses. The bodies in his photographs are representative of friends and acquaintances, a mostly queer community largely absent from the photographic histories he engages. Through careful printing, arrangement and installation, McKnight draws formal and figurative parallels that speak to the ways in which a geography both inscribes upon and is inscribed by our histories, traumas, intimacies, and subjectivities. The photographs describe queer intimacy with and within a landscape queerly registered and reconsidered: in terms of the mythopoetic, the sexual and the psychological." Klaus von Nichtssagend Gallery

The Visual Arts Department Faculty and Staff Exhibition
September 9 - November 22
Feigenbaum Center for Visual Arts
Crowell and West Galleries

Opening Reception
October 23, 2026
4:30 - 6:30pm

Take a virtual tour of the exhibit!

As part of the celebration of the 10th anniversary of the opening of the Feigenbaum Center for Visual Arts, the department is pleased to present Practices: the Visual Arts Department Faculty and Staff Exhibition. This show brings together more than 60 works across a variety of media, including painting, printmaking, photography, robotic art, sculpture, installation, and theatrical costume and set design.

Union College, the Visual Arts department, and especially our students are extremely fortunate that all of the Studio teaching faculty and support staff are artists with robust and active practices of their own. Each individual work embodies their accomplishments in their respective fields and media, and collectively, the exhibition is a series of dialogues between their practices. Aesthetic concerns resonate between drypoint etchings and robotic machines, and between paintings and photographs, between wallpaper and installations. Thematic concerns resonate across all the works: stasis and animation, memory and oblivion, raw perception and esoteric ideation, embodied experience and disembodied feeling. What unites them is the dynamic and multivalent notion of practices.

Practices can be rehearsals and repetitions. Practices can be rituals, whether spiritual or mundane. Practices can be the refinement of material technique through the conjunction of hand, mind, and eye. Above all, practices are constant experimentation, restless elaboration, and a devotion to process, not just product.

Art History

AAH-116 Rome in the Age of Michelangelo
TTh 9:00-10:45

AAH-194 Visual Culture in Communist China, 1919 - Present
MWF 11:45-12:50

AAH-208 Business of Visual Art & Entrepreneurship
TTh 10:35-12:40

AAH-210 Modern and Post Modern Architecture
TTh 1:50-3:40

AAH-223 The Nude
MWF 10:30-11:35

AAH-366 Contemporary Art
MWF 10:30-11:35

AAH-440 Special Topics in Art History
MW 3:05-4:45

Studio Art

AVA-110 Drawing 1
MW 9:30-12:30

AVA-120 Photo 1: Introduction to Photography
TTh 9:30-12:30

AVA-130 Sculpture 1
TTh 9:30-12:30

AVA-160 Digital Art
MW 9:30-12:30

AVA-215 Figure Drawing
MW 2:00-5:00

AVA-220 Photo 2: Intermediate Photography
TTh 2:00-5:00

AVA-230/330 Sculpture 2/3
TTh 2:00-5:00

AVA-260 Painting in Oil
MW 9:30-12:30

AVA-282 Digital Aesthetics
MW 2:00-5:00

AVA-350 Advanced Printmaking
MW 2:00-5:00

PHOTOS: Exploring spaces and new perspectives in Jackson’s Garden

Students in AVA 310 - Experimental Drawing are using non-traditional materials and conceptual challenges to spark play in their drawing practices and expand their notion of art making

The Missing Curriculum: Why the Future Belongs to Students Who Trust Themselves

Thursday, October 1
6:00pm
Reamer Campus Center Auditorium

In this interactive presentation, award-winning author, TED speaker, and creator of The Power of Gesture ®, Jen Aks introduces students to an often-overlooked resource: the bodies intelligence. Grounded in neuroscience and brought to life through experiential hand gesture practice, students can discover practical tools to regulate the nervous system, strengthen self-trust, access creativity, and make thoughtful decisions, even when the path forward is unclear.

Co-sponsors: Visual Arts Department, Athletics, Wicker Wellness Center & the Career Center

The Union College Visual Arts Department was recently featured in a WAMC story. Listen here.

The Department of Visual Arts is committed to the centrality of art in the liberal arts at Union College. We do so from a position unique among other departments on campus. Already by nature interdisciplinary, the department has in recent years increasingly become a dynamic intersection of scholarly undertakings and teaching initiatives across the campus. Our vision is to strengthen the multiple connections between ourselves and other academic departments and to reach beyond the campus to develop relationships with other arts institutions. Our vision is to continue to bridge the past, present, and future for our students through painting, drawing, sculpture, photography, printmaking, digital art, and art history. Our vision, in short, is to enrich the Union College community through art.

Take a virtual tour of the Feigenbaum Center for Visual Arts.

Professor Conley's Post Digital Printmaking class printed their oversized woodcuts with a steamroller!