Visual Arts Department

An installation by Chadwick Augustine featuring ceramics from the Robert M. Finks East Asian Collection

January 13 – March 11, 2022

Opening and Reception: Thursday, February 3, 4:30-6:30pm

All visitors will be required to follow Union College mask and vaccination protocols.

This exhibition examines the intersections between collecting, biographies and multiple temporalities. It presents an artwork within an artwork. Specifically, artist Chadwick Augustine has designed an installation of wood and other mixed media that enfolds and converses with selected works from the Robert M. Finks Collection of East Asian Ceramics, which is part of the Union College Permanent Collection.

Chadwick Augustine is an artist working in Brooklyn and in Upstate New York. He earned his MFA in Ceramics from the New York State College of Ceramics at Alfred University in 2004, and his BFA from the University of Wisconsin at the Peck School of the Arts in Milwaukee, Wisconsin in 2001.

The late Dr. Robert M. Finks (1927-2014) was a Research Professor of Geology at Union College from 2003-2011. Before that, he was a Professor of Paleontology at Queens College, City University of New York, from 1961-2001. He specialized in the research and description of early to middle Paleozoic sponges, many new species of which he named. Dr. Finks is said to have had a large collection of fossil specimens. He also collected words, and was a published poet. His pursuit of knowledge extended to historical objects as well, including original edition books, a Roman glass acetabulum, or vinegar cup, and cupboard upon cupboard of ceramic vessels, eighty-four of which he donated to Union College before his passing.

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.