Visual Arts Department

January 3 - March 10, 2023
Feigenbaum Center for Visual Art
Crowell and West Galleries

Mon. - Fri. 9:00am - 5:00pm

Opening Reception: January 19, 4:30-6:30pm

Gallery Talks at 5pm

View the Catalogue

Take a virtual tour of the exhibit!

Satellite and Sediment features drawings and paintings by five contemporary artists working in response to the land. Manipulating satellite imagery, drone footage, collaged landscapes, and foraged materials, the artists mingle close observation and lived experience, body and nature, realism and abstraction. Collectively, their artworks depict human interventions that continue to transform the earth: hurricanes, blizzards, oil spills, property lines, unnatural forests.

Cynthia Lin reinterprets topographical details from NASA satellite imagery and magnified sections of skin with invented colors and unpredictable technical processes. Combining printmaking, scratch-board, solvent transfers, and oil on mylar, her large-scale works move from pores and hair follicles to lava flows and land boundaries. Sara Schneckloth forages natural material from New Mexico’s San Juan Basin to create pigments for her mixed media drawings. Based on low altitude drone footage, her loosely-referential maps of the region’s banded topography suggest geological formations and extensive resource extraction, as well as less-visible divisions between public and private lands.

Beatrice Modisett uses handmade charcoal and wood ash from her property in upstate New York in her monumental drawings of waves, wind, and extreme weather, suggesting a state between coalescing and collapse, forming and eroding. Barry Nemett’s accordion books combine multiple locations and climates, weaving intricate thickets and tree bark with expansive landscapes of patchwork fields, karsts, and canyons across continents. Athena LaTocha works her ink and earth drawings in concert with the land, often beginning them on and with the ground itself, letting the atmosphere, rain, sand, and soil direct the piece.

In Satellite and Sediment, the artists ask us to question distinctions between human systems and natural systems, and to reexamine scale and agency. Is it the earth we are seeing or our own skin? Is it land-made or hand-made? Topographical skin maps are magnified, aerial maps and weather systems become human scale, and monumental landforms fit in your palm. Bringing us into their intimate conversations with nature, these five artists encourage us to look closely at our own relationships with the climate around us, the sky above, and the ground below.

In Union News

In Schenectady Gazette

Cynthia Lin Artist Talk

Fri. January 20, 12:50-1:50pm
Feigenbaum Center for Visual Art
Room 204
Lunch Buffet will be served
More info here.

January 8 - June 4, 2023
Kelly Adirondack Center at Union College

Mon. - Thurs. 10:00 am to 4:00 pm.

Opening reception January 8, 2:00 - 4:00pm

In the News

The Kelly Adirondack Center and Union College Department of Visual Arts are pleased to present Layers of Autumn, an exhibition of paintings by Shriya Balaji '23, Natalie Berg-Pappert '23, Talia Coker '23, Saliha Nazir '23, Isabel Pacchiana '24 and Emily Zucco '23, students from Professor Laini Nemett’s Fall 2022 Plein Air Painting course at Union College.

Following the storied tradition of plein air painting and its recent revitalization in the contemporary art world, Union’s Plein Air Painting course brought students outdoors almost every day, rain or shine, to paint from life in nature. Layers of Autumn features paintings from a range of locations visited in this class, including Lock 7 Park on the Mohawk River; Jackson’s Garden and other sites on the Union College campus; and the Hudson River School favorite, Kaaterskill Falls, in Palenville, NY. One collaborative two-panel painting in the exhibit was made collaboratively by every student in the class just outside the doors of the Kelly Adirondack Center.

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

Walkers and bikers on the Albany County Rail Trail in Bethlehem get the treat of seeing Prof. Fernando Orellana's new public art mural, "Cathedral." Orellana's mural and the majority of his teaching at Union is about the intersection of engineering and art.

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.