Visual Arts Department

August 28 - November 23, 2023

Curated by Professor David Ogawa and Aylin Ergun '26
Crowell and West Galleries, Feigenbaum Center for Visual Arts

Opening reception and Artist's talk: Friday 22 September 2023 4:30-6:30 pm

Take a virtual tour of the exhibit.

The Visual Arts Department is pleased to present selections from two bodies of work by the Boston-based artist Caleb Cole. This exhibition explores ideas about queerness, presence, and absence through the expanding medium of photography.

In Odd One Out, the artist has digitally modified thrifted vintage group portraits to draw attention to the figure in each who does not seem to fit in with the others. The work makes the twin senses of otherness and erasure concrete, transforming the source photographs into meditations on group portraiture, social convention, and belonging.

The selections from In Lieu of Flowers come from a series of portraits of transpeople who have been murdered in the U.S. and Puerto Rico since 2020. This ongoing project utilizes self-portraits from social media transformed into anthotypes - unique photographic objects made with pigments extracted from roses grown in the artist's garden. The creation of each anthotype is a delicate and days- to weeks-long process of exposure, care, and witnessing of the lives that have been taken by transphobia, state violence, and neglect.

In addition to opening up questions about queerness and identity, absence and presence, this exhibition also invites a consideration of the queerness of photography itself, as a medium whose images and objects both continue to resist categorization.

Union graduates, like the ones featured below, are thriving in the art world. Learn more about art at Union, and read additional alumni stories, in the Spring 2023 magazine.

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

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.