Visual Arts Department

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.

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

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 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!