Gallery director and curator Sam Toabe and associate professor Christopher Schade celebrates the Visiting Artist Lecture Series in the University Hall Gallery’s latest exhibition, “(Re)Visiting,” on display now until April 5.
The Visiting Artist series is organized by Schade himself, and invites acclaimed professional artists each semester to give a public talk in a studio art or art history class on campus. Afterward, the artist engages in visual art critiques of students’ work.
The initial concept came from a previous speaker series he founded with his wife Zoe Pettijohn Schade and friend Michael Lee in 2011. Inspired by “the Club” — a famous 1950s gathering of artists — Schade was interested in creating a community where artists could meet and connect on a deeper level through discussions of their art. He decided to bring back the concept upon his hire at UMass Boston in 2016.
For Schade, the series demystifies for students the process of engaging with the arts. “A big part of the series is, in terms of the talk, showing all these different ways that people think about art,” he said. “‘How do you do this? How do you make a life in the arts, whether it’s teaching or showing, or a combination? Do you work collaboratively with other people?’ There’s just so many different ways to do it.”
Toabe noted how the variance in mediums and styles reflects the pedagogy within the art and art history department. “We’re trying to encourage students to think about the quality of their work in terms of their technical practices, the complexity of the ideas that they’re working with, and really trying to be individuals thinking for themselves,” he said. “I wanted to show a huge variety of different practices just to show the students in our department that they don’t need to be pigeonholed.”
The exhibition features nine artists that previously visited between 2017 and 2023, including Rachel Beach, Beth Campbell, Tory Fair, Colin Hunt, Lucy Kim, Joiri Minaya, Todd Pavlisko and Enrico Riley, as well as Pettijohn Schade herself. The most recent artist, Anabel Vázquez Rodríguez, participated in the Visiting Artists lecture series for the first time earlier this month. Students can visit the University Hall Gallery Monday through Saturday from 12 p.m. to 5 p.m. to view the pieces.
Near the entrance to the gallery, Fair’s “Sunflower,” cast in bronze and steel, achieves a rugged look when compared to the traditionally saturated and fragile appearance of the flower. Simultaneously, the metal material showcases the resilience and beauty of the sunflower and how it stands tall at all times, even after wilting.
“I love that students can be at scale with a sunflower. It’s a one-on-one scale, almost, that makes you talk to the flower and communicate with the flower,” Fair said, adding, “It’s like the flower becomes a memory.”
Beach’s piece “Demi” is striking with its red acrylic-painted sides and abstract architecture. Depending on the angle it is viewed at, the geometric shapes created by the carving and painting of the wood and the negative space in between resemble different objects and structures. Beach likens it to a “guardian of war,” which can be seen through the almost Greecian helmet-like structure.
“For me, there’s a relationship to the human body,” Beach said. “You have a bodily relationship to these things, which, in turn, goes towards meaning in the way we experience ourselves in the world regarding something being visual — a visual sensation or visual information received versus a physical sensation in the body.”
Similarly, Kim’s “Homomorphy: Fish and Bat” is eye-catching both through its concept and its bold yellow coloring that accentuates details. The top panel, consisting of scaled fish molds, connects to a bottom panel adorned with baseball bats. These bats make up the lower half of the fish, but only the catfish aligns accurately with the handle. With the other fish, Kim creates a comical juxtaposition between the larger upper halves and the slim lower halves of the bat handles.
This piece comes as apart of her series centering around homomorphy, the similarity of two forms in shape but not structure. Kim said, “I’m interested in it because it’s also the basis for stereotyping … Once you decide that someone is doing something because they look this particular way, if you see any deviation or contradiction to that idea, you decide that that’s the anomaly.”
In his work, Hunt captures the confluence of person to place and the forces of the natural world in relation to the human body, especially within structures of time. This piece, “Untitled (Red Rocks),” plays upon temporal aspects with the detachment of the central human silhouette from the mountainous terrain that it is reflecting.
“Everything is continuity and change, and form — which memory is merely just a version of — is just a momentary, vanishing concept. If we’re able to let go of that, our capacity for empathy just grows bigger,” Hunt said. “I hope that one, in thinking about these things, is able to think about the land in that sense and that it contains us all … and contains everything that’s ever been as well.”
Pettijohn Schade’s piece implements deeply intricate pattern work with a consistent system of hexagons, pyramids, pentagons and cubes. Together, these shapes intertwine in tight, interconnected visual structures to comprise the complex composition of “Attempts at Self Organization 5.” While the geometric elements are inherently abstract and easily seen repeated throughout the painting, there is also a particular order that contains the disorganization through clearly defined frameworks and symmetrical positioning.
“All of my work deals with repetition … and the ramifications of repetition psychologically, historically, culturally and formally,” Pettijohn Schade said. “This series deals with repetition through mirroring through symmetry. So, all of the shapes, all of the gilding lines in this piece, are actually mirror lines of where there’s a mirror being refracted, the shape of different mirror tiles.”
Another work of abstractionism, Riley’s “Untitled (Mending Relations)” is evocative, meticulous in how it presents itself while still also being able to be interpreted in many different ways. The abstraction melds in realism with its depiction of loose panels and tape patching up areas of the canvas. According to Riley, this particular work represents more of “a kind of involvement with ideas about time and how one spends their time.”
“It points to the duration of time it might take for certain aspects of the painting, either spatial aspects or nameable events, to begin to occur for the viewer,” Riley said. “This painting signals a body of work that really begins to focus on this sort of idea — through a process of looking and spending time with the painting, where does the painting deposit the viewer?”
At the center of the space, Campbell’s unique mobile dangles from the ceiling from a painted steel rod. Ranging from paintings and a wall mounted telephone to work documents pinned onto a corkboard, each panel of “Shifting” reproduces mundane scenes within different spaces and times. Fixtures from earlier decades feel nostalgic, while more contemporary fixtures are a reminder of the everyday objects missed.
“I want those little sections to feel like the world and connect people to some kind of sentiment or feeling. We’re in one place, but we’re always grabbing other places and memories and histories,” Campbell said.
Through this exhibition, Toabe wants students to recognize the importance of having artists in the community, both in the wider and more local, and allowing artists to have their voices heard.
“It’s one thing to see an artwork, be impacted by it and think about it critically — but to also be challenged by the artist, their voice, their perspective and hear a little bit more about their biography and their various perspectives on why they’re making their work is really crucial in thinking critically about visual art,” Toabe said.
Schade also hopes that this exhibition will raise more awareness about the Visiting Artists lecture series and encourage students to share what they learn with one another. “It’s not like it happens and then it’s done. It feels like it keeps resonating through these conversations, and those keep making everything richer,” Schade said.
There will be a panel discussion for the exhibition March 26 from 3 p.m. to 5 p.m., with guests Schade, Pettijohn Schade and Lee. Directly after, between 5 p.m. and 7 p.m., the closing reception will be held in the gallery space on the first floor of University Hall.
