Exhibitions

The Spring 2025 Exhibitions are open April 4 through May 17. Join us for events, including gallery talks by Jiayi Young '94 and Gustavo Fares! 

Spring 2025 Exhibitions

April 4 – May 17

A Traveler's Guide to Early Modern Japan

Leech Gallery

Associate Professor of History Brigid Vance’s Early Modern Japanese History course co-curates an exhibition of Japanese wood prints in the Lawrence University Japanese Woodblock Print collection. 

Gustavo Fares, Abstract-Organic

Hoffmaster Gallery

An active scholar and instructor, Professor Gustavo Fares has taught in the Spanish Department at Lawrence since 2000, and he also has a vigorous visual art practice. He holds an MA in Visual Arts, taught painting and drawing at the Escuela Nacional de Bellas Artes in Buenos Aires and has shown his work in numerous solo and group exhibitions.

According to the artist, “The Abstract-Organic series appeals to nature in the ways in which the works are made as well as in the images they present. The images are built around “indexical images,” that is, images constructed with the impression on the painting’s surface of real objects, which in this case are tree branches. The use of this kind of images can be traced back to pre-historic times, to the paintings in the Lascaux and Altamira caves, as well as to modern art, such as David Smith’s early paintings. Unlike traditional landscapes, which typically represent a natural space, these images have as their leitmotif structures derived from nature but rendered in abstract configurations. Even if it is possible to recognize the presence of tree branches, their arrangements do not relate to “natural” habitats, but rather create a spatial logic similar to that of Cubism or to Jackson Pollock’s drips. Trees are also related to Wisconsin, of course, the space Lawrence University and we inhabit, and to its paper industry; thus, the series wants to establish a connection between the images and the place where they were created.”

Jiayi Young, Beyond Tomorrow: An Artist’s Quest in the Last Decade

Kohler Gallery

This exhibition puts process pieces for two projects into direct dialogue: What does the bot say to the human? and Murmur. Both projects speak to technological advancements like AI and the new human experiences they bring, which create cultural impact and new meaning to our collective identity. One project is about social media, and the other is about the moon landing.

Jiayi Young ’94 is an Associate Professor of Design at the University of California, Davis. After majoring in studio art and physics at LU, she received an MFA in Multi-media and Painting from Washington State University. Using multidisciplinary approaches, her work examines contemporary society including the culture of consumption, the programming and exploitation of the feminine, cultural assimilation, and personal identity. Leveraging social media, crowd-sourced media, and user-created content, she sets up scenarios and creates conditions to make visible empathetic relationships between people in the presence of contemporary culture. Her work invites the public to participate to come in close contact with an experience that engages the rethinking of the present-day human experience.