Previous Exhibitions

The exhibition hosted all kinds of events to bring people together, from bookmaking workshops for community members to university classes, from a concert by Sewanee Praise to a weekly Bible Study Group, from film screenings to conversations about voter suppression and voter registration, from visits by Sewanee Elementary School students to meetings by the board of the Grundy County Historical Society, from the Southern Intellectual History Colloquium to an afternoon of rug-hooking with the Broad Mountain Conglomerate Ruggers. It was an exhibition designed for sharing challenges, and books, films, and ideas about how to meet those challenges.

Ih a special presentation of collage, costume, dance, and music, the UAG will host the interdisciplinary project This Ain’t No Cakewalk, created by visual artist Thom Heyer and musicologist Dr. César Leal. The exhibition and its associated events will consider appropriation and the cakewalk tradition. Originating in the Antebellum South and first performed by enslaved persons, cakewalks became broadly fashionable.

The University Art Gallery presents Reclamation, an exhibition of photography, sculpture, and collage by the University of the South’s senior art majors: Ivey Dahlstrom, Violet Hoagland, Barton Perkins, and Brianna Young.

Freely combining imagery, techniques and materials from disparate places and cultural registers, Atlanta-based artist Jiha Moon questions the value of origins. As she writes, “The world is so interconnected nowadays, how can one even tell where someone or something “comes from” anymore?” She draws pictorial references from sources as seemingly distinct as Korean temple paintings and Walt Disney cartoons, synthesizing them into a visual language that is both strange and familiar.

The Isle of Printing will lead Sewanee in a community project centered around The Communication Station - Automated Exchange Interface, an experimental process for people to share and receive objects and ideas. Participants can interact, examine and share with their community in an efficient modern manner that explores our collective ability to communicate with one another as neighbors and citizens of the world.

In Fabrics of Socialism, Vesna Pavlović mines the archive of the former Yugoslavia to explore propaganda and collective memory, the medium of photography and the life and obsolescence of media.

Angelica Mesiti’s moving 4-channel video installation "Citizens Band" depicts individuals from Cameroon, Algeria, Mongolia and Sudan, surrounded by the dense urban environments of their adopted homes, as they quietly recall and perform the music of their birthplaces.

The University Art Gallery is proud to present the work of renowned South African artist activist Zanele Muholi in a selection of 22 photographs from her series Faces and Phases, dignified portrait photographs of black South Africans who identify as LGBTI. Shown together, these portraits of individuals represent and build community. Muholi is a visual activist. In collaboration with her sitters, she uses photography to combat the oppression of a group whose existence is often excluded from South African history.

Jessica Wohl’s Love Thy Neighbor grapples with the fear, intolerance, and polarization the artist sees dividing communities and cities across the country, and answers those divisions with objects that evoke empathy and comfort. The patterns of Wohl’s quilts invoke the fences, gates, and security bars that divide us, both from one another and from that to which we aspire.

Invoking the units used to organize EPA cleanup sites, Operable Units explores the connections between industry, communities and the environment along the Kalamazoo River in Michigan. The installation juxtaposes two fragile constructs: the suspended structure Exposure Pathways, fabricated from an abandoned ream of paper found in the former Plainwell Paper Mill, and Superfund Areas 1-5, built of brittle clay saturated by stains and oxides.