Past Exhibitions

Devotion: Photographs from the Collection of the Watkinson Library at Trinity College

November 11 – December 9, 2024

Devotion: Photographs from the Collection of the Watkinson Library at Trinity College, is an intimate exploration of the connections that shape our lives, highlighting themes of love, family, friendship, kinship, and care as we evolve from childhood to adulthood. The exhibition presents a selection of gelatin silver prints by Mike Disfarmer, František Drtikol, Leonard Freed, Ken Heyman, Henry Horenstein, Leon Levinstein, Jacques Lowe, Danny Lyon, Erika Stone, Lou Stoumen, and William Witt. The photographs, taken between 1925 and 1981, embody the essence of human connectedness, exploring love, family, friendship, kinship, and care from childhood through adulthood.

Thanks to generous gifts by a small group of donors, shepherded by Michael Mattis and Judith Hochberg, the Watkinson Library at Trinity College’s Photography Collection provides an important pedagogical resource for students, faculty, and community members interested in understanding our historical past and the trajectory of the art of photography.

Curated by Adrian Martinez Chavez, Visiting Assistant Professor of the Practice in Fine Arts

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Detritus

September 16 – October 28, 2024

Detritus brings together four artists creating works of art from discarded objects and materials and address an urgent need for change. Faustin Adeniran, Marsha Borden, Kathryn Frund, and Ian Trask each consider the complex relationship between nature and humanity, by viewing what we throw away as a reflection of individual and collective values

Adeniran’s work is rooted in transformation; by repurposing discarded objects, he subverts Western sensibilities imposed through colonialization and invites viewers to reconsider their relationship with consumption and waste. Borden treats single-use plastic bags as precious objects to be cherished, emphasizing the duality of modern mass production, noting the hypocrisy of single-use objects’ durability and cheaply manufactured textiles’ low quality. Frund’s nautical maps, made of synthetic clothing intercepted from the waste stream, address the repercussions of consumer culture on our oceans and explore ideas of transcendence and restitution. Trask combines a curiosity about the adaptation and resilience found in the natural world with his concern for material waste; intrigued by our shifting perceptions of what is needed or valued, he repurposes trash as artist materials in a continual process, mimicking natural systems of transformation and rejuvenation.

Curated by Lisa Lynch, Director, Widener Gallery

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Rise

February 26 – April 14, 2024

Rise presents a selection of recent works from alumni artists spanning twenty years of the Trinity College Studio Arts Program Postbaccalaureate Fellowship. The featured paintings, prints, installations, videos, textiles, and assemblages stem from close observation of current realities and research directed at future change.  

Exhibiting artists include Alison Cofrancesco (’20), Sebastian Ebarb (’06), Ilana Harris-Babou, Brenda Ordoñez-Guillén (’22), Samantha Kasubaski Rosado, Harrison Kinnane Smith, and Nick Van Zanten. 

The Studio Arts Program Postbaccalaureate Fellowship at Trinity College provides support and workspace for recent arts graduates as they shape the direction of their art and prepare for graduate school. The Studio Arts Program gratefully acknowledges the support of The Deborah Buck Foundation and the Hilla von Rebay Foundation.  

Curated by Lisa Lynch, Director, Widener Gallery

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We Find Ourselves In This Place

November 13 – December 18, 2023

We Find Ourselves In This Place features work by Traé Brooks, Sophia DeJesus-Sabella, and Kevin Hernández Rosa, three Hartford-based artists producing sculpture, assemblage, drawing, and weaving works that engage with how identity is shaped by—and in turn shapes— history and culture.

Many of the exhibited artworks are made with everyday materials and objects. With these often discarded or mundane things, the three artists engage with complex issues of identity, race, class, gender, and sexuality. The found objects hold only so much cultural information on their own. Looking at how the artists transform these materials, we begin to see subjects—memory, trauma, labor, agency—in actions including impressing, indenting, pulling, erasing, wrapping, covering, and stacking. These sculptural works appear malleable and show records of constant formation. The past is seen in residual imprints of things no longer present, or glimpses of what’s hidden within the folds of something new.

We Find Ourselves In This Place. This title refers to either a place in history or a location—maybe this gallery, a home, a city. Whatever this place is, in different ways, it influences us. In turn, our presence in this place also creates change. The transformed things in the exhibition —whether a fork, a wheel, or a bucket—all seem to operate as stand-ins for the self in how they are altered, as well as positioned like bodies in space. Each object seems to operate as the shifting site of the individual, variably registering place and in turn uniquely standing in place.

Curated by Lynn Sullivan, Assistant Professor of Fine Arts

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Jenny Wu: Otherly

September 25 – October 23, 2023

Otherly includes abstract sculptural paintings by Visiting Assistant Professor in Fine Arts Jenny Wu. Like the exhibition’s title, Wu’s work physically, visually, and thematically refers to the state of being something else – an unrecognizable art form, an indefinable artistic style, or an individual outside of a socially or politically defined group.

Through a process of pouring, slicing, and manipulating paint, Wu transforms the two-dimensional medium to a palpable, malleable material that defies categorization. The resulting patterns display repeated but subtly differing timelines of her process, measuring change and progress over time and coalescing into new, cohesive wholes.

Wu invites gallery visitors to participate in Art for the People, \ˈtü\, an interactive, collaborative art project. From a large pile atop a pedestal, visitors may select and take home a tiny cube, comprised of segmented slices of Wu’s poured paint. They are asked to send her a photograph of the cube in its new home, which will be added to an ever-growing online gallery. Here, tiny cubes can be seen resting on leaves or windowsills, traversing nature atop a hiking stick, or interacting with other works of art in galleries. The inclusive project, like Wu’s sculptural paintings, carries themes of regeneration and interconnectedness, as each fragment takes on a life of its own while becoming a part of a new online community.

Curated by Lisa Lynch, Director, Widener Gallery

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“The Aesthetics of Information”: No Olvidaremos, An Exhibition by María Verónica San Martín

March 13 – May 13, 2023

Chilean artist María Verónica San Martín commemorates the 50th anniversary of the U.S. supported military coup d’etat in Chile, which overthrew the democratically elected president and imposed a regime of repression, human rights violations and political torture. At Trinity, San Martín brings together several projects that grapple with and memorialize this history: Dignidad (2018), The Javelin Project (2021), and examples from her Moving Memorial series (2012-ongoing).

The exhibition is co-hosted by the Department of Fine Arts/Studio Arts Program and The Watkinson Library, where additional artworks are on display.

Curated by Erica Wessmann

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Extrusions

November 7, 2022 – December 12, 2022

Extrusions features the work of Oscar Rene Cornejo, Res, Jessica Vaughn, and Anne Wu.

Activating a boundary – in one sense – gives rise to form.  Edges and limits work to define or identify, to name.  The solidification of form can be empowering, unifying, and moving.  It can be seen as the point of transformation, when one steps into their own and finds themselves.  The boundary can be revelatory.

Amidst the current immigration crisis, the nationwide attacks on trans-rights and narrowing availability of gender-affirming procedures, and affirmative action on the cusp of being overturned in the United States, each of the four artists represented in Extrusions quietly and powerfully address how material, form, space and community take shape in this often inhospitable climate.  By highlighting both what is and what is not there, giving weight to absence, each artist shines a light on our assumptions creating space for flexibility in what often feels like an inflexible world.

Curated by Erica Wessmann.

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Divine Theory

May 20, 2022 – September 30, 2022

In Divine Theory, Jerome Sicard’s large, stoic sculptures are flanked by the quiet wall works of Brea Campbell-Stewart and bathed in the cassette-recorded sounds of original compositions by artist and musician Miguel Mathias. Together, these visual and auditory components create and aura of sanctity — borrowing the aesthetic power and calculated opacity of the religious only to deploy them at the contemporary intersections of craft, commerce, and appropriation.

Curated by Harrison Kinnane Smith, Trinity Studio Arts Program 2021-2022 post-baccalaureate fellow.

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Joseph Byrne: Connemara Paintings

April 5 – May 6, 2022

Connemara Paintings features recent work by Trinity College Studio Arts Program Director and Professor of Fine Arts Joseph Byrne. Honoring the occasion of his retirement, the exhibition includes paintings from 2020 through 2022 that are inspired by the physical surroundings and the cultural and geological history of western Ireland. Connemara is located north and west of Galway City. Byrne frequently paints on-site near the vast Roundstone Bog, which is near his grandmother’s birthplace and is one of Ireland’s last wild natural areas.

In this most recent series, Byrne distills the material characteristics of this austere landscape into a sensory experience of place. Layers of paint and gestural marks reveal the complexity of the area’s geological formations. Though his practice is grounded in careful observation, Byrne is always navigating between what is out there in the world and his subjective response to it.  He has said, “I find the more intimate I become with a particular landscape, the more I can invent and deviate, allowing for that crucial move from description to interpretation.”

Curated by Felice Caivano