Exhibitions

After six decades of artistry, Minch, an award-winning New Jersey artist and Kean Alumna, returns to Kean with a powerful body of work: a collection of collages, sculptures, and paintings. The work exudes strength in a subtle feminine way that draws the viewer in closer for deeper inspection. Identity is a theme that threads through each piece giving her art depth and a genuine richness that celebrates her family’s diverse heritage, friends, and the human experience. 

Ubuhle Beads is a collective of female beadwork artists founded in 1999 by Bev Gibson and master beader Ntombephi Ntombela on a sugar plantation in South Africa that empowers and changes the perspective of African women. The organization has allowed for women artists of South Africa to have a platform to use their generational talents for financial independence that was not previously available.  

Rooted in her Caribbean and African heritage, spirituality and identity, Heather Williams’ work explores the concept of damage and repair. Known for her abstract paintings, figurative sculpture, and film, Williams’ artistic voice is clear, purposeful, and unwavering. An introspective person with a thoughtful narrative to share with the world, she does not shy away from difficult subject matter.

The exhibition Hemingway in Comics provides a unique and entertaining lens for considering one of America’s most influential authors through themes that explore his origin story as well as his legendary iconic personas, both fact and fiction.

Winbury’s Field of Green series are bold action work. She moves across the canvas with decisive gestural movements, allowing her intention, and subconscious to drive pigment stick strikes and brush strokes.

We cordially invite Kean University students and community members to participate in the Temporary Mural Project. This collaborative endeavor will unite the Kean University community and its supporters with the acclaimed Jamaican-born artist Mashell Black. Utilizing the walls of the Nancy Dryfoos Gallery as a canvas, we seek to create a visually compelling representation of the diverse individuals associated with Kean University.

From 1984 to 2001, Wigstock was an annual outdoor drag festival that took place at the end of June throughout New York City to mark the end of the summer for LGBTQIA+ people. The community gathered in numbers and created a safe environment for themselves and allies alike.  Pierre Dalpé captured the attendees during its peak in popularity from 1992-1995. Although there were many drag performances and musical concerts, Dalpé was more attracted to the surrounding crowd. From cross-dressing in drag to DIY outfits and carnivalesque costumes, the attendees all had the same goal: freedom of expression.

This exhibition is a culmination of our summer fine art intensive, showcasing the incredible work of our young artists. Throughout this intensive, our Art Educators worked tenaciously to ensure that each artist learned essential techniques, expanded their vocabulary, embraced their individuality, and explored various artistic influences.

Explore hand-tinted vintage photographs from Meiji Japan (1880-1900).

Athena LaTocha (Lakota and Ojibwe) created the works in her Mesabi series on-site at iron deposits in the Mesabi Mountain Range of northern Minnesota, which is known to the local Ojibwe as Misaabe-wajiw, “Giant Mountain” or “Sleeping Giant.” The range is the site of the one of the world’s largest open-pit iron ore mines. LaTocha cast iron reliefs during a month-long residency, coordinated by the MacRostie Art Center in Grand Rapids and supported by the Minnesota Museum of Mining in Chisholm, where iron mining started in the 1880s and continues today.

"I want to be a catalyst for change—to create an equitable community around different modes of practice, decolonize education and eliminate gatekeeping to encourage critical thought and discourse at any stage, and open museum and institutional spaces to self-taught artists and curators that highlight underserved and marginalized voices." - Jacoub Reyes

Artist-in-Residence, Ricardo Roig, developed his unique hand-cut fine art technique while at Kean University. Layers of Life, the title of his solo exhibition as the Galleries at Kean artist-in-residence, is a play on words. Not only does it describe his artistic process, in part, but it also captures a snapshot of his personal philosophy as well.

Giants, Dragons & Unicorns: The World of Mythic Creatures 

Giants, Dragons & Unicorns: The World of Mythic Creatures traces the natural and cultural roots of some of the world’s most enduring mythic creatures. 

See the legends come to life! Build your own digital dragon, interact with 3-D objects including fossils of prehistoric animals, and see magical remnants of unicorn horns. This family-friendly exhibition features unique cultural objects to highlight the surprising similarities and differences in the ways people around the world envision and depict mythic creatures.  Giants, Dragons & Unicorns: The World of Mythic Creatures is organized by the American Museum of Natural History in New York.

75th Anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights Mural by Ricardo Roig

This solo exhibition features new works by Anna Shukeylo that focus on play and capturing the sentimentality of the moments they portray.

Melissa Stern’s HouseBroken considers the notions of house/home—in all their mixed messages. Each sculpture and drawing riffs on the notions of houses, homes, family, loneliness, connection, security, or escape. This body of work is a loose document of the pandemic years and also stands on its own over time as a visual musing about the nature of “home.” 

Lisa Ficarelli-Halpern is an award-winning American figurative artist living and working in the New York metropolitan area. She is best known for re-contextualizing art-historical images within a contemporary setting.

Sight Unseen presents work by the world’s most accomplished blind photographers as they explore ideas about the nature of seeing. The artists of Sight Unseen, in bringing their inner visions into the world of the sighted, reveal a rich visual and emotionally complex blending of the physical and conceptual worlds.  

Internationally recognized artist Spandita Malik explores the very specific way traditional Indian embroidery has passed down her matrilineal line, becoming a language common to the women in her family.

Hidden Gems is an exhibition of freestanding sculptures inspired by rock structures and created with multiple parts of cast, assembled and carved resin.

Reclaimed Creations embodies the rich beauty of nature through the use of reused materials. 

Photographic images presented in this digital exploration document Kean Community members’ first-hand study of the United States Civil Rights Movement during recent visits to Georgia and Alabama.

The end of war does not mean peace. It is simply the end of war, the end of death and destruction. Every story of war includes a chapter that almost always goes untold – the story of the aftermath, which day by day becomes the prologue of the future. Image: Kathryn Cook. 

Blended, by artist Jerome China, is an exploration of reimagined, recycled and reused metals made into sculpture. The identity of each piece is formed through several individual remnants, which are fused together to compose an entirely new art piece with its own story to tell. 

The Rarely Seen exhibition is meant to engage audiences in cross-disciplinary conversations about climate change, animal welfare and human perspective.

This exhibition focuses on the masterful small-scale prints made by Ansel Adams from the 1920s into the 1950s.

Profundo is a multimedia body of artwork by Tamara Torres about the feminist upsurge happening within Puerto Rican communities.

Lives were altered in 2020. The drumbeat of society stopped and crisis unfolded as fear, uncertainty, frustration, powerlessness, anger, loss and anxiety took the world stage. 

KEAN UNIVERSITY is pleased to present “PIECES OF A MAN,” a survey of new works by Los Angeles based, contemporary artist, Knowledge Bennett. Bennett returns to his home state of New Jersey to put together his largest exhibition to date, waging a complete takeover of KEAN University’s campus galleries. The exhibition will span across 5 galleries, each with its own new body of work.

While the world was experiencing a global lockdown, Bennett was reminded of what it meant to be “still” yet not necessarily sit still. Continuing right through the pandemic, studying, designing, photographing, and painting, he’s amassed a collection of new works ready to be unveiled to the public this fall. The exhibition borrows its title from the late great Gil Scott-Heron’s 1971 debut studio album. The album which Scott-Heron emphatically states, “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised”.

PIECES OF A MAN shall commence September 1 and run thru December 17, 2021. Kean University is located at 1000 Morris Ave, Union NJ 07083.