Past Exhibitions

The Department of Art and Art History is extremely proud to present the work of the department's 35 graphic design and 13 studio art seniors, in the culmination of their Bachelor of Arts degrees.

Join us for the Opening Reception recheduled to Saturday, January 20, 5-7pm

The Department of Art and Art History is extremely proud to present the work of the department's 35 graphic design and 10 studio art seniors, in the culmination of their Bachelor of Arts degrees.

Solo exhibition of Wendel A. White's photography curated by Claude Baillargeon. Join us for the exhibition opening on Friday, September 8, 5-8pm. Please make sure to arrive by 5pm to attend the lecture that takes place before the opening.

The Department of Art and Art History is extremely proud to present the work of the department's 49 graphic design and 6 studio art seniors, in the culmination of their Bachelor of Arts degrees.

Featuring: Claude Baillargeon, Meaghan Barry, Lindsey Camelio, Dho Yee Chung, Setareh Ghoreishi, Dick Goody, David Lambert, Colleen Ludwig, Karen McGarry, Maria Smith Bohannon, Ryan Standfest, Cody VanderKaay

Opening Reception: Thursday, January 12, 4:30-7pm

The Department of Art and Art History is extremely proud to present the work of the department's 20 graphic design and 7 studio art seniors, in the culmination of their Bachelor of Arts degrees.

Featuring works by: Derrick Adams, Joseph Beuys, Katherine Bradford, Edward Burtynsky, Naoya Hatakeyama, Georg Herold, Barbara Kruger, Robert Longo, David Maisel, Tony Matelli, Carlos Motta, Robin Rhode, Wilhelm Sasnal, David Shrigley, Ai Weiwei. Curated by Leo Barnes and made possible by the Hall Art Foundation and Art Bridges.

The Department of Art and Art History is extremely proud to present the work of the department's 34 graphic design and 10 studio art seniors, in the culmination of their Bachelor of Arts degrees.

Works by: Mary Ellen Bartley, Peter Bialobrzeski, Markus Brunetti, Lucas Foglia, Cig Harvey, Jacqueline Hassink, Erik Madigan Heck, Pieter Hugo, Joshua Lutz, Michael Massaia, Jeffrey Milstein, Zanele Muholi, Christopher Payne, Toshio Shibata, Raïssa Venables

This exhibition includes works by: Yaacov Agam, Philip H. Campbell, Christo and Jeanne-Claude, Chuck Close, James Wille Faust, Sam Gilliam, Janis Goodman, Robert Mapplethorpe, Peter Milton, Judy Pfaff and John Torreano.

The Department of Art and Art History is extremely proud to present the work of the department's 36 graphic design and 8 studio art seniors, in the culmination of their Bachelor of Arts degrees. Please visit www.ouaahthesis.com to view more work.

See new acquisitions by Gilda Snowden, Carlos Rolon, Jane Hammond, and others - plus diverse selections from the collections archive. Click MORE INFO for our Covid Protocols and learn more about the exhibition

At the conclusion of a unique educational journey of the Fall 2020 semester, the OaklandUniversity Department of Art and Art History is extremely proud to present the work of the department's 29 graphic design and 7 studio art seniors, in the culmination of their Bachelor of Arts degrees. Please visit www.ouaahthesis.com to view more work.

This exhibition features the work of the full-time faculty of the Department of Art & Art History at Oakland University. After your virtual visit fill out our guest book and let us know about your visit.

At the conclusion of a unique educational journey of the Winter 2020 semester, the OaklandUniversity Department of Art and Art History is extremely proud to present the work of the department's 5 art history, 31 graphic design and 11 studio art seniors, in the culmination of their Bachelor of Arts degrees. Please visit www.ouaahthesis.com, an online thesis exhibition that is dedicated to these seniors and their hard work, while joining us in congratulating them on a job well done!

Organized by the Detroit Institute of Arts and made possible by the Nancy and Sean Cotton Collection. This is one in a series of American art exhibitions created through a multi-year, multi-institutional partnership formed by the Detroit Institute of Arts as part of the Art Bridges + Terra Foundation Initiative. Generous support is provided by the Richard and Jane Manoogian Foundation

The senior thesis exhibition features the work of graduating studio art and graphic design students.

Free yourself from the frame of everyday life and rise above to something better than reality.

In the wake of the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear accident, a thirty-kilometer Exclusion Zone surrounding the irretrievably damaged power plant was created to curtail exposure to radiation.

Who Were They Then, featuring: Morgan Barrie, Carole Harris, Mel Rosas, Clinton Snider, and Bryant Tillman. Much like the physical traces left by time and change on a city, materiality and texture characterize the artists’ work in this exhibition. Each artist has connections to Detroit, whether they have been educated here, lived, or exhibited in the city.

Kresge Library’s Special Collections include magnificent, unusual, and obscure books, including the Hicks Collection of books by and about women from the 17th to 19th century and the Springer Collection of Lincolniana.

Art in Dialogue seeks to bring together Oakland University’s most precious resource – our students’ viewpoints – with some of our most valuable cultural objects – our Gallery’s art collection. Over the years, Oakland University has amassed a remarkable art collection that includes modern masters like Edvard Munch and Fernando Botero. For this exhibit of modern and contemporary works, students in the art history class AH 3900 Curatorial Cooperative at the OUAG invited a variety of student organizations to consider various artworks in the collection.

Art & Design Faculty Exhibition, featuring: Lucas Albrecht, Claude Baillargeon, Maria Smith Bohannon, Bruce Charlesworth, Eugene Clark, Miranda Clark, John Corbin, Susan E. Evans, Amy Feigley-Lee, Grace Frost, Lynn Galbreath, JenClare B. Gawaran, Dick Goody, Tim Gralewski, Trisha Holt, Keegan Kuvach, David Lambert, Alexander Meiser, Martha Mysko, Sinisa Nedelkoski, Eleanor Oakes, Kimmie Parker, Matt Ross, Ryan Standfest, Sally Schluter Tardella, Cody VanderKaay, Rachel Reynolds Zahorsky. Curated by Dick Goody

A fascination with the specificity and veracity of content in contemporary image-making fuels this exhibition. The depiction of places, objects and people has been the raw material of visual art for millennia, and this capacity to record and editorialize subject matter is what makes visual art such a crucially informing and contextualizing pictorial capture of the time of its production.

Cody VanderKaay’s oeuvre encompasses a network of interests concerning architecture, assemblage, modularity, mass-production, repetition, and utilitarianism. He examines the paradoxes presented by the properties of dense and delicate materials and blends strictures of ritual and metaphysics under the celestial umbrella of Zen-inflected craftsmanship.

Gertrude Stein's semiotic-inflected phrase beautifully extrapolates on the fact that a flower is an indivisible aesthetic cul-de-sac, a fundamental adorable form. In winter, this intimates that the next best thing to a living rose is a picture of one.

Thomas Berding, b. 1962, Cincinnati, OH, lives and works in East Lansing. The most challenging aspect of contemporary abstract painting is to make something that we never anticipated seeing before. Thomas Berding’s uniquely distinct paintings overcome this challenge with brio and inventiveness.

This exhibition features sixty-five twentieth-century prints from the 1920s to the 1940s, which was a prolific era for printmaking. The WPA (Works Progress Administration), which was part of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal in response to the Great Depression, put millions of unemployed people to work in the execution of public works.

Born in Chicago in 1970, Carlos Rolón/Dzine has been recognized for his elaborately crafted paintings, ornate sculptures and works that come out of American, Latino and uniquely based subcultures. His studio practice investigates pop culture, craft, ritual, beauty and its relationship to art history, subculture, appropriation and the institution.

Stimulus/Response/Affect explores varied ways artists engage the human body through sensorial, perceptual, chronological and spatial shifts, using sound and kinetic sculpture, interactive video, participatory games, augmented reality, social media and programmed software.

Employees Only features: Meaghan Barry, Susan E. Evans, Lynn Galbreath-Fausone, Dick Goody, Colleen Ludwig, Sally Schluter Tardella, Cody VanderKaay, and Vagner M. Whitehead. This exhibition by members of Oakland University’s studio art faculty is accompanied by a catalogue, and comprises work in all medias.

The Fortress is a complex of workshops and residency studio spaces in North End, Detroit, where Steven Kuypers and Steven McShane have created a unique workspace with artist residency studios that includes an array of production machines for metalsmithing, woodworking and new and alternative technologies.

Field Guide explores Susan Goethel Campbell’s work from 2005 to 2015, revealing the trajectory of her expansive interests made manifest in her various oeuvres. These bodies of work emerge, populate and overlap one another.

The ability of photography to reveal what is invisible to the naked eye has a rich history dating back to the advent of the medium. Often typifying the conflation of science and art characterizing early photography, the pursuit of the invisible by means of light-sensitive emulsions remains a compelling source of fascination for contemporary image-makers and their audience.

Memory Palace, comprised of paintings and codices, concretizes the conceptual practice of recording and archiving a selected collection of memories. Sally Schluter Tardella’s paintings are reminiscent of floor plans from an archeological dig, but they are accumulations rather than subtractions, being built up over time until the final layer of paint cures. Schluter Tardella offers two versions of memory.

Kaiho is a Finnish word evoking a feeling of melancholia for a lost paradise.  In her photographs, Susan E. Evans explores identity retrospectively and contemporaneously through images made in Finland after discovering that her maternal ancestors originated there. 

The Body Metonymic, an exhibition of contemporary sculpture by twelve international artists: David Altmejd, Folkert de Jong, Lonnie Holley, Chris Jones, Fabienne Lasserre, Martin McMurray, Matthew Monahan, Martha Mysko, Michelle Segre, Shinique Smith, William Stone, and Johannes VanDerBeek

Gilda Snowden – Album: A Retrospective, 1977-2010, with its archivist-inflected title, Album, is a look back at a varied and impressive oeuvre, almost forty years in the making. It is also a reflection on Gilda Snowden’s extensive career and community presence as an artist, activist, teacher, peacemaker and doyenne of the visual arts in Detroit.

Born in Morocco, Lalla Essaydi works to examine the role of the Muslim woman in today’s society. Through the use of hand-applied Arabic calligraphy and the re-appropriation of poses inspired by Orientalist paintings, Essaydi explores the relationship between the themes of writing, femininity, and pleasure.

This exhibition explores the work of international contemporary artists fixated with portraiture. It considers: the sitter, the artist and, you, the viewer. It proposes to facilitate a fresh look at portraiture, to re-evaluate and reclaim it as a practice central to the artist rather than the amateur. In this context the artist is the only genuine author of authenticity.

Philadelphia artist James Johnson explores the varied effects that possessions have on individual human consciousness and society as a whole. Singular sculptural objects coalesce with photographic images to form ever-changing constructs.

The artistic practice of Graem Whyte lies at the intersection of family, community, collaboration, craftsmanship, metaphysics and the imaginative repurposing materials. In this exhibition he focuses on four projects paralleling themes drawn from the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. The resulting sculptures and installations encourage relational involvement.

Central to the practice of the painters in this exhibition is the expansion of the imaginary as the primary source of their compositions and as such their practice is rooted in invention and the mind’s eye.

This exhibition from the John F. Korachis Collection of African Art explores the diversity of African art. Encouraging the viewer to connect personally with each object, many of the artworks are accompanied by reflective texts by Oakland University faculty members, urging each of us to consider how we contextualize art from different cultures.

Using the notion of “borders and frontiers” as a metaphor for the democratization of imagery and the collaging of reconfigured pictorial forms in a global context, this exhibition explores the cultural significance of the reproduced and repurposed image.

A conceptual artist, Greig uses the authority of photography to challenge conventions of image making about gender, identity and truth. Whether exploring nineteenth century mores as a reflection of our own conformity, or testing the limits of appropriation, ideology, or respectability, her work is often embedded in autobiography or its fictional antithesis.

Twenty artists: forty works. Ten Years of Contemporary Art takes a celebratory look at the past decade with artists from the earliest to the most recent exhibitions; each shows a recent work and one from the last ten years, describing in a statement how his/her work has evolved.

Artists’ books are often more intimate than an artist’s primary oeuvre because they are not generally meant for public scrutiny. Their scale and personal nature make their perusal the exclusive domain of one pair of eyes at a time. This engrossing survey features contemporary artists’ books from the last two decades.

The more than thirty Chinese Literati scroll paintings in this exhibition are dated from the Song Dynasty (960–1279) to the present day. Organized into five sections, “Hermitic Scholars,” “Divine Landscapes,” “Politicized Animals,” “Humanized Plants,” and “Written Images,” it offers a comprehensive introduction to the historical contexts, major themes, and philosophical backgrounds of Literati art.

George N’Namdi began collecting art as an undergraduate at Ohio State in the late-sixties. After receiving a Ph.D. in Psychology from the University of Michigan, he left a successful practice to open Jazzonia, his first gallery in Harmonie Park, Detroit, in 1981.