Past Exhibitions

April 4 - May 17, 2025

Benedict Gallery

Five graduating seniors from Sweet Briar College’s Department of Studio Art are delighted to showcase their thesis exhibition, Inner Landscapes. This collection invites viewers to explore the complex terrains of the mind, memory, and emotion. The seniors have presented a diverse range of mediums including painting, sculpture, and photography. Each featured piece in this collection showcases the seniors’ journeys in exploring identity, transformation, and self-expression.

Among the featured artists are Giselle Vega, Kalin Ross, Laci Walker, Sydney Harris, and Trista Cleaves. Their pieces range from abstract compositions to figurative expressions, each offering a different lens through which to explore the interplay between inner perception and outer reality.

Jan. 16 - March 27, 2025

Vaulted Gallery (Helen Mary Cochran Library)

Artist Melissa Townsend works with the Yoga Sūtras of Patañjali by painting each sūtra, in addition to studying the text in the traditional way and translating the Sanskrit content. Her intention is not to illustrate the sūtras, but to allow the meaning of each sūtra to inform a painting in a non-predetermined way, to open herself up to receiving the teaching of the sūtra on an intuitive level, and to let that guide the creative process. The paintings on display are from the first book of the Yoga Sūtras: Book One, Samādhi Pādah (On Transcendent Meditative Absorption).

Melissa Townsend is an independent scholar, artist, writer, teacher, and long-time yoga practitioner based in San Francisco, whose mother taught at Sweet Briar College. A student and teacher of Sanskrit and Yoga Philosophy, she has translated, painted, and authored The Yoga Sūtras of Patañjali – A Visual Meditation. She has presented the work and taught and lectured about it nationally and internationally.

A collaborative project between Dr Zhen Liang, Assistant Professor of Philosophy, and Sweet Briar College’s Galleries program. Funded by Sweet Briar College’s Lectures and Events Committee.

Jan. 16 - Feb. 7, 2025

Benedict Gallery

Closely observed photographs from three classes taught by Medford Taylor from an independent study by college photographer Ella Peterson ’25, to paired works from Introduction to Digital Photography (VART 117), and single image highlights from Smartphone Photography (SART 109) students. This exhibition was installed independently by Gallery Assistants Gabby Hammond ’26 and Fran Falcone ’27.

Oct. 3 - Dec. 13, 2024

Pannell Gallery

“A novel is a mirror carried along a high road”—Stendhal, 1870
“If art reflects life, it does so with strange mirrors”—Bertolt Brecht, 1949

Horror, as a genre, along with the tremors it provokes—revulsion, relief, humor, uncanniness, and the sublime—already constitutes a ripple in the mirror. The symptoms of its alienations, however, are myriad.

For Scary Stories: The High Road/Strange Mirrors, more figurative works of art have been installed on the western wall of Pannell Gallery, more abstract works on the eastern wall. Dolls, devils, spiders, skeletons, cat-rabbits, hazmat suits, and a meat grinder on one side; on the other, ineffable sources of unease that perhaps demand greater participation from the viewer. For the former, traditional contextualizing panels have been provided, while language has been largely absented from mediation with the abstract work, coaxing viewers to lose themselves in Joan Mitchell’s black trees, Jon Schueler’s red heaven, Jules Olitski’s yellow hell. Such decisions were not made to suggest any essential relationship between language and figuration but rather just to create a unique experience. Even more important is the show’s hope that the arrangement subverts simplistic binaries—particularly between the figurative and the abstract.

This exhibition coincides with Professor Joe Sacksteder’s English and Creative Writing elective Scary Stories: Tradition and Innovation, and several pieces in this show are translations of works of literature and mythology into visual mediums: Peter Milton’s etching illustrations of Henry James’s ghost story “The Jolly Corner,” Hans Richter’s Faust, Ana Maria Pacheco’s Tales of Transformation, and multiple artists’ ekphrastic explorations of Carole Oles’s poem “For Evelyn,” including Sweet Briar’s own Professor Laura Pharis. In many of the narratives studied by Professor Sacksteder’s class, characters—and even the form of the stories themselves—attempt to impose order on forces that refute comprehension. Such is the case in “Permanent Collection,” a new story published by Professor Sacksteder in Bard College’s magazine, Conjunctions, which fictionalizes the context of this very exhibition and imagines a vast, mirrored web stretched over Pannell’s colonnade.

Situated between the figurative and the abstract walls, the altar of Amy Sacksteder’s gruesome ceramics—suggesting organs, surgical trays, and malignant masses—show the bridging of the spaces to, itself, be a zone not of clarity but of hemorrhage. A pocket gallery displays work by the children of Sweet Briar’s faculty and staff, banished to cramped sub-staircase chambers for bad behavior (very bad behavior). As all of these different modalities of monstrosity stare each other down across the gladiatorial pit of Pannell, let’s not hesitate to shake the exhibition’s cages to see what new connections and antipathies arise.

Curator: Joe Sacksteder

Nov. 7 - Dec. 12, 2024

Benedict Gallery

“My work brings together materials and processes that express the union of humanity and the physical world, most often textile traditions in collaboration with botanical material. The deep historical and lived experience we have with cloth echoes our connection to the botany all around us – both are entwined with our evolution and survival, and they are now so completely integrated into our lives that they become nearly invisible. Both flora and cloth represent powerful and symbolic connections to place, time, people, and our past.

Whether stitching, drawing, planting seeds, or harvesting, my hands echo the gestures made by thousands of hands over thousands of years and I feel connected to the lineage of people working with textiles, plants and the land. Stitching, like horticulture, can be functional – a technical solution to join materials/a means of survival – or both can be done purely in service of the soul, lifting the spirit through beauty and wonder.”

Hillary Waters Fayle received a MFA in Craft/Material Studies from Virginia Commonwealth University and a BFA from Buffalo State College. She is an Assistant Professor and directs the fiber program at Virginia Commonwealth University. She has previously taught at Penland School of Craft (NC), the Mediterranean Art & Design Program (Italy), and Yasar University (Turkey) and is an alumna of the Oak Spring Garden Foundation Artist Residency (VA). Recent projects include collaborations with Domestika, L’Occitane en Provance, and the New York Botanical Garden. Her work is on view or collected at the United States Embassies to Colombo, Algeria, and Bangladesh. A public installation in collaboration with the AKG Museum can be seen year round in Buffalo, NY.

Sept. 17 - Dec. 7, 2024

Vaulted Gallery (Mary Helen Cochran Library)

Drawing for Jules celebrates pairs of paintings exploring the visual playfulness of shadows, transparency, and mark-making. My paintings quite often start from a highly observed moment but find their way to speak more about an admiration of color and a mystery of simplified shapes. This work, in particular, dives deeper into the wonder of paint mixing and application. Is a mark drawn? painted? fast? slow? When is the paint opaque or transparent?

A personal detail of this work is these paintings were made a year before and a year after the birth of my daughter, Jules. Although not originally intended to mimic toddler scribbles, I have embraced the similarity and irony and continue to enjoy finding a new way to represent the objectivity of a paint mark. When these paintings are not recognized by their initial inspiration, they may be enjoyed purely by their patterns, subtle color shifts, and illusions of light and flatness. The remaining abstraction is where we may find unexpected curiosity or joy.

Claire Stankus was raised in Albany, New York, and holds an MFA from the University of Connecticut. The artwork in this exhibition was made during three artist residencies: the Studios at MASS MoCA in North Adams, MA, Sam & Adele Golden Foundation for the Arts in New Berlin, NY, and most recently, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts in Amherst, VA. Claire is an Assistant Professor of Studio Art at Sweet Briar College and teaches Painting: Color and Composition, Classic Drawing, and Mixed Media 2D Design.

May 21 - Aug. 24, 2024

Benedict Gallery

John James Audubon left a challenging legacy. His art has had a positive impact on the natural world. However, this does little to alleviate Audubon’s impact on the lives of those he enslaved and treated with infamous brutality.

John James Audubon was a Haitian American who arrived in the United States in 1803 at the age of 18. Audubon bought a plantation in Kentucky and proved a violent enslaver. Once in the U.S. he chose to study and paint animal life rather than the portraits that had previously earned him an income. He became best known for his book Birds of America, published between 1827 and 1838, which could not have been made without the help of local Native Americans catching specimens and sharing knowledge of regional birds.

One example of Audubon’s positive impact on the natural world can be seen in Sweet Briar College’s print, American Elk - Wapiti Deer, 1845. These elk have been pushed further westward and away from where Audubon had depicted them roaming Kentucky in the 19th century. Between 2012 and 2014 elk were reintroduced to their original habitat, and now, there is a thriving herd of 250 in southwest Virginia. Without Audubon’s early depictions of these animals, we may not have known that elk were native to the East Coast and, therefore, would not have reintroduced them.

Curators: Alyssa O’Quinn ’26 and Lauren Jamerson ’26

Feb. 8 - June 29, 2024

Pannell Gallery

Susie Ganch’s art installation invites collaborators and viewers to viscerally experience the overwhelming scale of plastic pollution and its relationship to climate change. Ganch works with excess material - the abject waste of human consumption - that has not (yet) found its way back to a functional afterlife. Her human-scale form of recycling has woven coffee cup lids into swirling tapestries, plastic bags into cloud rooms, and now water bottles into architecture. In Under Land Over Sky,seven elevations of green emerge through 6,680 translucent plastic bottles activated by daylight from unshuttered gallery windows. Together, the varying colors of the bottles create a 24-foot topographical map of Sweet Briar College and the Shenandoah Mountains to the west.

Ganch’s work responds to and comments on our ongoing interaction with the landscape and environment. Her background in geology and metalsmithing feeds her practice-led research, which relies on discoveries that can only be made by working with materials and finding solutions through hands-on experiments. Ganch’s studio practice centers beauty, references science, is influenced by culture, and uses criticism to address the environmental urgencies of our times.

Under Land Over Sky is a collaboration between Sweet Briar College’s Galleries & Museum and Sweet Briar College’s Center for Human and Environmental Sustainability, and is generously funded by The Friends of Art.

April 29 - June 30, 2024

Vaulted Gallery (Mary Helen Cochran Library) 

“After graduating from Sweet Briar in 2004, my husband and I moved to England, Japan, Germany, Italy, Hawaii, and both coasts of the US. This series spans over a decade of my life and began before we had our son, who is almost a teenager now. Looking back on what I painted feels like time traveling. I have included the place and the year in the title labels so you can follow along with me. I believe the paintings are infused with the culture of that moment just as I left a piece of my heart in each place we called home. I work primarily with fast-drying acrylic on rollable canvas sheets that give me the ability to create and move easily in any environment. The paintings are a visual journey through our family’s transitions as filtered through my whimsical, quirky, and sometimes “deep” imagination. Come travel through my daydream with me.”

Brienna McLaughlin Pruce has a double B.F.A. in Studio Art and Creative Writing from Sweet Briar College and an M.F.A. in Painting from SCAD. While studying abroad at Oxford, she met her husband and best friend who whisked her away to live in many different countries, giving her a lot to paint about over the past two decades. During a break from teaching college art courses and designing online graduate art courses, she trained with a Grand Master in Advanced Vietnamese Raja Yoga from the International Yoga Institute, which has also informed her art.

www.briennapruce.com

April 5 - May 17, 2024

Benedict Gallery

Passion Fruit is a ripe reflection of what is truly important to the visual art majors of Sweet Briar College. Each artist has been working on their pieces since the start of their senior year, but the work to get there started long ago. This exhibition compounds their effort, resilience, and dedication to each of their passions and garnishes the gallery with works that reflect years of hard work.

Through painting and more, Amy Berta teaches about the controversies of conservation, while sculptures of mother daughter relationships are explored with Renée Taylor. Adventure and storytelling are expressed by Alexis Hoyt and Lilloette Lee, and Alyssa Ramirez-Wallace shares her love and appreciation for her family with myriad media.

Jan. 15 - March 30, 2024

Vaulted Gallery (Mary Helen Cochran Library)

Ian Donegan’s relationship to land is a through-line in his practice, which spans painting, drawing and video. The places he paints are precious to him. He is engaged in reciprocity with his surroundings, and sees painting as a way to honor the places that have shaped him. He finds clarity and peace in nature - it is sacred to him. Ian Donegan is an interdisciplinary artist based in Richmond, VA and a 2021 graduate of Virginia Commonwealth University.

Feb. 8 - March 30, 2024

Benedict Gallery

Where do female artists find themselves in collections? Here on Sweet Briar College’s campus we display prints and print exchanges by Professor of Visual Arts, Laura Pharis, alongside a couple of her paintings and one sculpture. Some are generous loans from the artist, others are long term loans that seem to have morphed into permanent presences without payment, and others are in our decorative display collection. A few made it into the fine art collection. However, her predecessors, such as the former male Professor of Studio Art Loren Oliver, have their paintings predominantly logged in the fine art collection. What makes for this difference? Is it gender, medium, or availability? It is time to rethink how we collect women artists’ work.

Oct. 7 - Dec. 16, 2023

Pannell Gallery 

You might not think the pattern on your grandmother’s wallpaper is subversive… but a group of artists in the 1970s co-opted decorative ephemera, from cake icing to paper doilies, as art that challenged traditional hierarchies. Through excessive paper cutting, wallpaper patterning, and doily pasting, on every square inch of the canvas, they rebelled against ideas of ‘women’s work’.

Taking inspiration from Islamic patterns, they introduced tessellations and calligraphy into their art, expanding visual associations to cultures beyond Europe and North America. Turning to crafts found in the quilt bee and letter writing circles, they also elevated the tactile and repetitive acts of domesticity. Artists in this Pattern and Decoration (P&D) movement resisted 1950s abstraction, liberating future artists to use, misuse, and subvert the decorative in their art and tell new and troubling stories.

The exhibition Cut Pattern Paste contains Sweet Briar College collection works by Pattern and Decoration artists from 1970 to 1985 (below in bold), as well as their contemporaries, and those working now.

Jennifer Bartlett - Phyllis Bramson - Amy Chan - Christo and Jeanne-Claude - Lalla Essaydi - Mahsa R. Fard - Ida Kohlmeyer - Joyce Kozloff - Henri Matisse - Deb Mell - Joe Monk - Uzo Njoku - Ann Pakradooni ’43 - Judy Pfaff - Faith Ringgold - Miriam Schapiro - Krystyna Smiechowska - Kara Walker.

Exhibition paper-collage and dot-painting signage commissioned from Dahbia Bensaada ’23 and Melody Cooper ’24.

Oct. 4 - Dec. 9, 2023

Benedict Gallery

Amy Chan’s paintings contain the optimism that is part of their making. The joyously artificial color hums with dissonance through the clean materiality of gouache. The flat shapes offer humor and monumentality, while hinting at the unease of a science fiction landscape. Chan draws from disparate sources like cartoons, science textbooks, plants, design and operation manuals for her paintings. The interplay of color and shape to perch on the edge of harmony, while pointing the viewer towards something more unknowable.

Sept. 14 - Dec. 9, 2023

Vaulted Gallery (Mary Helen Cochran Library)

Austin “Auz” Miles’ work uses a mixture of abstract and figurative imagery to tell stories about beauty ideals, spirituality, ancestry, and individual experiences of women as they relate to the African Diaspora. Through her work, Austin hosts visual conversations that ignite understanding and inspire community healing. Miles has produced a number of key murals in Richmond, including one through the Mending Walls project in 2020. Her studio is in Petersburg, Virginia.

May 27 - Aug. 20, 2023

Benedict Gallery

AnaMarie Liddell was born in The Netherlands, completed a Studio Art degree at Sweet Briar College in 1988, and forged a career as an artist and arts manager in Charlottesville, Virginia. The root of her arts practice is in the mesmeric process of careful observation, seen in these large-scale graphite drawings of horizons and tidelines. Liddell’s monochromatic palette is simple and direct, invoking the Dutch landscape tradition of the 17th Century. Going beyond representation, each work brings an element of the fantastical to the wonders of the natural world. Drawn on visits to North Carolina and Maine, each landscape is a chance to enter into her realm of deep ecological attention.

May 21 - Sept. 16, 2023

Pannell Gallery

Migrating Abstraction gathers abstract artworks in the Sweet Briar collection from the 1950s to the 1990s. The exhibition considers the distinct European and American approaches to abstraction that merge with each artist’s migration across the Atlantic. Artists on show are Josef & Anni Albers, Alexander Calder, Joan Mitchell, Dorothy Dehner, Jon Schueler, Jose Guerrero, Loren Oliver, Pat Steir, and March Avery. The exhibition was selected and researched by Introduction to Arts Management students, and contains artwork made by students in the Painting: Color and Abstraction course.

Jan. 20 - Sept. 9, 2023

Vaulted Gallery

The Studio Art Faculty Show features recent work by professors, Lou Haney (painting), Shawn O’Connor (ceramics), Laura Pharis (painting & printmaking), Claire Stankus (painting), and Medford Taylor (photography). This quadrennial exhibit celebrates the arts practice the studio art faculty sustain, alongside their teaching, providing insight into work made during and in recovery from the Covid-19 pandemic. The show also offers students a once-in-a-degree moment to see how their own skills in the arts, as well as across disciplines, might be nurtured by those who teach them at Sweet Briar College.