Doris Ulmann Galleries

Sara Torgison: Spanned Separations
2026-01-28 - 2026-03-20 | Lower Traylor Gallery
Sara Torgison: Spanned Separations is on view in the Lower Traylor Gallery from January 28 through March 20, 2026. Sara Torgison will give an artist talk at the exhibition’s closing reception on Friday, March 20, at 12:00pm in the Lower Traylor Gallery in the Rogers-Traylor Art Building. All are welcome; no RSVP required. For more information, visit our Events page.
In this visiting artist exhibition, Sara Torgison presents a collection of recent works that explore the deceptions and detachment of anthropocentric culture, while imagining repair to our relationship with ecosystems and the more-than-human world. Animal figures play at the edges of human, while humans merge with experimental ecologies. Each work troubles the distance between us and the animals and environments we exploit for our wellness and comfort. During an era of mass extinctions and climate collapse, Torgison’s work complicates binary narratives by dwelling in the margins of material and symbolic corporealities of human and non-human animals.
Sara Torgison is an interdisciplinary artist with a focus in ceramics and fiber art. She received an MFA from the University of Cincinnati Department of Design, Architecture, Art and Planning and a BFA (ceramics) and BS (Zoology) from Cal Poly Humboldt in Arcata, California. Her work often blends media, extending finite and fragile surfaces to emphasize and inhabit marginal spaces. Sara is currently Visiting Ceramics Faculty at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, and works as a preparator at the Weston Art Gallery in Cincinnati.

Kat Spears: Surface Lore
2026-01-21 - 2026-03-13 | Upper Traylor Gallery
Kat Spears: Surface Lore is on view in the Upper Traylor Gallery from January 21 through March 13, 2026. Kat Spears will give an artist talk on Wednesday, March 11, at 5:00pm in the Upper Traylor Gallery in the Rogers-Traylor Art Building. All are welcome; no RSVP required. Kat will also lead a workshop focusing on monotype printmaking techniques on Wednesday, March 11, at 7:00pm. Advanced registration for this workshop is required. The workshop is free and all supplies are provided, but space is limited. For more information, visit our Events page.
The paintings in Surface Lore hide many layers of imagery gleaned from observation, sketches, personal photo archives, art history, memory and imagination. Their surfaces have been metamorphosing for the past three years, during which time they have changed to reflect the artist’s changing preoccupations and favorite icons. The surface quality and imagery visible at last has been guided by the unexpected textures and colors that appeared in this process of layering, painting-over, and un-painting.
Kat Spears is an artist originally from Kentucky. Their studio practice is founded largely in an inexhaustible love for observational and figural drawing and painting. Parallel to this practice, they engage with many modes of image-making, as well as installation, sculpture, poetry, music, and sound. They graduated from Berea College in 2014 (Studio Art, Art History, Spanish), and completed a Masters of Fine Arts from Indiana University Bloomington in 2022. They have been teaching drawing and painting courses since 2019 and currently serve as the Visiting Professor of Painting and Drawing at Berea College.

Sangmi Yoo: Dream a little dream of me
2025-10-29 08:00 - 2025-12-05 17:00 (America/Kentucky/Louisville) | Upper Traylor Gallery
Sangmi Yoo: Dream a little dream of me is on view in the Upper Traylor Gallery from October 29 through December 5, 2025. Sangmi Yoo will give an artist talk at the exhibition’s opening reception on Wednesday, October 29, at 5:00pm in the Upper Traylor Gallery in the Rogers-Traylor Art Building. All are welcome; no RSVP required. For more information, visit our Events page.
The installation and prints in Sangmi Yoo: Dream a little dream of me originate from her research, gleaned from the Huntington Museum’s William Morris Co. collection and her studies on labor in the history of textile printing. She brings us back to the nineteenth-century frenzy over printed cotton with floral motifs in English households, the popular Chintz imports from India, and the subsequent arrival of the English textile revolution. Yoo’s personal memory also reflects on the women workers in textile factories of the 1970s who contributed to the rapid economic development of post-war South Korea.
Born in South Korea, Yoo’s recent work has considered the often-problematic cultural representations of botanic gardens. Her print installations combine various digital, traditional, and post-digital printmaking techniques. Awards for her work include a Denbo Fellowship from Pyramid Atlantic Art Center, an AHL Foundation’s Visual Arts Prize, and a Puffin Foundation Artist Grant. She has exhibited in venues, such as Lucca Biennale Cartasia 2024 in Lucca, Italy, MOCA Jacksonville in Florida, the American University Museum in Washington DC, Seoul Olympic Museum of Art, the Museum of Printing History in Houston, the Moonshin Museum in South Korea, the Gyeongnam International Art Festival in South Korea and the Pacific Rim International Print Exhibition in Christchurch, New Zealand.

Abbey Peters: Carefully Held
2025-10-22 08:00 - 2025-12-05 17:00 | Lower Traylor Gallery
Abbey Peters: Carefully Held is on view in the Lower Traylor Gallery from October 22 through December 5, 2025. Abbey Peters will give an artist talk at the exhibition’s opening reception on Wednesday, October 22, at 5:00pm in the Lower Traylor Gallery in the Rogers-Traylor Art Building. All are welcome; no RSVP required. For more information, visit our Events page.
Abbey Peters: Carefully Held is a collection of ceramic vessels and small sculptures that explore how women offer and receive care across generations. Ranging from personal, to archival, to the mundane, the pocket-sized objects reference the many ways we nurture and carry others in the palms of our hands; the decorative vessels contain hidden compartments to safeguard knowledge related to reproductive care for future generations.
Peters is an artist based in Iowa City, IA, working with ceramics and collected materials. She holds an MFA in Ceramics from the University of Iowa and a BFA from the University of Arkansas. Her work has been exhibited nationally in over thirty group exhibitions. Peters has received international research grants supporting projects on midwifery and beekeeping in London, UK. She has held positions at Anderson Ranch Arts Center in Snowmass Village, CO, and Lillstreet Art Center in Chicago, IL. Her artist residencies include laRex l’Atelier in St. Raphael, France; the inaugural CIRCA Exchange in Boulder, CO; and the Vermont Studio Center in Johnson, VT. Peters is currently the 3D Studio Technician at Grinnell College.

At Home with the Elliotts: A 'Fine Art Print Collection' Before Berea College
2025-09-29 08:00 - 2026-03-13 17:00 | Masterpiece Gallery, Berea, KY, United States
“I have the collecting gene. There’s just no doubt about it.” – Gerald Elliott
Shelly and Gerry Elliott have been collecting prints since they married in 1960, carefully selecting one print through a mail order catalog tied the New York-based Association of American Artists. As Gerry says, “It just went on from there.”
Since then, the Elliotts have amassed a collection of hundreds of these works on paper representing an impressive array of artistic styles, time periods, methods, processes, and techniques that they have lovingly hung en masse in their home, leaving hardly one inch of wall space bare. Shelly and Gerry have chosen to live a life surrounded by art, by what they find to be beautiful, curious, and interesting.
To date, the Elliotts have generously gifted over five hundred artworks from their personal collection to the Berea College Art Collection. At Home with the Elliotts: A ‘Fine Art Print Collection’ Before Berea College is inspired by the Elliotts’ lifelong adoration and pursuit of the print and their drive to intentionally create a space for themselves in this world that has enabled them to be entirely surrounded by visual art and human creativity. This exhibition recreates, in part, the Elliotts’ Washington, DC, home in such a way to encourage visitors to consider the different ways one might seek out a life in the arts.
Click here to view more information about the artworks included in the show!
At Home with the Elliotts will be on view in the Masterpiece Gallery on the first floor of the Rogers-Traylor Art Building from Monday, September 29, 2025 through Friday, March 13, 2026. This exhibition is generously supported by Shelly and Gerry Elliott and the William A. and Leola Piper Boyce Art Exhibition Endowment Fund.

Gerry Elliott – Fine Art Print Collector, directed by Justin Skeens, 2023, featuring Kelsey Frady Malone, PhD; Dante Stewart (Berea College Class of 2023); and Florence Wright (Berea College Class of 2025)

Anne Mondro: Tethered
2025-09-10 - 2025-10-17 | Upper Traylor Gallery
Anne Mondro: Tethered is on view in the Upper Traylor Gallery from September 10 through October 17, 2025. Anne Mondro will give an artist talk on Friday, Oct. 10 at 12:00pm in the Upper Traylor Gallery in the Rogers-Traylor Art Building. For more information, visit our Events page.
Anne Mondro: Tethered is a series of intricately woven wire sculptures that reflect on the complex and often conflicting emotions associated with being a caregiver and care recipient simultaneously. Drawing from the artist’s personal experience as a mother and cancer survivor, Mondro processes the complex and often conflicting emotions with this experience through her making. Tethered seeks to portray these emotions as well as the impact that caring has in our healing.
Mondro is a studio artist, arts and health practitioner, and a professor in the University of Michigan Stamps School of Art & Design. Her artwork has been shown nationally and internationally including exhibitions at Ceres Gallery, Cranbrook Art Museum, Powerhouse Museum of Science and Design, and the Urban Institute for Contemporary Art. Mondro’s work is in the permanent collections of the University of Michigan Hospital and the Detroit Medical Center Children’s Hospital of Michigan. Her arts and health research focuses on designing and facilitating visual art programming for people living with dementia and their caregivers, with the intention of increasing social interaction, supporting learning and discovery, and building relationships. Mondro’s initiatives include Artful Approach™ and Retaining Identity: Creativity and Caregiving, programs for caregivers to learn how to engage people living with dementia in visual art activities. She has been awarded a National Endowment for the Arts grant and the Family Caregiver Alliance’s 2015 Rosalinde Gilbert Innovations in Alzheimer’s Disease Caregiving Legacy Award in Creative Expression for her course Memory, Aging & Expressive Arts. Mondro has presented at national and international conferences on creative aging and dementia care including the Association for Medical Humanities (2021), the British Society of Gerontology (2018), 9th Annual International Arts and Health Conference (2017), Culture, Health & Wellbeing International Conference (2017), and the National Center for Creative Aging (2016).

Rosemary Meza-DesPlas: A Meandering Line
2025-09-03 - 2025-10-10 | Lower Traylor Gallery
A Meandering Line is on view in the Lower Traylor Gallery from September 3 through October 10, 2025. Rosemary Meza-DesPlas will give an artist talk on Friday, Sept. 5, at 12:00pm, and will host a drawing workshop on Friday, Sept. 5, at 2:30pm in the Rogers-Traylor Art Building. For more information, visit our Events page.

A Meandering Line features meticulously embroidered human hair artworks by Rosemary Meza-DesPlas. Artist Paul Klee once stated, “A line is a dot that went for a walk.” In Meza-DesPlas’ artwork, line is human hair. Line variations in her work suggest emotion, texture, three-dimensionality, and movement. This exhibition showcases experimentations and documents the evolutionary process of working with the first fiber: hair. These artworks reflect material culture, display sewing dexterity, communicate figuration, and manifest themes. Material culture of hair connects medium and meaning: this common fiber correlates to age and beauty. Identity and femininity resonate in Meza-DesPlas’ art. Her hand stitching can be contextualized, art historically, within the 1970s women’s craft movement; however, she is translating drawing techniques into the sewn line. A self-taught stitcher, she has sewn with her natural hair color, dyed hair, and graying hair.

Rosemary Meza-DesPlas, a multidisciplinary Latina/Coahuiltecan artist, incorporates fiber art, drawing, installation, painting, performance art, and video into her studio practice. Through figurative artwork, she amplifies the voices of women and their lived experiences. Socio-cultural issues, gender-based burdens, and political agency are explored through an intersectional feminist lens. The tenacity of her eight aunts in the face of personal tragedies and adversities was an early inspiration; their narratives contributed to her embrace of feminist ideology. Thematic continuity links Meza-DesPlas’ visual artwork with her academic writing and poetry. This written discourse provides a foundation for her performance artwork. In 2022, she was honored with a Latinx Artist Fellowship by the Mellon Foundation and the Ford Foundation. Through the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, she was awarded a grant in 2022 to create and stage a new performance artwork. Her work has been exhibited at many museums, including the Museum of Sonoma County, Spartanburg Art Museum, Marin Museum of Contemporary Art, Koehline Museum of Art, and the Art Museum of Southeast Texas. Meza-DesPlas received a BFA from the University of North Texas and an MFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art.

Mirage: Senior Exhibition
2025-04-09 - 2025-04-30 | Lower Traylor Gallery
Located in the Lower Traylor Gallery, the annual Senior Exhibition showcases examples of paintings, prints, drawings, and multimedia works made by graduating Studio Art majors. The exhibition will be open from Wednesday, April 9, through Wednesday, April 30. A reception with artist talks and snacks will be held Wednesday, April 23, 3:30-5:30, in the Rogers-Traylor Art Building. All are welcome!

reframing: women artists in the berea college art collection
2025-04-09 - 2025-04-30 | Masterpiece Gallery, Berea, KY, United States
This exhibition has concluded but a virtual catalog and exhibition gallery can be accessed here.
During the Spring 2025 semester, students in ARH/WGS 243: Women in Art explored the roles that women have played in the history of art across time as artists, as subjects, and as active agents of change. Towards this goal, we examined and questioned long-accepted models of artistic creativity, scholarship, and curatorial practice that have upheld the ideal of the “male artistic genius” which has largely resulted in the exclusion of women from the mainstream art historical canon. To better understand the structural barriers that have inhibited women’s full participation in the arts, we have also looked to feminist scholars and curators who have worked to recover women artists from the past and to reframe how art history has been written, exhibited, and taught since the 1970s.
To put what we have learned into practice, we turned to the College’s permanent art collection and set out to curate an exhibition of women’s art following a feminist art historical model – one that is collaborative, exploratory, recuperative, and actively resistant to traditional narratives. reframing: women artists in the berea college art collection brings greater attention to the varied ways that women have achieved professional success and personal fulfillment through their creative practice. As these artworks show, in spite of very real and challenging obstacles, women have pursued art in order to pass down collective histories, create and foster kinship bonds, share their own perspective, and challenge dominant discourses and representations of the so-called “feminine” experience.
This exhibition has concluded but a virtual catalog and exhibition gallery can be accessed here.
Image credit: Rosemary Feit Covey (South African, b. 1954), Reflection, etching, late 20th century, Gift of Shelly and Gerald Elliott, 2024

Isaac Couch: Occupied
2025-02-24 - 2025-03-14 | Tredennick Gallery
Occupied features a collection of work shirts and tarps that textile artist and designer Isaac Couch calls Ghosts. These Ghosts refer to embodiments of energies from the past that manifest themselves in the present. As Couch says, “At the current political and economic moment, we are reminded yet again that history repeats itself if we do not learn from our mistakes. I find it important to conjure these Ghosts again as a reminder to myself and the community around me that we must stay woke despite how easy it may be to fall asleep.”

This special exhibition was organized and curated by Berea College student Soreyda Begley and supported by the Doris Ulmann Galleries, the Carter G. Woodson Center, and the Student Government Association. This exhibition will be on view from February 24 through March 14 in the Doroth Tredennick Student Gallery.
Isaac Couch graduated from the University of Kentucky with a degree in Merchandising Apparel and Textiles and earned his Master’s of Design at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Couch has received numerous fellowships, including the Luminarts Fashion Fellowship (2021), the Fashion Council Fellowship (2021), and the Arts Club of Chicago Fellowship (2023-2024). He has exhibited his work widely, most recently at the Weinberg Newton Gallery, the Comfort Station, and the Co-Prosperity Sphere in Chicago and, closer to home, at the Lexington Art League. Couch currently teaches at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and is an Artist in Resident with the Cliff Dwellers and the Chicago Artist Coalition.
Soreyda Begley is an arts and culture activist who blends her background as a garment worker, fashion designer, and performance artist with community organizing and advocacy. She is double majoring in Political Science and African and African American Studies. Begley is active on campus, serving in multiple leadership positions as the Student Government Association Junior Senator, the Art Committee’s Co-Chair, and the Black Students Union Bridging the Gap Chair.

Liz Ensz: Ground Truthing
2025-01-29 - 2025-03-14 | Lower Traylor Gallery
Liz Ensz: Ground Truthing features works of textiles and sculpture that explore the semblance of place as understood through cartographic measurements, embodied experiences, and technological mediations. Responding to the Lower Traylor Gallery’s architecture, and informed by the stratigraphy of the geological record, this exhibition embraces spatial and temporal disorientation as a device for shifting perspective and learning to view the Earth’s past, present, and future as strange and unstable. This exhibition will run from January 29 through March 14.

Laura Colomb: Sinkhole
2025-01-22 - 2025-02-28 | Upper Traylor Gallery
Laura Colomb’s painting practice focuses on historic sites and preserve land within Florida, a place she sees as one of many dualities. For Colomb, the sinkhole embodies this duality. Sinkholes create crystal clear natural springs for swimming and diving, but they can also destroy lives and property within seconds, holding both intense wonder and terror alike. Laura Colomb: Sinkhole explores this contradiction and those contradictions inherent in our current and historic use (and abuse) of our environments.
This exhibition will be on view from January 22 through February 28 in the Upper Traylor Gallery.

The Illustrated Memoir Project
2025-01-13 - 2025-01-31 | Tredennick Gallery
On view in the Dorothy Tredennick Student Gallery are memoirs produced as part of The Illustrated Memoir Project, a nonprofit organization based in Cincinnati, Ohio. The Illustrated Memoir Project engages refugee and immigrant youth to write and illustrate true stories from their lives. The goal of this project is to foment intellectual self-trust in the participants, center their lived experience, enhance social emotional learning, and increase literacies. Through sharing these stories, the Project seeks to foster a richer understanding of the experience of refugee and immigrant youth and build a more welcoming global community. This special, short-term exhibition will be open from January 13 through January 31.

Eddy López: verso(s)
2024-10-30 - 2024-12-04 | Upper Traylor Gallery
Verso is the reverse of something, a coin, a painting, a photograph. Verso, in Spanish, is a conjunction of words that make up a poem. Eddy López: verso(s) is a print media exploration on the dangers of nostalgia and representation using photographs and writings from the Nicaraguan revolution and civil war of the 1970s and 1980s. Using archival war photographs, the versos of these prints are used to obfuscate the horrific contents of the fronts, critiquing the nature of representations of war. Through composite prints, the versos of Nicaraguan poets and writers, dreaming of a liberated homeland, are layered into chaotic reflections of a lost revolution. A utopia, fleeting, in versos. This exhibition will be on view October 30 through December 4 in the Upper Traylor Gallery.

Marika Christofides: Life Cycles
2024-10-23 - 2024-12-04 | Lower Traylor Gallery
Life Cycles features digital collage-based print works by Oklahoma-based artist Marika Christofides that depict abstracted biomorphic forms in various stages of transformation. Motifs change and replicate across the works in the exhibition, mimicking the stages of an organism’s biological development. The works in Marika Christofides: Life Cycles explore what it means to “become” through a lens that combines bioscientific concepts with feminist concerns and underlying personal narrative – asking questions about identity, embodied experience and gender roles in an advancing world. The exhibition is on view in the Lower Traylor Gallery from October 23 through December 4, 2024.

Lisa Kriner: To Walk, To Remember, To Record
2024-09-11 - 2024-10-18 | Upper Traylor Gallery
To Walk, To Remember, To Record, featuring work by Professor of Art Lisa Kriner, explores the act of walking through the landscape, remembering those walks, and recording my experiences of the spaces around me through drawings, embroidery, and handweaving.

Lonnie & Twyla Money: 50 Years of Kentucky Folk Art
2024-09-04 - 2024-10-11 | Lower Traylor Gallery
The Doris Ulmann Galleries is excited and honored to be the final stop on the tour of the Lonnie & Twyla Money: 50 Years of Kentucky Folk Art exhibition. Prior to arriving at Berea College, this exhibition of carefully carved and painted wooden sculptures was featured at KMAC Contemporary Art Museum in Louisville and the Kentucky Folk Art Center at Morehead State University.
Please join us Wednesday, September 4, at 4:30 for our first program of the academic year! In celebration of the opening of Lonnie & Twyla Money: 50 Years of Kentucky Folk Art, author Karen Money and the artists Lonnie and Twyla Money will be with us to talk about their work and the process of organizing this very special traveling exhibition, which developed out of Abney’s dedicated work writing a book on the Moneys’ collaborative art practice. Abney’s book, of the same title, is available at most local booksellers in the state and online.
Lonnie & Twyla Money: 50 Years of Kentucky Folk Art and associated events are co-sponsored by the Doris Ulmann Galleries and the Loyal Jones Appalachian Center and are generously supported by the William A. and Leola Piper Boyce Art Exhibition Endowment Fund.

Picturing Appalachia: Views from the Permanent Collection
2024-08-28 - 2025-03-14 | Masterpiece Gallery, Berea, KY, United States
Picturing Appalachia: Views from the Permanent Collection, located in our Masterpiece Gallery, centers artwork and artifacts that engage with the landscape, labor, craft traditions, and people that have called the Appalachian region home. Well-known artists and photographers including Henry Ossawa Tanner, Doris Ulmann, Walker Evans, and Aaron Siskind are presented alongside lesser known and unrecorded artists and makers who either came from or traversed the region and felt inspired to document what they saw. Though by its very nature incomplete – as all exhibitions are – this show seeks to highlight what makes Appalachia so beloved and special and to encourage visitors to think deeply about the rich, complicated history of how this place and its people have been presented in visual art and culture.
Special thanks to our colleagues at Loyal Jones Appalachian Center and Hutchins Library and our summer intern, Joshua Kells (Berea College Class of 2026) for their invaluable contributions to this show.

Catharsis: Senior Exhibition
2024-04-12 - 2024-05-01 | Doris Ulmann Galleries
The annual Senior Exhibition showcases bodies of work made by graduating Studio Art majors. Catharsis: Senior Exhibition showcases examples of paintings, prints, sculpture, and fiber arts that are spread through the Upper Traylor Gallery, Lower Traylor Gallery, Masterpiece Gallery, and the Dorothy Tredennick Student Gallery. The exhibition will be open from Friday, April 11, through Wednesday, May 1. A reception with artist talks and snacks will be held Wednesday, April 24, 3:30-5:30, in the Rogers-Traylor Art Building. All are welcome!
Featuring work by:
Hayley Campbell
Thomas Chai
Nicole Eller
Daisy Martin
Taylor Nordmoe
Casey Plas
Ellen Schley
Josh Szidik
YoungSoon Takei
Annika Tuls

Click through the slideshow below to view some of the works featured in Catharsis: Senior Exhibition.

Work by Taylor Nordmoe, Daisy Martin, and Nicole Eller in the Lower Traylor Gallery

Work by Daisy Martin, Nicole Eller, and Annika Tuls in the Lower Traylor Gallery

Work by Daisy Martin, Nicole Eller, and Hayley Campbell in the Lower Traylor Gallery

The Lower Traylor Gallery, with work by Hayley Campbell, Taylor Nordmoe, Daisy Martin, and Nicole Eller

Work by Ellen Schley in the Masterpiece Gallery

Work by Josh Szidik in the Tredennick Gallery

View of the Upper and Lower Traylor Galleries

Work by Nicole Eller and Annika Tuls in the Lower Traylor Gallery

Work by YoungSoon Takei, Casey Plas, and Thomas Chai in the Upper Traylor Gallery

Pop-Up! Exhibition: Casandra Cutter and Charlie Trowbridge
2024-03-26 - 2024-03-30 | Tredennick Gallery
This week-long pop-up exhibition features work by Student Craft Apprentices Casandra Cutter and Charlie Trowbridge. Casandra and Charlie spent several months making, learning, and sharing their expertise at Student Craft, culminating in the work shared in this show.
Casandra Cutter is a broom maker and folk craft disciple currently living and working in South Texas under the name Sisterwolf. After 17 years in a skilled trade, Casandra turned their full-time attention to the craft in 2023. Her work is informed by vast and varied life experience, a reverence for tradition, and a modern reclamation of “women’s work.” Casandra produces utilitarian objects that advocate sovereign domesticity by combining purpose with indulgence.
Charlie Trowbridge is a cabinet maker based in Chicago, Illinois. He has a BFA in Industrial Design from DePaul University. His work includes furniture and built-in cabinetry, with a particular interest in objects made for kitchens and hospitality spaces.

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Berea students, faculty, and staff are welcome to exhibit their work in the Dorothy Tredennick Student Gallery throughout the academic year. To learn more about how to organize a pop-up exhibition of your own, reach out to Dr. Kelsey Malone (malonek2@berea.edu).

Kate Roberts: in care of
2024-01-31 - 2024-03-15 | Lower Traylor Gallery

Samuel L. Dunson, Jr.: Actions Affirmed
2024-01-24 - 2024-03-01 | Upper Traylor Gallery

Intimacy: Photographs from the Collection of Joseph Goins
2023-11-01 - 2023-12-06
The black and white photographs featured in this exhibition present images of intimacy, examining the spiritual, emotional, physical, intellectual and experiential aspects of this essential component of the human experience. A gesture, a touch, bodies leaning into one another; a white sun above the Pacific Ocean; a nude self-portrait hidden in the branches of a tree… how is intimacy revealed? Featuring works from the early twentieth century through the present, Goins’ collection invites a deep questioning into our humanity and our being.
Click here for details about the opening reception of Intimacy: Photographs from the Collection of Joseph Goins, which will include a talk with Berea College graduate Joseph Goins (Class of 1986). The talk will take place in Presser Hall 128, just across the street from the Doris Ulmann Galleries, with a reception afterwards at the Galleries with snacks and refreshments. All are welcome; no RSVP required!

Sketch: Contemporary Artists in Conversation with Emily Grace Hanks
2023-10-25 - 2023-12-06 | Lower Traylor Gallery
The Berea College Art Collection is home to over 250 artworks by Emily Grace Hanks (American, 1886-1962), an artist, educator, and inventor who specialized in observational drawing, painting, and illustration. Though Hanks or her work isn’t well-known today, her career was extremely multifaceted and provides an excellent case study of the pathways that were available to aspiring women artists during this era. In the summer of 2023, Sara Olshansky and Esther Sitver, two artists from the region who also specialize in observational modes of drawing and painting, were invited to the Doris Ulmann Galleries as part of an extended artist residency. Working alongside the Galleries team, Olsansky and Sitver studied Hanks’ work and archival materials housed in the BCAC and created a series of artworks in response to what they found. The resulting artworks – and the exhibition as a whole – explore the connections that can be made between artists across time and raise questions about what it means to leave an artistic “legacy.” What can we find when we look to the past? What can an archive reveal… and what does it leave obscured? And how can we fill in the gaps?
Click here for details on our Artist Talk with Artists Sara Olshansky and Esther Sitver will join the Doris Ulmann Galleries staff to discuss their work and the collaborative curatorial process behind the exhibition, Sketch: Contemporary Artists in Conversation with Emily Grace Hanks, which will be open in the Lower Traylor Gallery from October 25 to December 6.
Sara Olshansky is a draughtsperson and 2D media artist based in Louisville, Kentucky. She graduated from Hite Art Institute at the University of Louisville in 2018 with two degrees in 2D Studio Art and Art History, and a minor in Spanish Language. She has received numerous awards and grants in support of her research and travels, and her work is featured in several public collections as well as private collections across the U.S. Olshansky is interested in exploring addition and erasure of imagery on a single picture plane and how this technique might mirror construction and perception of lived experience and memory.
Esther Sitver is a Knoxville, Tennesee-based illustrator who merges vintage aesthetics with contemporary progressive ideas and humor. Her artwork explores the observable world through the female gaze. Her love for traditional pen and ink drawing pulls together her specialties: portraiture and figure drawing, editorial illustration, pattern design, and plein air painting. Sitver earned a BFA in Illustration from the Ringling College of Art + Design in 2020 and currently works as a freelance artist and for the Knoxville Museum of Art. Sitver has exhibited her work around the southeast, with recent exhibitions at The Emporium and Rala (both in Knoxville, TN). When she’s not scribbling, she can be found rollerskating and hiking around East Tennessee.
Click through the slideshow below to view some of the works featured in Sketch: Contemporary Artists in Conversation with Emily Grace Hanks:
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Meredith Setser: Immaculate Crude
2023-09-13 - 2023-10-20 | Upper Traylor Gallery
Meredith Setser, a fibers artist and art professor at Indiana University, creates large-scale abstract textile works composed of handmade felt that explore the current cultural landscape figuratively. On a visual level, the works in Meredith Setser: Immaculate Crude reference the history of textile craft and Setser’s interests in geology and ecological sciences. Setser’s work will be on view through Friday, October 20, and she’ll be on campus that day to give an artist talk and felting demonstration for the closing reception.
Click here for more details about our Artist Talk with Meredith Setser in conjunction with the closing reception for the exhibition, “Meredith Setser: Immaculate Crude,” which is on view at the Doris Ulmann Galleries through Friday,October 20. Setser’s large-scale fiber installations incorporate handmade felt and draw inspiration from geological forms and human interactions with the natural environment. She’ll also give a felting demonstration as part of her talk.
Refreshments and snacks will be available after the talk. This event is free and open to the public. No RSVP necessary.

Margo Duvall & Katherine Strause: Around and Around Again
2023-09-06 - 2023-10-13 | Lower Traylor Gallery
Capturing ordinary moments with wit, sentiment, and tenderness, the artworks on view in “Around & Around Again” welcome us into conversation about the circularities of human experience that transcend both time and individual circumstance: the moments of full freedom felt by children at play; the liminal space between adolescence and adulthood; the associations of ‘home’ that can be both fond and difﬁcult; the strength we gain from a supportive sisterhood.
Margo Duvall and Katherine Strause are both nationally recognized and awarded artists and educators from Little Rock, Arkansas. Duvall (Assistant Professor of Photography, University of the Ozarks) and Strause (Retired Chair and Professor of Painting, Henderson State University) share an interest, in both their pedagogical and professional practices, in exploring personal narrative as expressed through ephemera and found imagery.

Abstraction / Pattern / Geometry / Design
2023-09-06 - 2024-03-13 | Masterpiece Gallery, Berea, KY, United States
ABSTRACTION / PATTERN / GEOMETRY / DESIGN highlights a curated selection of over 60 artworks from the Berea College Art Collection that showcase how artists and makers utilizing different styles, methods, places, and time periods have relied on and experimented with abstraction, pattern, geometry, and design in their work, to different ends and for varying purposes. This exhibition will run through mid-March.

dis/comfort: Senior Exhibition
2023-04-11 - 2023-05-03 | Upper & Lower Trayor Gallery
The annual Senior Exhibition showcases bodies of work made by graduating Studio Art majors. This year, “dis/comfort: Senior Exhibition” features pieces of mixed media, paintings, prints, and handmade books. The exhibition will be open from Tuesday, April 11, through Wednesday, May 3. A reception with artist talks and snacks will be held Wednesday, April 26, 3:30-5:00, in the Rogers-Traylor Art Building.
Click on the names below to explore our graduating seniors’ virtual showcases!
Elsa Black
Shaylee Hall
Abry Reeder
Betsy Schley
Liv West
Megan Woolverton

Student Pop-Up Exhibit: Abryanna Reeder & Ellen Schley
2023-02-27 - 2023-03-03
For one week only starting on Monday, February 27, Art students Abryanna Reeder (Class of 2023) and Ellen Schley (Class of 2024) are exhibiting work in the Dorothy Tredennick Student Gallery. On view through Friday, March 3, these artworks were created last semester in Prof. Dan Fineberg’s Sculpture and Intermedia course. The Tredennick Gallery is located to the right of the reception desk on the “Traylor” side of the Rogers-Traylor Art Building.
Abryanna Reeder is an Art major from the foothills of Appalachia in the northeastern region of Kentucky. She is committed to finding ways to incorporate her knowledge of the land, farming, and place attachments into her art.
Ellen Schley is a junior Art major from Sterling, Ohio. She is interested in making art that can be interacted with and experienced by the audience.

Leslie Smith & Katie Wigglesworth: Unusual Care
2023-02-22 08:00 - 2023-03-24 17:00 | Upper Traylor Gallery
“Leslie Smith & Katie Wigglesworth: Unusual Care” presents a collaborative body of work by printmaker and book artist Leslie Smith and textile artist Katie Wigglesworth. Made in response to research they completed at The Penland School of Craft about settlement schools and the revival of craft, the artworks featured in this exhibition investigate the great leap it takes both to start a craft school and be an artist in difficult times. This exhibition will be on view through March 24, and Smith and Wigglesworth will be giving an artist talk in the Upper Traylor Gallery at 3:00 on Tuesday, March 21.
