Archive
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Observed
March 22, 2024—April 26, 2024
Observed: Hypervisibility and Reclamation aims to explore the contradictions we face when surveillance is conflated with safety; when law enforcement agencies, governments, businesses, and institutions leverage digital and biometric technologies to track us, as well as our resistance and community responses.
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Ojuelegba
January 6—March 8, 2024
Ojuelegba is a new multisensory installation from renowned Nigerian artist Emeka Ogboh. Inspired by the district Ojuelegba in the heart of Lagos, Nigeria, Ogboh’s installation envisions an immersive experience where sight and sound entwine.
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Extra Medium | John Muse
September 8 - October 13, 2023
Extra Medium | John Muse , the gallery is divided: in the front, clusters of framed collages, a vitrine of journals and smaller works, and a large video projection of cut and painted paper; in the back, a studio where Muse works for the duration of the exhibition on more video, more collages, and more journals. Curated by Homay King, the exhibition is accompanied by a broadsheet publication, a program of Muse’s short films, and interactive games featuring guest collaborators.
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Seeing Sound
October 27 - December 16, 2023
Seeing Sound is an expansive exhibition that explores the current trajectory of sound as a dynamic branch of contemporary art practice, curated by Barbara London.
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Let's Get Free
March 17-April 21, 2023
Let’s Get Free: The Transformative Art and Activism of the People’s Paper Co-op showcases nearly ten years of cultural organizing campaigns and collaborative public art by the People’s Paper Co-op (PPC), an ongoing project of The Village of Arts and Humanities in North Philadelphia
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Currently
January 20-March 3, 2023
Currently is a participatory exhibition organized by artist Mark Menjívar that looks deeply at capital punishment in the United States. Through maps, signs, collaborative timelines, a reading table and spaces for imagination, visitors are invited to reflect on the complicated nature of state-sanctioned violence. Visitors will be invited to participate in ongoing collective research and leave reflections directly on the gallery walls, which will then become a publication at the close of the exhibition.
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Native America: In Translation
October 21 – December 11, 2022
Curated by the artist Wendy Red Star, gathers the wide-ranging work of nine Indigenous artists who consider the complex histories of colonialism, identity, and heritage. Exploring the historic, often fraught relationship between photography and Native representation, the exhibition offers new perspectives by established and emerging artists who reimagine what it means to be a citizen in North America today.
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Hee Sook Kim: Surfacing
September 2 – October 7, 2022
Hee Sook Kim’s survey exhibition Surfacing explores the richly painted and encrusted surfaces of her canvases and how these techniques and painterly strategies express the artist’s personal history, nostalgia, cultural affiliation, and moments of rebellion and resistance against systems that restrict reflection, growth, and healing.
Everlasting Playground 1, 2021 Acrylic, oil, rhinestones on canvas 40 x 120 in.
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Performing Past-Present: Transforming Reenactment
March 18–April 23, 2022
Curated by Sally Berger. Performing Past-Present: Transforming Reenactment features work by four contemporary artists—Sharon Hayes, Jennifer Karady, Dread Scott, and Marisa Williamson—who re-present historical issues, art, and events using conceptual, theoretical, and performance methodologies. Their works bring past events into the present with mixed media and video installations, material objects, photography, performance, and strategies of social practice. They use enactment and reenactment to unsettle rigid ideas about time, space, history, and memory, and to reposition, personalize, and embody them in new ways. Rooted in community and collaboration, their work transforms our understanding of and responses to history, politics, trauma, sexuality, and identity.
Marisa Williamson, The Fire (Wild is the Wind), 2017. Live animation, color, sound (Nina Simone’s Wild is the Wind), 5:03 min. Image courtesy of the artist.
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Condition Report
January 28–March 4, 2022
Condition Report, the latest exhibition from artist William Powhida, is a close examination of the often unobservable phenomena at play in American finance, culture, and politics. Through works from 2012 to the present including prints, drawings, paintings, and an updated version of the artist's evolving Possibilities for Representation installation, Powhida maps the current condition and possible futures of the American project. Accompanied by a small publication capturing a recent conversation between William Powhida and artist Mark Thomas Gibson, the exhibition offers insights, warnings, and inspirations for what was, what is, and what could possibly be.
Pandemic (Philadelphia), 2021. Watercolor on paper mounted on panel. 14 x 11 in., 2020, oil on canvas, 43 x 50 inches
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Slavs and Tatars present The Contest of the Fruits
September 10—December 12, 2021
The Contest of the Fruits takes a nineteenth-century Uyghur allegorical poem as the point of departure for investigations into language, politics, religion, humor, resilience, and resistance in a pluralistic world. It includes a virtual series, publication, new animation work, and exhibition at Haverford’s Cantor Fitzgerald Gallery by renowned artist collective Slavs and Tatars.
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Notes for Tomorrow
February 15-April 11, 2021
Notes for Tomorrow features artworks from around the world, brought together to reflect on a new global reality ushered in by the COVID-19 pandemic. With the ever-present backdrop of the crisis, Independent Curators International (ICI) turned to 30 curators from 25 countries to question and reassess values and relevance in contemporary culture, and to share an artwork they believe is vital to be seen today.
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Ying Li: Blossoms In A Sudden Strangeness
September 22–November 13, 2020
On March 11, 2020 Ying Li received notification that the Haverford College campus would be closing temporarily in response to the COVID-19 pandemic in Pennsylvania. What was initially forecast as a brief break soon became weeks and then months. Faced with time and a campus blossoming from winter to spring and spring to fall, Ying Li did what any artist would do and went to work, painting each day en plein air. The result is Blossoms in a Sudden Strangeness, an exhibition that captures the abstract beauty of Li’s creative output from March–August 2020.
Night Tulips, 2020, oil on canvas, 43 x 50 inches
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do it (home) Part 1 & Part 2
May 8-September 11, 2020
December 11, 2020 - March 27, 2021As many around the world are experiencing social distancing and orders to stay at home, the Cantor Fitzgerald Gallery is joining Independent Curators International (ICI) and over 30 art spaces around the world in sharing do it (home). A version of do it envisioned by Obrist in 1995, do it (home) assembles a set of artists instructions that can easily be realized in one’s own home.
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An Alarming Specificity
March 20-April 24, 2020
Featuring work by Shannon Finnegan, Chitra Ganesh, GenderFail, Yvette Granata, Lynn Hershman Leeson, Linda Stupart, and Eva Wŏ, An Alarming Specificity engages with human bodies which do not align with a fictional norm grounded in white patriarchal hegemony. Curated by Aubree Penney, the exhibition examines ways artists subvert the predominance of white, heterosexual, cis-male, non-disabled bodies as the default of humanity.
You’ve Earned a Licking (featuring Icon Ebony Fierce), Eva Wŏ
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Bicentennial City
January 24 - March 6, 2020
In 1976, America was having its 200th birthday and Philadelphia was chosen to host the party. For over a decade prior, the July 4th weekend stood as a site of possibility. The celebration drew an estimated two million visitors, and in some ways the city was able to catch its breath. Yet things did not go as planned. With a racist mayor, post-Vietnam malaise, and the galvanized resistance of marginalized groups, the Bicentennial in Philadelphia laid bare some of the most pressing questions of America’s national identity. As we revisit this fraught history, Philadelphia’s famous Liberty Bell transcends its index of freedom-ringing and comes to embody the deepest fissures in American life: there’s a crack in the bell.
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Kameelah Janan Rasheed: Scoring the Stacks (Experiment II)
October 25—December 15, 2019
Using a set of scores or performance instructions that riff on the traditions of musical notation, conceptual art, constrained writing techniques, and recreational mathematics, Kameelah Janan Rasheed’s Scoring the Stacks (Experiment II) encourages participants to explore Haverford’s newly renovated library, the arboretum, and other forms of institutional spaces and collections in unconventional ways.
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A Time for Farewells
September 6—October 11, 2019
In a contemporary moment fraught with unprecedented economic, political, and social turbulence, art has the power to instigate change and offer a vision for the future. Casting aside the constraints of traditional notions and existing power structures, the artists of the exhibition present sculptures, drawings, videos, and photographic works that collectively imagine a future radically different from our present, in the hope that the act of imagining can be an impetus for change.
Atul Bhalla, Anhedonic Landscape, 2019. Archival Pigment Print. Courtesy: Vadehra Art Gallery, Delhi.
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Molly Crabapple & Marwan Hisham: Syria in Ink
March 22—April 26, 2019
This exhibition includes over fifty original drawings by artist Molly Crabapple and the voice of author and journalist Marwan Hisham. With pen and brush, together they capture Syria from before its precipitous fall to its current state of crisis and mass displacement.
Aleppo Skyline, 2017, pen and ink on paper, 18 ¾ x 31 ¼ inches. © Molly Crabapple. Image courtesy the artist.
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Guadalupe Rosales: Legends Never Die, A Collective Memory
January 25—March 8, 2019
Since 2015, artist Guadalupe Rosales has been building an archive of vernacular photographs and ephemera connected to Latinx culture in Los Angeles. Her projects exist as both archives of physical objects and crowd sourced digital archives, assembled on her widely followed Instagram accounts: Veteranas & Rucas and Map Pointz. Guided by an instinct to create counternarratives, Rosales tells the stories of communities often underrepresented in official archives and public memory.
Shrine to Ever Sanchez, Guadalupe Rosales’s studio, 2018; Photograph by Mike Slack for Aperture. Courtesy Aperture.
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The Legacy of Lynching: Confronting Racial Terror in America
October 26—December 16, 2018
Seeks to spark conversation about the legacy of racial injustice in America today. Coordinated in collaboration with the Equal Justice Initiative (EJI) and the Brooklyn Museum with support from Google, this exhibition presents EJI’s groundbreaking research into the history of lynchings and connects it to digital media, documentary film, contemporary artworks, and archival materials.
Image courtesy lynchinginamerica.eji.org.
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Invitation to Paradise
September 7—October 12, 2018
With their busy modern lives, people often seek a place of physical and emotional healing. In the exhibition Invitation to Paradise, Hee Sook Kim, with her eye for beauty, fills the canvas with motifs from Korean folk paintings and thus invites the viewers into a meditative healing space.
Paradise Between 8 (detail), 2016, oil, acrylic, rhinestones on canvas.
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Unwilling: Exercises in Melancholy
March 23—April 27, 2018
Curated by Vanessa Kwan and Kimberly Phillips, Unwilling is a resistance and a proposition: it responds to the profound cultural reckoning we are witnessing in this moment in time, as the boundaries and exclusions of state-defined citizenship become increasingly fraught.
Noa Giniger, The Sorrow the Joy Brings, collage from steel engraving (Napoleons Grab, 1838), 2012. 16.5 x 21 cm. (publication detail). Courtesy of the artist.
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Black Atlas
January 26—March 9, 2018
Drawing on the photographic archives of the Museum of Ethnography in Stockholm, Black Atlas turns the ethnographic gaze onto itself, reflecting upon the administration of racialized labor for transporting artifacts from across the world to the collections of European museums.
Detail from The Administration, 2016 Inkjet prints on archival paper Courtesy the artist and Museum of Ethnography, Stockholm
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Futureproof
October 27–December 17, 2017
The artists in Futureproof engage with the many malleable interpretations of futureproofing, drawing from both the legacy of military and corporate scenario planning and the use of semi-fictionalized artifacts or archives as "proof," or evidence, of alternate timelines or futures yet to come.
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DEAR 1968,…
September 8–October 13, 2017
In Dear 1968,… artist Sadie Barnette mines personal and political histories using family photographs, recent drawings, and selections from the 500-page file that the FBI amassed after her father joined the Black Panther Party in 1968.
Detail from The Living Room, 2017. Custom wall vinyl, installation dimensions variable. © Sadie Barnette. Courtesy of the artist.
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Resistance After Nature
March 17—April 28, 2017
Curated by Kendra Sullivan & Dylan Gauthier, Resistance After Nature tracks the practices of artists who imagine and construct alternative approaches to such entangled ecological, political, and economic issues as Indigenous sovereignty and water rights, the fossil economy, ocean acidification, and deforestation.
Lake Mead. OakleyOriginals/Flickr/Creative Commons
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ALL BIG LETTERS
January 20–March 3, 2017
Curated by Vandalog Editor-in-Chief and Haverford alumnus RJ Rushmore ’14 on the 50th anniversary of modern graffiti, ALL BIG LETTERS approaches the medium as fundamentally entangled with its tools.
UNTITLED (CENSE, ET AL.) STEVE WEINIK, 2014. PHOTOGRAPH
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Bring Your Own Body
October 21—December 11, 2016
Bring Your Own Body: transgender between archives and aesthetics presents the work of transgender artists and archives, from the institutional and sexological to the personal and liminal. Taking its title from an unpublished manuscript by intersex pioneer Lynn Harris, the exhibit historicizes the sexological and cultural imaginary of transgender through a curatorial exploration of the Kinsey Archives.
Zackary Drucker, Southern for Pussy (2015). Film still. Courtesy of the artist.
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Ying Li: Geographies
September 9—October 7, 2016
Geographies surveys the past four years of work by the Chinese-born Li in a selection of more than 100 paintings and drawings on view at Haverford College, where she has taught since 1997.
Ying Li, The Hudson River, 2016. Oil on Panel, 16 x 16 in. © Ying Li.
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Among the Unburied
March 18, 2016—April 29, 2016
Three artists-cum-storytellers—Mauricio Arango (Colombia/USA), Marianne Nicolson (Kwakwaka’wakw/Canada), and Park Chan-kyong (South Korea)—invite us consider a world of ghosts as firmly planted in the complex geopolitics and cultural schisms of Colombia, the Pacific Northwest, and Korea.
Mauricio Arango, The Night of the Moon Has Many Hours, 2010. HD video, sound, 12-00. [production still]
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The Wall in Our Heads: American Artists and the Berlin Wall
October 23-December 13, 2015
Curated by Paul M. Farber, the exhibition commemorates the twenty-fifth anniversary of the reunification of Germany and reflects on legacies of division in American culture.
Leonard Freed, American Soldiers Stand Guard as the Berlin Wall is Put Up, 1961, Brigitte Freed/Magnum Photos
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The Past is a Foreign Country
August 28—October 9, 2015
Curated by Brendan Wattenberg, the exhibition features site-specific installations of immersive wallpaper prints and a chronicle of more than fifty buildings and civic structures throughout West Africa and France.
François-Xavier Gbré, Baie de Mermoz II, Dakar, Sénégal, 2012. © François-Xavier Gbré
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Archaeologies of Destruction, 1958-2014
March 20–May 1, 2015
Traces the archaeological remnants of "destructivism" or "destruction Art" in Latin America as they continue to reverberate in our present.
Marcos Kurtycz, Artefacto Kurtycz, 1982. Photograph by Adolfo Patiño, Facultad de Artes Plásticas U.V., Xalapa, Veracruz. Courtesy of Private Collection.
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Zoe Strauss: Sea Change
January 23 – March 6, 2015
Celebrated Philadelphia photographer Zoe Strauss traces the landscape of post-climate change America.
Grand Isle Beach, Grand Isle, Louisiana, Early July, 2010. © Copyright of Zoe Strauss.
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Memory Place Desire: Contemporary Art of the Maghreb and Maghrebi Diaspora
October 24-December 14, 2014
Features the works of 13 artists from the North African countries of Algeria, Morocco, Tunisia, and the Maghrebi diaspora.
Brown Eyes, from the series 'Kesh Angels, 2010/1431. Courtesy of Hassan Hajjaj and Taymour Grahne Gallery, New York, NY © Hassan Hajjaj
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Hee Sook Kim: The Spiritual Garden
September 5—October 10, 2014
A solo exhibition featuring recent paintings, prints, video, and installations by Hee Sook Kim, Associate Professor of Fine Arts at Haverford College.
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if I can't dance to it, it's not my revolution
Friday, March 21–Friday, May 2, 2014
if I can't dance to it, it's not my revolution takes as its starting point a maxim by anarchist feminist Emma Goldman to examine the political movement of anarchism through counter-cultural artistic practices.
Larry Fink, Black Mask, 1967
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Prison Obscura
January 24—March 7, 2014
Curated by Prison Photography editor Pete Brook, Prison Obscura presents rarely seen vernacular, surveillance, evidentiary, and prisoner-made photographs, shedding light on the prison industrial complex.
Ellen Gould, Prison Obscura illustration
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Brian Dettmer: Elemental
October 25—December 15, 2013
Sculptor Brian Dettmer's Elemental begins and ends as raw material, the physical texts that remain when histories and books slip away into the bits and bytes of the information age.
Brian Dettmer, Active Games and Contests, 2012
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A Stirring Song Sung Heroic
September 6–October 11, 2013
Features the work of photographer William Earle Williams, Audrey A. and John L. Dusseau Professor in the Humanities, Professor of Fine Arts, and Curator of Photography at Haverford College.
William Earle Williams, Interior, Fort Morgan, Battle Site, Mobile Bay, Alabama, 2003
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White Boys
March 22–May 3, 2013
Curated by Hank Willis Thomas and Natasha L. Logan, White Boys charts the ways artists are aestheticizing white, male identity in the United States today.
Eva O'Leary, Happy Valley, PA, 2012
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OPP: Other People's Property
January 25–March 8, 2013
Curated by Kalia Brooks, OPP: Other People's Property surveys the work of photo conceptual artist Hank Willis Thomas.
Hank Willis Thomas, Branded Head, 2003
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What Can a Body Do?
October 26–December 16 2012
Curated by Amanda Cachia, What Can a Body Do? features the work of nine contemporary artists who invent and reframe disability across a range of media.
Artur Zmijewski, An Eye for An Eye, 1998
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No Middle Way
September 7–October 12, 2012
Working from a deep engagement with the material and visual possibilities of painting, Ying Li builds a visceral connection with place using high volumes of oil paint to depict the landscape.
Ying Li, Dartmouth Spring #3 (Burst), 2012
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And The Winner is Nick Kahn
March 16–April 20, 2012
Investigates competition, cooperation, and community through a series of artist residencies, curricular interventions, and a massive skee-ball tournament involving all members of the Haverford community.
Nick Kahn vs. Chris Mills, April 20th, 2012
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People's Biennial
January 27–March 2, 2012
An exhibition that examines the work of artists who operate outside the "sanctioned" mainstream art world, recognizing a wide array of artistic expression present in many communities across the United States.
Jorge Figueroa (Pennsylvania), Untitled, 2007
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Through The Plain Camera
October 21—December 11, 2011
Through the Plain Camera celebrates photographers who take pictures that describe and yet transcend everyday experience, suggesting something about the specific interior lives of these artists.
Elizabeth Fleming, Rejected Popsicle, from "Life Is a Series of Small Moments," 2008
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Field Guide: Markus Baenziger
September 2—October 7, 2011
Using plastic resins, found objects, and various casting and carving techniques, artist Markus Baenziger invents floridly beautiful flora that often merge with or emerge from technological debris.
Markus Baenziger, Forever Never, 2005
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Possible Cities
March 18 – April 29, 2011
Seeks to complicate representations of Africa through a set of works on cities as sites of convergence of multiple pasts and futures and as collections of changing and changeable sites that may or may not be geographically contiguous.
Ingrid Mwangi, Eastleigh Crossing, 2009
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Sex Drive
January 28–March 4, 2011
Using photography, drawing, painting, video, sculpture, and installation, 22 artists bring their own pleasures and political dispositions to bear on identity and gender, romance and lust, strictures, and scandals.
Leon Golub, High Kick, 2002
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Problemy
September 3–October 8, 2010
Incorporating the drawings, paintings, digital prints and sculpture of Dufala Brothers Steven and Billy Blaise, Problemy plays with the humble yet hugely important artifacts of daily life.
Steven & Billy Blaise Dufala, Master Lock and Key, Photo: Claire Iltis
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Mapping Identity
March 19-April 30, 2010
Explores aspects of contemporary cultural identity and the effects of displacement, exile, transnationalism, hybridity, cosmopolitanism, and the state of the in-between.
Glenn Kaino, Graft (Ostrich), 2006, Photo: Lisa Boughter
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Imaginative Feats Literally Presented
October 23-December 11, 2009
Artists Jeanne C. Finley and John Muse explore the visual culture of America's contemporary wars through three video works.
Installation Shot, Flat Land, Photo: Lisa Boughter
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Beautiful Human
September 11-October 9, 2009
Presents unique explorations of human life by six Philadelphia-based artists: Donald E. Camp, Matthew Fisher, Laura Graham, Rob Matthews, Joshua Mosley, and James Mundie.
Installation Shot, Photo: Lisa Boughter