Events and exhibitions
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An education in art goes beyond building knowledge and technical skills, it’s about finding one’s voice, igniting curiosity, connecting with others, making meaning of the present and discovering a place in the world. It is important to celebrate successes together because the experiences and relationships one creates here will inform the rest of their life.
ASU Events
Exhibitions
Yonia Fain’s Map of Refugee Modernism | A project with artist Yevgeniy Fiks
Feb 23 to March 19 | Harry Wood Gallery
Artist lecture | March 18 | 10 to 11:30 a.m.
Closing reception | March 18 | 5 to 7 p.m.
Starting in the nineteenth century, millions of Jews left Eastern Europe. Whether they escaped pogroms or sought new economic and educational opportunities abroad, the generation of Jewish artists who grew out of this migration lived simultaneously in the world of Yiddish culture and the emerging world of modernism. Later, in the twentieth century, the careers of Eastern European artists deeply connected to Yiddish culture were cut short by the Holocaust; many of those who survived became refugees.
“Yonia Fain’s Map of Refugee Modernism” explores one chapter in the peripatetic biography of modernist painter and Yiddish writer Yonia Fain (1913–2013). During the Second World War, Fain fled Eastern Europe to Asia to escape Nazi persecution, but was forced to live in Shanghai for the duration of the war. Later Fain moved to Mexico City, where he was befriended by luminaries in the Mexican art world, represented the country abroad and exhibited his work in the Palacio de Bellas Artes. Fain’s time in Mexico City is chronicled in this exhibition, including his since destroyed mural for the Memorial Chapel in the Panteón Israelita at the Cementerio Ashkenazi, which has been reimagined for this exhibition by Phoenix-based painter Rachel Kornovich.
Part of a series on art histories of Yiddishland developed by Yevgeniy Fiks, "Yonia Fain’s Map of Refugee Modernism” intervenes in national art-historical narratives. Yiddishland is not a state and may be something more or less than a nation: even as these artists possess profound connections to Yiddish literature and culture, their national, ethnic and cultural identities remain unresolved (as in the hyphenated description of Fain as Lithuanian-Jewish-Mexican-American, and so on). Rooted in Yiddish-ness, working and living in at least two languages and traversing several countries and even continents, these artists radically expand our understanding of modernism.
Publication
“Reflections on Refugee Modernisms”
Edited by Chelsea Haines
Featuring contributions by Fiona Gray, Kathryn Hunter, Jillian Joiner, Gabriella Jording, Mehrdad Mirzaie, Morgan Rumsey, Jordan Tanguay, Yihan Yu and Koni Zhang.
Published on the occasion of "Yonia Fain's Map of Refugee Modernism," this edited volume includes new scholarship from graduate and undergraduate students in the seminar Refugee Modernism(s) taught by Chelsea Haines in Fall 2025. From reflections on the Armenian Genocide’s imprint on Arshile Gorky’s work to Japanese American women’s craft practices during internment, and from photography and displacement in post-Katrina New Orleans to current experiments in virtual reality and Holocaust memory in an emerging post-witness era, these essays intervene decisively in art-historical narratives that privilege the nation-state and its citizens. Collectively, they foreground artists who were migrants, exiles, colonial subjects, or internally displaced—figures whose histories have often been obscured or flattened to sustain settled narratives of artistic, historical, or national meaning.
This exhibition is presented in collaboration with "Art Workshop: Crossing Borders: Jewish Art, Literature and Migration in the Americas” and the “Books from Yiddishland(s): The History of Yiddish as a Migrant Language, Culture, and Art” featured collection at the Hayden Library.
“Yonia Fain’s of Refugee Modernism” is curated by Dr. Chelsea Haines with curatorial assistance by Mehrdad Mirzaie and Ninabah Winton. This project is supported by an HIDA subvention grant and Jewish Studies at ASU.
Gallery Hours
Monday – Thursday | 9 a.m. to 5 p.m.
Fridays | 9 a.m. to 3 p.m.
Closed on weekends and university holidays
Natural Perspectives | Senior BFA Exhibition
March 16 to 19 | Gallery 100
Opening reception | March 17 | 5 to 7 p.m.
Gallery 100 is pleased to present “Natural Perspectives”, a BFA group exhibition including artists working across drawing, painting, photography and animation. The exhibition brings together a group of artists whose mediums and practices confront themes such as visibility, identity and transformation through portraits, landscapes and composites. Through vastly different media and aesthetics, the artists challenge narratives that have shaped the representation of women, labor, performance and perception.
This exhibition explores how histories are remembered, how identities form and how bodies are viewed, consumed, celebrated or erased. Women are posed within male-dominated labor sites, transformed through surreal editorial staging, rendered in excess color and clown-like performance, compared to fruit as symbols of consumption, embedded within desert landscapes and dissolved into psychedelic portals of emotional inquiry.
Color is a major symbolic language used by each artist. Elements such as bold reds, rainbow palettes, desert light and saturated psychedelia refuse subtlety and demand attention. Rather than rewriting history, these works aim to reveal its ignorance, expose its distortions and imagine expanded futures. Together, the artists propose that landscapes hold incomplete stories, female figures carry inherited expectations and images shape memory. Through color symbolism, transformation and diverse media, “Natural Perspectives" invites viewers to alter their perspectives on what has already been historically perceived about landscapes, the female figure and composites.
Artists: Wendy Avila, Clay Bilitzo, Winter Hubbard, Averie Johnson, Jenny Lausen, Emmy Lozano, Rylee Moore, Trinity McCall and Aileen Sanchez.
Gallery Hours
Monday – Thursday | 12 to 5 p.m.
Friday | 12 to 3 p.m.
Closed on weekends and university holidays
Image courtesy the artists.
To Wilt | MFA Thesis exhibition
March 20 to 28 | Northlight Gallery
Opening reception | March 20 | 6 to 9 p.m.
This is not a romance. It is an inquiry into what love becomes under observation: image, transcript, measurement, replay. In translating intimacy into visual data, whether through artificial generation or camera-based capture, the work exposes the instability of emotion when subjected to analysis. The individual's tragedy is structural; each act of capture confirms the disappearance of love.
Gallery Hours
Thursday – Saturday | 12 to 5 p.m.
First and third Fridays of the month | 6 to 9 p.m.
Closed Sunday – Wednesday and university holidays
Image: Danyal Khorami.
In the Making: Craft, Community & Art Education in the Valley of the Sun
April 6 to 13 | Harry Wood Gallery
Opening reception | April 7 | 4 to 7 p.m.
Community sewing circle | April 11 | 11 a.m. to 2 p.m.
"In the Making: Craft, Community & Art Education in the Valley of the Sun" presents individual and collaborative textile works by artists and educators directly connected to the ASU Art Education program. The exhibition asks how teaching and artmaking inform one another, and how shared craft practices and values can deepen both.
Developed over the course of a year through sewing circles and writing workshops, the project frames craft as a mode of research, pedagogy and knowledge-making. It aims to recognize, amplify and strengthen intergenerational exchange among ASU art education students, faculty, new teachers and mentor teachers, creating a place and platform to acknowledge the depth and value of the creative work taking place in K-12 art classrooms across the greater Valley.
Image: Carolyn Hazel Drake.
Gallery Hours
Monday – Thursday | 9 a.m. to 5 p.m.
Fridays | 9 a.m. to 3 p.m.
Closed on weekends and university holidays
