Wallach Art Gallery

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Wallach Art Gallery Columbia University's premier gallery. Free and open to the public. The Miriam and Ira D.

Wallach Art Gallery advances Columbia University's historical, critical, and creative engagement with the visual arts. Serving as both a laboratory and a forum, The Wallach Art Gallery offers opportunities for curatorial practice and discourse, while bridging the diverse approaches to the arts at the University with a welcome broader public. We present projects that meet one or more of the following criteria:

---Are organized by graduate students and faculty in Art History & Archaeology or by other Columbia scholars,
---Focus on the contemporary artists of our campus, or
---Present new scholarship on University special collections. Established in 1986, The Wallach Art Gallery is the University's premier visual arts space, presenting numerous critically acclaimed exhibitions, a dynamic range of programming, and publications that have made lasting contributions to scholarship. Since its beginning the gallery has presented exhibitions that examine a broad range of cultures, time periods, and styles, some of which have traveled to other national and international venues. The Wallach Art Gallery also presents projects that animate other university spaces as opportunity arises. The Wallach Art Gallery operates in close relationship to the Department of Art History and Archaeology, School of the Arts, and the university Libraries, particularly Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library.

Installation views from Chapter 1 of the exhibition "Allan Sekula: Fish Story" (October 2–December 20, 2026). The exhib...
10/22/2026

Installation views from Chapter 1 of the exhibition "Allan Sekula: Fish Story" (October 2–December 20, 2026).

The exhibition features photographs alongside passages of text written by the artist.

On a text panel adjacent to several photos in Chapter 1, Sekula writes the following:

Chapter 1: Fish Story
1.

Growing up in a harbor predisposes one to retain quaint ideas about matter and thought. I'm speaking only for myself here, although I suspect that a certain stubborn and pessimistic insistence on the primacy of material forces is part of a common culture of harbor residents. This crude materialism is underwritten by disaster. Ships explode, leak, sink, collide. Accidents happen everyday. Gravity is recognized as a force. By contrast, airline companies encourage the omnipotence of thought. This is the reason why the commissioner of airports for the city of Los Angeles is paid much more than the commissioner of harbors. The airport commissioner has to think very hard, day and night, to keep all the planes in the air.

For more information or events related to the exhibition, visit wallach.columbia.edu

Image Captions:

1-2 Boy looking at his mother. Staten Island ferry. New York harbor. February 1990. Courtesy Walker Art Center and Allan Sekula Studio
3, 6 Welder's booth in bankrupt Todd Shipyard. Two years after closing. Los Angeles harbor. Courtesy Walker Art Center and Allan Sekula Studio
San Pedro, California. July 1991. Courtesy Walker Art Center and Allan Sekula Studio
4-5 Pipe fitters finishing the engine room of a tuna-fishing boat. Campbell Shipyard. San Diego harbor. August 1991. Courtesy Walker Art Center and Allan Sekula Studio
7 Remnants of a movie set. Abandoned shipyard. Los Angeles harbor. Terminal Island, California. January 1993. Courtesy Walker Art Center and Allan Sekula Studio

A full-length biography on the life of Arthur Mitchell (1934–2018), one of the first Black principal dancers with New Yo...
10/21/2026

A full-length biography on the life of Arthur Mitchell (1934–2018), one of the first Black principal dancers with New York City Ballet, and the co-founder of the Dance Theatre of Harlem, has just been published by Yale University Press.

Authored by Barnard Professor Emerita of Dance Lynn Garafola, the book is based on decades of research and exclusive interviews.

In 2018, Garafola curated the Wallach Art Gallery exhibition "Arthur Mitchell: Harlem's Ballet Trailblazer" (January 13–March 11, 2018), which featured rare photographs, drawings, posters, memorabilia, and video footage from Mitchell’s personal archive, which he donated to Columbia University’s Rare Book & Manuscript Library in 2014.

10/21/2026

In the coming weeks, both Columbia and Princeton are hosting events that explore the impact of Allan Sekula's "Fish Story" and Related Works.

These events are being sponsored by Columbia University's Wallach Art Gallery, and Princeton University departments of Comparative Literature, English, and Program in Media and Modernity.

Scheduled Events:
Tuesday, October 27, 7 pm
Film Screening
Allan Sekula and Noël Burch’s "The Forgotten Space" (2010)
134 Small Auditorium
Princeton University Art Museum
Princeton Campus

Wednesday, October 28, 5 pm
Book Presentation
"Amphibious Realities: the Documentary Poetics of Allan Sekula"
Gail Day and Steve Edwards
Betts Auditorium
Architecture Building
Princeton Campus

Saturday, October 31, 1 pm
Symposium
Revisiting Allan Sekula's "Fish Story"
The Lantern
Lenfest Center for the Arts | 8th floor
Columbia Manhattanville Campus

Saturday, November 7, 1 pm
Film Screening
Allan Sekula's "Lottery of the Sea"
The Katharina Otto-Bernstein Screening Room
Lenfest Center for the Arts | 2nd floor
Columbia Manhattanville Campus

Through December 20, 2026
Exhibition
Wednesdays–Sundays, 12noon–6 pm
"Allan Sekula: Fish Story"
Wallach Art Gallery
Lenfest Center for the Arts | 6th floor
Columbia Manhattanville Campus

The Columbia exhibition and events are hosted by Wallach Art Gallery at Columbia University, New York. Wallach Art Gallery

The Princeton events are hosted by the Department of Comparative Literature. Co-sponsored by the Committee for Film Studies, Humanities Council Princeton Humanities Council, Humanities Initiative, Department of English Department of English, Princeton University, Department of Art & Archaeology Art & Archaeology Princeton U, Program in Media and Modernity Media + Modernity Princeton, European Cultural Studies, and Princeton University Art Museum Princeton University Art Museum

OPENING IMAGE:

Allan Sekula, "Boy looking at his mother. Staten Island Ferry. New York harbor. February 1990," from the series "Fish Story" (1988–1995). Cibachrome print, 33-1/8 x 23-5/8 x 1-3/4 in. framed. Courtesy Walker Art Center and Allan Sekula Studio

Sarah Russell, an art history doctoral candidate at Columbia University, has been named the 2026-27 Center for Spain in ...
10/14/2026

Sarah Russell, an art history doctoral candidate at Columbia University, has been named the 2026-27 Center for Spain in America (CSA) Curatorial Fellow at the Meadows Museum in Dallas, Texas. Since starting the fellowship on October 5, 2026, Russell has been pursuing original research in 17th-century Spanish painting at the museum, which has extensive holdings of Spanish art, including works by El Greco, Diego Velázquez, Juan Carreño de Miranda and Claudio Coello. Supported by the Center for Spain in America in collaboration with the Centro de Estudios Europa Hispánica (CEEH), the fellowship is designed to advance new scholarship in Spanish art while providing emerging scholars with hands-on curatorial experience.

During her fellowship, Russell will continue to work on her doctoral dissertation, "The Art of Undeception in the Spanish Golden Age," while contributing to curatorial initiatives at the Meadows. Much of her time will be devoted to studying the still lifes that will inform the final chapter of her dissertation focused on trompe l’oeil.

Sarah Russell is the curator for the Wallach Art Gallery's 2027 exhibition “Engaño: The Art of Illusion in Early Modern Spain”. This exhibition brings together a rich array of seventeenth-century Spanish art from more than 25 U.S. museums, and focuses on the tension between truth and deception in Golden Age Spain. It addresses questions about deceptive illusion—or engaño—that permeated the visual arts as well as religion, philosophy, science, and literature. This pervasive concern was with optical mistakes, the duplicty of other people ,and the failure to perceive transicence of earthly life. While painting and sculpture designed to trick the eye was commonplace across early modern Europe, artistic deceit had a distinct resonance in Spain, animating contemporary discourse, raising questions about the nature of appeareances and reality, truth and illusion.

IMAGE 1: Columbia University Art History PhD candidate Sarah Russell
IMAGE 2: The Meadows Museum holds one of the largest and most comprehensive collections of Spanish art outside Spain.

Five stills from Allan Sekula's film "The Lottery of the Sea", 179 minutes, color, sound. English, Spanish, Gallego with...
10/07/2026

Five stills from Allan Sekula's film "The Lottery of the Sea", 179 minutes, color, sound. English, Spanish, Gallego with English subtitles. Camera, Writing, Voice: Allan Sekula. Editing: Elizabeth Hesik.

Screening on the afternoon of November 7, 2026, Allan Sekula’s "Lottery of the Sea" offers a portrait of maritime life in moving images. Filmed and narrated by the artist while traveling at sea and to ports including Panama City, Barcelona, Athens, and New York City, among others, the work is being shown in conjunction with the Wallach Art Gallery exhibition "Allan Sekula: Fish Story" (10/2–12/20/2026) and its meditations on maritime landscapes, mythologies of the sea, and globalization.

"The Lottery of the Sea" also addresses environmental disasters at sea with extended footage of the 2002 MV Prestige oil spill and subsequent clean up. Sekula described this meditative video montage as “a meandering, essayistic voyage from seaport to seaport, waterfront to waterfront, coast to coast.”

The screening is introduced by Alexander Alberro, Virginia Bloedel Wright '51 Professor of Art History, Barnard College, Columbia University.

About this work Allan Sekula wrote: "'The Lottery of the Sea' takes its title from Adam Smith, who, in his famous Inquiry into the 'Wealth of Nations' (1776) compared the life of the seafarer to gambling. Thus notions of risk were introduced by Smith through an allegory of the sea's dangers, especially for those who did the hard work, and then, secondarily, for those who invested in ships and goods.

The film asks, is there a relationship between the most frightening and terrifying concept in economics, that of risk and the category of the sublime in aesthetics? We know that the sea a primordial source of sublimity, especially in the 18th century.

This film is an offbeat diary extending from the presumably "innocent" summer of 2001 through to the current "war on terror" all by way of a meandering, essayistic voyage from seaport to seaport,waterfront to waterfront, coast to coast."

Register at https://events.leapevents.com/event/the-lottery-of-the-sea-screening

10/02/2026

Thanks to all who attended the Preview of 'Allan Sekula: Fish Story" at Wallach Art gallery on October 1, 2026.

The Wallach Symposium "Revisiting Allan Sekula's Fish Story" takes place on Saturday, October 31, 2026.Please join us fr...
09/30/2026

The Wallach Symposium "Revisiting Allan Sekula's Fish Story" takes place on Saturday, October 31, 2026.

Please join us from 1–4:30pm at the Lenfest Center for the Arts on Columbia University's Manhattanville campus for presentations by:

Gail Day, Professor of Art History and Critical Theory, University of Leeds

Steve Edwards, Manton Professor of British Art and Director of the Manton Centre for British Art, Courtauld

Joe Riley, Assistant Professor of Art, Reed College

Ben Young, Clinical Assistant Professor, HIDA School of Art, Arizona State University.

"Revisiting Allan Sekula's Fish Story"
Saturday, October 31, 1–4:30pm
The Lantern
Lenfest Center for the Arts | 8th Floor
629 W 129th Street New York, NY 10027

Visit wallach.columbia.edu/events for more information or to register

The Wallach Art Gallery is pleased to present "Allan Sekula: Fish Story" (1988–1995), the magnum opus by the renowned Am...
09/30/2026

The Wallach Art Gallery is pleased to present "Allan Sekula: Fish Story" (1988–1995), the magnum opus by the renowned American photographer, writer, filmmaker, theorist, and critic who sought to make visible the wide-ranging disruptions caused by containerized shipping and its impact across the globe.

On loan from the Walker Art Center, "Fish Story" offers meditations on maritime landscapes, mythologies of the sea, and the changing nature of cargo shipping as a way to explore how the neoliberal shift toward globalization plays out in the lives of workers and the seaports where they reside.

The Wallach Art Gallery exhibition (10/2–12/20/2026) is the first time this seminal research-based photo essay is presented in New York in its entirety.

Wallach Art Gallery hours are 12–6pm Wednesdays–Sunday.

We are conveniently located near the 125th Street stop on the 1 train.

Oct 2—December 20, 2026
"Allan Sekula: Fish Story"
Wallach Art Gallery
Lenfest Center for the Arts
615 West 129th Street | 6th Floor
New York, NY 10027

More information: wallach.columbia.edu

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615 West 129th Street
New York, NY
10027

Opening Hours

Wednesday 12pm - 6pm
Thursday 12pm - 6pm
Friday 12pm - 6pm
Saturday 12pm - 6pm
Sunday 12pm - 6pm

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+12128546800

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