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Welcome to the University Galleries at the Ben Shahn Center for the Visual Arts, William Paterson Un

The University Galleries present exhibitions of contemporary art, oversee the University’s art collections, and offer educational programs. The Galleries are dedicated to exploring creative processes, furthering scholarship, and fostering a dialogue about the visual arts and culture. We invite you to visit our exhibitions, attend public programs, and participate in this conversation.

04/16/2025

Yesterday we hosted our award ceremony and opening reception for “Here/Now: A Juried Exhibition of Student Artwork.” Thank you to all who were in attendance, and congratulations to our 2025 award winners:

Nicole Prior
Best in 2D Design, “Untamed”

Cynthia Boyd
Best in Animation, “A Magical Girl Transforms”

Fiona Healy
Best in Sculpture, “Vase”

Dante’ Blucher
Best in Drawing, “Descent of the Tooth Fairy”

Olivia Thompson
Best in Ceramics, “Self Portrait in Clay”

Saoirse LeFebvre
Best in Painting, “Lady in Green”

Rachel Kim
Best in Photography, “Silence”

“Here/Now” is on view in Court Gallery, Ben Shahn Center for the Visual Arts through May 1, 2025.

This exhibition showcases a variety of media including drawing, illustration, painting, photography, sculpture, textiles, animation, and graphic design. It was juried by William Paterson University Department of Art Faculty members James Blasi, Andrea Geller Jablonski, Michael Rees, and Robin Schwartz.

04/09/2025

OPEN NOW!
Here/Now: A Juried Exhibition of Student Artwork
April 7 – May 1

Award ceremony: Tuesday, April 15 | 12:30 p.m. – 1:00 p.m.
Followed by an opening reception: Tuesday, April 15 | 1:00 p.m. - 2:00 p.m.
Court Gallery, Ben Shahn Center for the Visual Arts

Here/Now, an annual exhibition featuring William Paterson University student artwork, will be on display in the Court Gallery, Ben Shahn Center for the Visual Arts from April 7 to May 1, 2025.

This exhibition showcases a variety of media including drawing, illustration, painting, photography, sculpture, textiles, animation, and graphic design. William Paterson University Department of Art faculty members James Blasi, Andrea Geller Jablonski, Michael Rees, and Robin Schwartz juried the exhibition.

Artists featured in the exhibition include: Olivia Thompson (Glen Rock NJ), Dante Blucher (Woodland Park, NJ), Jasmine Hurtado (Garfield, NJ), Alexzander Taliaferro (Garfield, NJ), Yael Jose Tapia (Park Ridge, NJ), Cynthia Boyd (Bronx, NY), Saoirse LeFebvre (Sussex, NJ), Kate Maitland (Hopatcong, NJ), Gianna Ballesteros (Waldwick, NJ), Katrina Pascale (Newton, NJ), Jonelly Campos (Hackensack, NJ), Ray Bruton-Moore (Burlington, NJ), Samir Hargrove (Somerset, NJ), Christina Lavorini (Sussex, NJ), Bobby Fenton (Hawthorne, NJ), Gianluca Vittorioso (Wayne, NJ), Rana Kizil (Wayne, NJ), Kimberly Cardenas (Clifton, NJ), Ariel Vallejo (Montague, NJ), J. Dylan Wilson (Wayne, NJ), Jeschelle Manansala (Hackensack, NJ), Jolie Conerly (Fair Lawn, NJ), Nicolas Minadeo (Totowa, NJ), Oliver Bornheimer (Lyons, NY), Nicole Prior (Hopatcong, NJ), Abby Herring (Wayne, NJ), Christian Montanez (Paterson, NJ), and Rachel Kim (Sicklerville, NJ).

Also on view is Before, After: Reflections on the Armenian Genocide, which traces generations of Armenian resiliency through the common thread of loss and survival. The exhibition examines the connections passed down through blood, migration and history; from genocide to diaspora to belonging.

04/03/2025

Post-Memory as Resistance: Documentation and Cultural Resilience in the Aftermath of Genocide

Post-memory describes the relationship that the generation after those who witnessed cultural or collective trauma bears to the experiences of those who came before, experiences that they remember only by means of the stories, images, and behaviors among which they grew up.

This conference will focus on hearing from descendants who have transformed traumatic events through documentation that includes photography and other modes of art making, gathering testimony from oral histories, and reassembling family histories from journals, letters, and genealogical research. Building on the foundation of our fall programming which introduced audiences to what the genocide was, this event will share how Armenians, Armenian Americans, and others have cultivated resilience, recovery, and genocide prevention amid ongoing conflicts. Our hope is that this programming will provide concrete examples of how individuals are actively transforming their trauma and will empower audience members to feel agency over their own stories.

Schedule
9:30 AM – Check-in and Breakfast
10:00 AM – Introduction
10:15 AM – Panel I: The Importance of Oral History in Genocide Education
11:15 AM – Break
11:30 AM – Panel II: Post-Memory, Photography, and Documentation
12:30 PM – Lunch
1:15 PM – Gallery tour of “Before, After” in South Gallery, Ben Shahn Center for the Visual Arts with Ara Oshagan and Diana Markosian

This event is open to the public. In-person and virtual attendance is available, and the required registration link is in our bio.

Sponsored by the William Paterson University Galleries, the William Paterson University Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies, and supported by funds from the Passaic County Cultural & Heritage Council.

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03/12/2025

Geoff Grogan is a cartoonist and mixed-media artist working in comics, animation, collage and painting. He has published comics since the 1990s and was the recipient of separate grants for his mixed-media collage comics, Look Out! Monsters and Fandancer. In 2010-11, he co-published (with cartoonist/artist Kevin Mutch) the broadsheet newspaper anthology, Pood, featuring full-page Sunday-page style comics from a broad array of independent cartoonists. More recently, he published Capt. Daiquiri Jones & the Space-Rockettes: The Sunday Adventures, a political satire in the form of a full-color tabloid newspaper comics section. His collages and paintings have been exhibited nationally and internationally, including at venues such as The Drawing Center in Manhattan. He is Associate Professor of Art & Art History at Adelphi University in Garden City.

“In this exhibition, my explorations within the Sunday page are represented by work from two publications, separated by a decade or so. While they differ greatly in style and purpose, they are united in my approach to the Sunday comics page as an integrated field, a kind of painting, as much as or more so than “story,” while at the same time still delighting in the interaction of text and image; thought and intuition, sequence and randomness, the rational and irrational.”

Image I: Geoff Grogan, “Korumbu Confesses,” 2010-11, paper collage, 32 x 27 inches, image courtesy of the artist

Image 2: Geoff Grogan, “Code Red,” page 14, 2024, giclee print on paper and Procreate, 30 x 24 inches, image courtesy of the artist

02/20/2025

Join us in the University Galleries for a unique and exciting event on February 25th from 6:00 PM - 7:00 PM at the Ben Shahn Center for the Visual Arts, Room 20. We are thrilled to present Carousel: A Comic Performance and Picture Show featuring live comic reading by Charles Fetherolf, Gideon Kendall, and R. Sikoryak. All three artists are featured in the spring exhibition “Sunday Comics: The Creative Page,” on view in Court Gallery through March 20, 2025.

This event is open to all, and we invite you to experience the magic of live comic reading and join in this art community-building experience. Don’t miss out on an unforgettable evening of creativity and connection!

11/21/2024

Cristina de Gennaro’s work explores aspects of the “feminine” in relation to aging and the association in Western culture of the “feminine” to earth and decay and the ironies these notions present regarding the obvious biological connections the feminine has to birth and life. She has exhibited her drawings and paintings, installations, videos, and performances in museums and galleries nationally including the Portland Art Museum, the Brattleboro Museum and Art Center, the Glyndor Gallery at Wave Hill, the Hunterdon Art Museum, Nexus Contemporary Art Center, the Dallas Museum of Art, The Women’s Building, and the Center on Contemporary Art, among others. She has been the recipient of fellowships from the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation, Millay Arts, the Fundación Valparaiso, the Saltonstall Foundation for the Arts, the Jentel Foundation, and was a visiting artist at the American Academy in Rome and the GlogauAIR Artist Residency Program. Her work has been reviewed in the New York Times, High Performance, Artweek, Seattle Post-Intelligencer, Dallas Times Herald, and The Oregonian, among others. She has received artist grants from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Oregon Arts Commission and participated in the New York Foundation for the Arts Mark 10 Program. De Gennaro received her MFA in Studio Art from Stanford University and is currently adjunct professor of Art at William Paterson University and New Jersey City University.

Come see “Turf Drawing: Westtown, NY” and “Turf Drawing: Westtown, NY #2” by de Gennaro, as well as the work of 10 other artists and members of the Department of Art faculty, in our “2024 Faculty Exhibition” on display in Court Gallery, Ben Shahn Center for the Visual Arts.

Cristina de Gennaro, “Turf Drawing: Westtown, NY,” 2022, charcoal on mylar, 42 x 42 inches, courtesy of Jessica Talos
Cristina de Gennaro, “Turf Drawing: Westtown, NY #2,” 2023, charcoal on mylar, 42 x 42 inches, courtesy of Jessica Talos

11/13/2024

”For many years, my work has focused on the South Caucasus, with particular attention given to Nagorno-Karabakh and Armenia. Nagorno-Karabakh, also known as Artsakh, is the home of indigenous Armenians who had lived there for millennia. After the fall of the Soviet Union, it declared its independence but remained unrecognized by the rest of the world. It was under constant threat and experienced frequent outbreaks of violence by neighboring Azerbaijan until fall 2023, when the Armenians were forced to flee the region.

I have documented Nagorno-Karabakh extensively over the years, making photos through the four-day war in 2016, the subsequent years of relative peace, the devastating attack by Azerbaijan in the fall of 2020, and its lingering aftermath. My purpose was to capture the realities of life amidst conflict and its aftermath. I photographed direct events of conflict and indirect consequences, subtle stories that filled the lives of Artsakh residents but were not always talked about.

On September 19, 2023, the Azerbaijani armed forces launched a war on Nagorno-Karabakh. This prompted a mass exodus of over 100,000 Armenians from the area, leaving behind their indigenous homeland. To this day, the refugees who fled to Armenia continue to face significant challenges in finding stability in life.”

Come see photographs from the series “A Troubled Home” by Anush Babajanyan, as well as the work of 12 other Armenian and Armenian American artists in “Before, After: Reflections on the Armenian Genocide” in South Gallery and East Gallery, Ben Shahn Center for the Visual Arts.

Anush Babajanyan, nine photographs from the series “A Troubled Home,” 2016-2023, photographic pigment print, 16 x 24 inches each, courtesy of Jessica Talos

11/06/2024

Marsha Goldberg was born in Boston, MA. She attended Brandeis University and Boston University and the Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture, later receiving an MFA from Rutgers’s Mason Gross School of the Arts. In addition to her studio practice and raising two daughters, she has taught studio art courses at Rutgers University, Kean University, and Middlesex College.

The series “Keep” began as a response to a place and its architecture, focusing on the massive Fort St. Jean in Marseille, France. Rooted in observation of form, light, and color, the imagery evolved to become intuitive and self-referential. Through a slow meditative process, the paintings achieve shifts in color, the completion of shapes, and a sense of tension and balance results from a carefully considered set of choices.

Come see “Keep LVII” and “Keep LVIII” by Goldberg, as well as the work of 10 other artists who are faculty of the Department of Art, in the current ”2024 Faculty Exhibition” in Court Gallery, Ben Shahn Center for the Visual Arts.

Slide 1: Marsha Goldberg, “Keep LVII,” 2023, acrylic and graphite powder on translucent Yupo, 25 x 38 inches, courtesy of Jessica Talos
Slide 2: Marsha Goldberg, “Keep LVII,” 2023, acrylic and graphite powder on translucent Yupo, close up, courtesy of Jessica Talos
Slide 3: Marsha Goldberg, “Keep LVIII, 2024,” acrylic on translucent Yupo, 25 x 38 inches, courtesy of Jessica Talos
Slide 4: Marsha Goldberg, “Keep LVIII,” 2024, acrylic on translucent Yupo, close up, courtesy of Jessica Talos

10/31/2024

“In these haunting black-and-white photographs, the subjects have been stripped of their surroundings. Their pasts, the lives they had known, had been obliterated. The darkness behind these survivors represents the silence from which they have now emerged, articulating their experiences for the world to know.

The photographs preserve the two essential markers of one’s physical identity: the face and hands. Noticeably, the passage of time, manifested in the furrowed foreheads and wrinkled, vein-marked hands, has not erased the reality or the pain of the Genocide. The intense emphasis on the face and hands ensures that each survivor is identified and accounted for. These are not headless torsos or indistinct faces. Rather, each instance of survival has been remembered.

These portraits, like the survivors themselves, function as testimonies of the Genocide and the subsequent lives in the Diaspora. In other words, these works are images of resistance. The survivors’ direct, confrontational gazes are no longer those of terrified young children fearfully looking into their perpetrators’ eyes begging for their lives, but rather, they are the defiant eyes boldly looking out and claiming a place—a voice—in history.”

Come see sixteen portraits from the iwitness series by Ara Oshagan & Levon Parian, as well as the work of 11 other Armenian and Armenian American artists in “Before, After: Reflections on the Armenian Genocide” in South Gallery and East Gallery, Ben Shahn Center for the Visual Arts.

Ara Oshagan & Levon Parian, Sixteen portraits from the “iwitness” series, 1996-2006, photographic pigment print, each print 20 x 20 inches, courtesy of Jessica Talos

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10/28/2024

Armenian Art, Culture, and Resilience

Join us Tuesday, November 12 from 4:00 - 6:30 p.m. for two programs celebrating Armenian art and resilience.

4:00 – 5:00 p.m. Tour of the exhibition “Before, After: Reflections on the Armenian Genocide” in South Gallery, Ben Shahn Center for the Visual Arts.

5:00 - 6:30 keynote and discussion, “Transforming Victimhood to Victorhood: Nurturing Resilience Post-Ottoman Turkish Genocide of Armenians,” in Science Hall West lobby featuring keynote speaker Vicki Shoghag Hovanessian, the cultural advisor of the embassy of the Republic of Armenia to the United States, as well as panel speakers Dr. Ani Kalayjian, the president and founder of ATOP MeaningfulWorld, and Lusine Yeghiazaryan, jazz musician.

Refreshments will be served.

RSVP by Monday, October 28 via linktree in our bio.

Image: Jacqueline Kazarian, “Armenia (Hayasdan),” 2015, archival pigment print, 122 x 262 inches, courtesy of Jessica Talos

10/15/2024

Join us this Thursday, October 17, for a morning of meditation and de-stressing in the University Galleries!

10:00 – 10:45 a.m.
Gentle Yoga and Meditation
South Gallery
Facilitated by Lucia McMahon, Professor and Chair of History, Philosophy, and Liberal Studies

11:00 – 11:45 a.m.
Dhrupad, The Ancient Meditative Music of India
Court Gallery
Performed by Payton MacDonald, Professor and Chair of Music

12:00 – 12:45 p.m.
Sound Bath Meditation
South Gallery
Facilitated by Katherine Roman

For yoga and sound bath, participants may be seated or lay down and are invited to bring a mat or blanket. A limited number of mats will be available.

10/09/2024

“This work is part of a process of what preceded it. Each piece has influenced the next. My interests are to paint and to create textiles. My instincts are to challenge the surface by connecting the two, or by simulating fiber with paint on a canvas.
My inspiration comes from all the connections I make to my past. From learning at a young age how to thread a needle, and then, later, working as a textile colorist and a painter. As well as all the new insights I gained while creating this work”.

Come see “Will Get There” and “Frayed” by Miriam Bisceglia, as well as the work of 10 other artists who are faculty in the Department of Art, in our 2024 Faculty Exhibition in Court Gallery, Ben Shahn Center for the Visual Arts.

Slide 1: Miriam Bisceglia, 2024, courtesy of Jessica Talos
Slide 2: Miriam Bisceglia, Will Get There, 2024, dyed linen, cotton yarn, glue, hand-stitched, 58 x 38 inches, courtesy of Jessica Talos
Slide 3: Miriam Bisceglia, Frayed, 2024, dyed linen, cotton yarn, glue, hand-stitched, 30 x 24 inches, courtesy of Jessica Talos

Address

300 Pompton Road
Wayne, NJ

Opening Hours

Tuesday	11am - 5pm
Wednesday	11am - 5pm
Thursday	11am - 5pm

Telephone

+19737202654

Website

http://www.wpunj.edu/coac/gallery

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