November 7 - December 8, 2024

"On the Move" is a photography exhibition celebrating the completion of an interdisciplinary inquiry at the unexpected intersection of physical therapy, photography and art history.  Awarded a UConn STEAM Innovation Grant in 2020, three early-career UConn professors created a study aimed at using creative movement and long-exposure photography to improve gait-training, motivation and quality of life for Parkinson's disease patients.  "On the Move" showcases the photographs created by participants during the study, and points to new horizons for collaborative research in the arts and sciences.  Visitors to the exhibition's opening reception will have the opportunity to make their own photographs via the same techniques used in the original study.  The exhibition is funded by a University of Connecticut School of Fine Arts STEAM Innovation Grant to principal co-investigators Clare Benson, Cristina Colón-Semenza and Charlotte Gray.

September 12 - October 13, 2024

Artists exhibiting in Significant Geometries utilize geometric shape to convey meaning in sculpture, painting, collage, and photography. The exhibiting artists are Helena Chastel, Paul D’Agostino, Will Holub, Seth David Rubin, Conny Goelz Schmitt, and Ellen Weider.

Conny Goelz Schmitt alludes to storytelling and knowledge in her ingenious sculptures created from vintage book parts. Ellen Weider’s paintings, distinctive in their mysterious arrangements of shape and color, suggest rarefied worlds and invite interpretation. Paul D’Agostino’s Chromatic Alphabet paintings consider language, text, narrative, and translation through precise arrangements of color and shape. Seth David Rubin’s photographic works transform landscape and explore points of view through arrangements of shaped reflections. Will Holub’s layered mixed media collages combine figural and abstract elements to discover interconnectedness amidst fragmentation and diversity. Helena Chastel’s sculptures are weighty or whimsical investigations of sacred geometry.

March 28 - April 28, 2024

In Abiding River: Connecticut River Views & Stories Janet L. Pritchard photographically traces our changing relationship with a wild and harnessed river’s rise, decline, and tenuous revival. Using a photographic method guided by archival research, Pritchard’s project addresses two framing questions: How does the Connecticut River influence life in its watershed, and how do people impact the river? Tracing the river’s flow from its source near the Canadian border 410 miles south to the Long Island Sound, these photographs reveal a landscape of many uses.

Writers have described the Connecticut River (CR) as the life artery of New England, or its cultural cradle, a region distinct in topography, history, culture, and ecological challenges—climate modeling predicts dramatic temperature increases and unprecedented flooding. Before European colonization, Native peoples thrived here, relying on the river for sustenance, transportation, and trade. It later became a settlement route for Europeans from the coast to the interior and a place of technological innovation so significant it is called the Silicon Valley of the 19th century. The CR Valley was a flourishing center of water-powered manufacturing and home to the now disappearing geographically indicated crop Connecticut Shade Tobacco. However, when an economy built on waterpower collapsed, mills moved south, and industry followed, leaving the river to rot. The Clean Water Act of 1972 helped effect change, and pollutants decreased. The river’s history is deeply intertwined with the local cultures, and understanding these connections is crucial to appreciating its more considerable significance and the challenges it faces. In Abiding River: Connecticut River Views & Stories, Pritchard’s photographs reflect her scholarly research and the beauty of the Connecticut River, a system influenced by nature, culture, and history with a future yet to be written.

Specimens of aquatic and marsh plants of the Connecticut River and its watershed, on loan from the George Safford Torrey Herbarium, in the Biodiversity Research Collections of the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at UConn, will complement the exhibition.

Repeat Photography: Pond of Contemplation, Pritchard’s subtly varied images of a singular landscape taken over the course of a year, presents a meditative reflection on nature, permanence, and change.

February 1 - March 3, 2024, Thursday - Sunday 12 - 4pm

partial company is an exhibition of works by Master of Fine Arts candidates, curated by Anna Schwartz.

In a gallery, you find yourself among partial companies. It is a rare and tender gift to be allowed into an artist's space and mind as they work, then wonderful and strange as the objects and spaces they make begin to hold a life of their own. Each work holds different presence and demands; some verge on quiet fondness, while others portend confident indifference.

The exhibiting artists are Mahsa Attaran, Becky Bailey, Monica Hamilton, Hanieh Kashani, Benjamin N. Kue, Sonja Langford, Erick Maldonado, Anna Schwartz, and Samantha Wood.

November 9 -December 10, 2023

Floating Points: Observing the Plastisphere with NASA is an exhibition of photography and video by Oskar Landi that represents a collaboration with UConn Avery Point Professor and Researcher Heidi Dierssen  and NASA scientists. The exhibition promotes environmental literacy about microplastics and highlights the quest to track floating plastics using optical remote sensing from satellites. It presents the challenges of “seeing” particles on the sea surface from space because of foam, glint, aerosols, and other things that can mask or even mimic the appearance of floating microplastics. The exhibition demonstrates a two-way collaborative dialogue between art and science—the science informing the art and the art informing the science.

For the Gallery Talk at the opening reception, Oskar Landi  introduced his photographic and video work and Dr. Dierssen  explained the challenges in detecting the billions of pieces of microplastics floating on the open ocean from NASA’s arsenal of ocean observing satellites. 

November 9 -December 10, 2023

Waterbodies is an exhibition of artworks by Marsha Borden, sTo Len, and Etty Yaniv that communicate the beauty and fragility of our waterways and marine environments in photography, textiles, installation, and print. Marsha Borden and sTo Len are both recipients of 2022 Connecticut Sea Grant Art Support Awards  Etty Yaniv, a nationally and internationally exhibiting artist, and founder and editor of the online magazine Art Spiel,  presents a site-specific installation in the gallery.

September 14 - October 22, 2023

Surface and Space artists Amina Ahmed, Santrupthy Das, Firoz Mahmud, and Sajal Sarkar presented works exploring the poetry of material and geometry, through abstraction and representation in video, drawing, watercolor, print, and folded paper. Their artworks address patterns of tradition, the creation of community, historical narratives, and notions of home.

Amina Ahmed's delicate works on paper reflect her engagement with mark making and drawing in space. Her video "Standing Under our Ancestors" illuminates the familial origins of her practice of geometry. Santrupthy Das creates installations of folded paper that hover and catch the light on their geometric planes. Her installation Earth Systems is a collaborative piece that incorporated folded paper structures created and installed by students under her guidance in two workshops on the UConn Avery Point campus. Firoz Mahmud's works on paper present dense juxtapositions of imagery, line, and washes of color that highlight the complexities of colonialism and heritage. Sajal Sarkar's Perilous Home series and other works use abstraction and imagery to explore the perils of the physical world and the nature of home as an immigrant.

May 25-June 15, 2023

Sense of Place presents thirty-five artworks, in photography, mixed media, printmaking, and painting, by thirty-two regional artists. The Alexey von Schlippe Gallery created a free call to artists who reside in towns served by the Cultural Coalition of Southeastern Connecticut to submit artworks that  explore the theme sense of place through ideas of memory, identity, the beauty of everyday spaces, familiar architecture, and nature through observation or interpretation. 

The exhibiting artists are: Ramil Khasanshin, Sunil Howlader, Alexi Rashan, Jerry Weiss, Sarah Stifler Lucas, Carmela Venti, Brad Guarino, Helen Cantrell, Nancy Gladwell, Elizabeth Ellenwood, Mattias Lundblad, Joan Mullins, James Morren, Victor Filepp, Eleanor Miller, Joseph Miklojcik, Kathleen DeMeo, Will Holub, Yujuan Zhai Patnode, Nancy Oates, Christopher Zhang, Earl Killeen, Mark Patnode, Susan MacKay, Nina Conolly, Lucia Sokol, Lois Lawrence, Glynis Blanker, Cassandra Calabrese, Dan Potter, Douglas Rice, and Sarah Savercool.

March 30- April 30, 2023

Deeply Rooted: The Tree of Life, is an exhibition of artwork that engages with the tree of life as archetype and idea, celebrating trees as majestic and magical. It features work by Texas sculptor Beverly Penn and New York painter Katie DeGroot. It includes Indian tribal art; watercolors by Abel Rodriguez, an artist of the Columbian indigenous Nonuya community; an etching by celebrated Indian artist Gulam Mohammad Sheikh; and works by Connecticut artists Joan Mullins, Rashmi Talpade, and Anne Doris Eisner.  UConn Master of Fine Arts candidates Anna Schwartz, Amira Brown, Monica Hamilton, Mahsa Attaran, and Hannieh Kashani exhibited work from their graduate seminar with Professor Kathryn Myers.

The Alexey von Schlippe Gallery thanks John H. Bowles and Kathryn Myers for lending works from their collections for the exhibition. We also thank the School of Fine Arts and Global Affairs at the University of Connecticut for their support. 

The exhibition is part of The Abrahamic Story of the Tree, a university wide series of lectures, exhibitions, and performances presented by UConn's Abrahamic Programs. The exhibition presents artworks by seventeen artists in a variety of media including sculpture, painting, drawing, printmaking, and photo collage.

February 2 - March 5, 2023

Poem Unlimited, is an exhibition of work by Master of Fine Arts candidates, curated by Kenny Heyne. The exhibiting artists are Mahsa Attaran, Logan Bishop, Amira Brown, Jennifer Davies, Monica Hamilton, Kenny Heyne, Hanieh Kashani, Anna Schwartz, Rossie Stearns, and Noah Thompson.

November 3 - December 18, 2022

Connecticut Sea Grant: Works by Kathryn Frund and Joseph Smolinski. The Connecticut Sea Grant (CTSG) is a federal-state partnership, housed at the University of Connecticut, which seeks to foster the sustainable use and conservation of coastal and marine resources. CTSG offers funding for artists through a competitive Arts Grant Program.

Kathryn Frund, who sources her art materials from the post-consumer waste stream, exhibits textile and mixed media works that contemplate and manifest systems of ocean currents, mysterious deep-sea forms, and the physical presence of Cape Cod Bay, to explore connections between consumer excess and stewardship. Through her use of discarded female garments in her Rescued, Reused Sandbag series the artist seeks to highlight “[her] community’s growing collective female voice for sustainable change.” Joseph Smolinski exhibits a new series of work representing his engagement with the coastal environment through the act of collecting. He incorporates found carbon-based materials, sea coal, in mosaic compositions of subtle and forceful beauty, and adorns his rustic reimagining of a Wunderkammer or curio cabinet, titled Climate Repository, with found objects and small sculptures, drawings, and digitally fabricated forms of his own making. The artist considers Climate Repository, built with wood milled from New Haven’s Lincoln Oak, felled by Superstorm Sandy, as “both a relic of a climate event and a display site… where object history and material meaning combine to display a collection that references our changing climate."

November 3 - December 18, 2022

The Interweaving of the Synthetic and Natural World is an exhibition of work by UConn Master of Fine Arts alumna and Fulbright scholar Elizabeth Ellenwood on view from November 3 - December 18, 2023. The exhibition presents the artist’s photographic documentation created during her fellowship year in Norway, of microplastics that pollute ocean waters, and coastal scenes marred by plastic detritus. The artist also presents images of the Plastisphere, a new marine ecosystem in which microbes and single celled organisms colonize the surface of degraded plastic objects. Ellenwood’s crystalline images are alluring and disturbing, illuminating in fine detail the reality of ocean pollution and the new worlds created in its wake. The opening reception for the exhibition on November 3  included an artist talk by Elizabeth Ellenwood at 6:30 pm.

September 8 - October 16, 2022

Tides and Currents is an exhibition featuring artworks by Laura Barr, Eileen Eder, Debbie Hesse, Heather Stivison, and Etty Yaniv. The artists present diverse artistic responses to the subject of Connecticut’s marine and coastal environments and waterways that manifest concerns about climate change, the visualization of scientific data, close observation, and the uses of the imagination.

Laura Barr exhibits oil pastels from her Ocean Elegy series, diptychs that reflect the artist’s concern for the protection and restoration of marine ecosystems. Eileen Eder captures the calm and sparkling beauty of our coastlines and waterways in her plein air oil paintings. Debbie Hesse creates large synthetic wall constructions that suggest shifting marine forms through a play of biomorphic shapes, light, and color. Etty Yaniv presents Archipelago, a series of small daily paintings composed of layered fragments of repurposed materials. In Archipelago the artist considers the power and force of water, a reflection of her “preoccupation with the urgent climate change crisis.” Heather Stivison’s oil paintings focus on capturing the mysteries of the deep ocean and the reflective surfaces of water.

Heather Stivison will give an artist talk at the opening reception on her two-year artistic collaboration with Noah Germolus, a Ph.D. candidate in Chemical Oceanography in the MIT-WHOI Joint Program at Woods Hole. The paintings from that collaboration blend artistic imagination with data about the dissolved organic matter, metabolites, proteins, and nutrients within ocean water to reveal or provoke new ways of thinking about our oceans.

March 3 - April 3 2022

The Narrative Imperative features the work of four artists who use visual narrative to re-envision histories or present an urgent personal perspective. The exhibiting artists are Annu Palakunnathu Matthew, Shabnam Jannesari, Clintel Steed and Amira Brown. Annu Palakunnathu Matthew, Professor of Art at the University of Rhode Island, will present photographs from her Memories of India series, and photo animations in Open Wound: Stories of Partition, which were included in the artist’s recent solo exhibition ReVision at the Newport Art Museum. Clintel Steed, a New York based artist and recipient of the John Koch Award from the National Academy of Arts and Letters, explores process through his raw reflections in paint on history and the unfolding of daily events. Shabnam Jannesari, Assistant Professor of Art at Hastings College, addresses the complexity of Iranian female identity under a patriarchal society in her large-scale paintings of imaginary spaces “where women can exist freely.” Emerging artist Amira Brown’s portraits of her character Dark Star reflect the artist’s commitment to articulating her experience “…moving into the unresolved and imaginative aspects of blackness.”

February 3 - February 20, 2022

Notes from the Interior exhibits six artists’ approaches to the subject of human spaces and their objects in the media of sculpture, textile, and painting. Alyssa McClenaghan considers the form of the cast iron radiator as a transformational object to reference gender and the body, in sculptures created from household construction materials. Claire Stankus uses the language of abstraction to translate the visually apprehended in ambiguous and poetic oil paintings. Fannie Allie’s textiles of mazelike architectures explore the relationship between internal states and interior spaces using found fragments of fabric and discarded materials. Tania Alvarez contributes her miniature Dreamscapes and large-scale paintings of basins which toggle between observation and the imagined. Magdalena Pawlowski’s densely constructed and jewel like egg tempera paintings of collected objects reference the visual language of folk art. Megan Marden, working in oils, contributes sensitive interiors from her Haunted Hive series.

November 11 - December 12, 2021

Color Cure is an exhibition featuring paintings, textiles, video, and sculptural works that revel in color and abstraction by artists Deborah Zlotsky, Leslie Roberts, Cat Balco,  Alyse Rosner, and Olivia Baldwin. Deborah Zlotsky presents oil paintings "evolved through the accumulation of actions and reactions" that include cunning surprises of trompe l'oeil. Leslie Roberts' conceptual paintings translate texts into an accumulation of chromatic notations that cohere into works dense with embedded meaning. Cat Balco's monumental abstractions, created with large push brooms consist of a "limited sequence of marks" that are gestural and minimal. Alyse Rosner presents a metamorphic digital drawing animation, and large and small paintings densely layered with sinuous line and washes of color. Olivia Baldwin presents paintings that gaily droop or curl expressively as if having flung themselves to festoon the walls of the gallery.