Visual Arts Annual Graduate Research Exhibition
March 28 - April 27, 2025 | HUB Gallery
Presentations: March 28, 2025, 1:00 – 4:00 p.m.
University Park, P.A.- The HUB-Robeson Galleries, in partnership with the Graduate School, are proud to present the Visual Arts Annual Graduate Research Exhibition. The exhibition will be on display in HUB Gallery from March 28, 2025, through April 27, 2025. Established in 1986, the Graduate Research Exhibition, hosted by the Graduate School, places special emphasis on communicating research and their creative endeavors to a general audience and offers professional development opportunities by challenging students to present their work to new audiences.
The Visual Arts option is designed for students required to create studio work as a part of their graduate degree program and gives candidates the opportunity to demonstrate the significance of their ideas and creative research to jurors from outside of their field who score the works and award prizes. All are welcome to the presentations of candidates on March 28, 2025, from 1:00 – 4:00 p.m. in HUB Gallery. Meet current Visual Arts graduate students and learn more about their studio practice.
Throughout their programs, MFA candidates work closely with art faculty and fellow artists to develop advanced techniques, expand concepts, discuss critical issues, and emerge with a vision for their personal work. Through a broad range of mediums spanning from painting and drawing to ceramic, graphic design, and new media, each piece is compelling in its own way and demonstrates the diversity of artistic research by Penn State graduate students.
This year’s Visual Arts Annual Graduate Research Exhibition features a variety of artwork speaking to the personal experiences of six different candidates. Elaheh Babaei’s “Tokmeh Couture” explores the intersection of Iranian architectural ornaments and contemporary fashion through graphic design inspired by the structural elegance of tessellation. Babaei’s project translates traditional motifs of geometric and ornamental patterns found in Iranian architecture and art and reinterprets them in modern design. Working with photomontage, Venus Bayat uses historical moments of women's presence throughout generations by merging a 1960s unknown photographer with their own contemporary work. Bayat’s, “The Women Who Keep History Alive” explores the intersection of the past and present and emphasizes how women preserve and reinterpret history. Robert Botchway delves into the intricate relationship between emotion and musical expression by blending fragments of musical instruments with abstract ceramic sculptures. Botchway's hybrid forms evoke the familiarity of traditional instruments while pushing into uncharted territory, challenging perceptions of both sound and form in deeply personal ways. Cecil Fish’s innovative approach to painting in the expanded field centers on the complexity of connecting with an over-abundant world. Through nature, people, and himself combined with new media, this draws the viewer in for exploration and evokes a sensation of being alive in an era of wonders, information overload, and facing an uncertain future. Betsa Houshmandipanah’s, “Warp and Weft” is inspired by childhood memories, particularly a Persian rug. She breathes new life into traditional forms through a combination of clay and yarn, which transforms the textile into a three-dimensional form. Her reimagining brings the old-world utilitarian essence into contemporary life while honoring its deep cultural significance. Adwar Oguttuh’s large-scale confrontational portraits capture profound stories of resilience for each subject. Through highly skilled dry media, these stories transcend cultural boundaries to illuminate how perseverance shape identity and strength. Together, these works ask the viewer to be present in experiencing the nuance and beauty around us.
Each work of art in the Visual Arts Annual Graduate Research Exhibition reveals insights into the creative process. Penn State graduate students’ dedicated study and artistic exploration culminate in work that provokes reflection on contemporary art practices and fosters dialogue on the meaning of artmaking today.
The Penn State community is encouraged to visit the exhibition in-person at HUB Gallery to experience this unique collection of artworks. HUB Gallery is open daily from 10:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m. and admission is free for all, always.
HUB-Robeson Galleries welcome and encourage class, office, and student organization group visits. Student and staff-led tours are available; email Galleries@psu.edu with inquiries.
Capacities of Care | Curated by Aaron Knochel
Capacities of Care | Curated by Aaron Knochel
February 14, 2025 – June 1, 2025 | Art Alley
University Park, PA – HUB-Robeson Galleries is excited to present Capacities of Care, a group exhibition curated by Aaron Knochel, Associate Professor of Art Education in Penn State’s School of Visual Arts, showcasing artworks thematically engaged with care ethics as a multidimensional space of relation that needs tending and sustenance. Capacities of Care is on view in Art Alley from February 14th, 2025 – June 1st, 2025. All are welcome to join us for a celebratory reception on February 14th from 4 - 6pm in Art Alley, HUB-Robeson Center.
There is a blossoming understanding of the impact of the arts on the health and wellbeing of our communities and institutions. Whether it be in the medical humanities or advances in neuroscience and the impact of the arts (or neuroarts), there is a growing need to understand how creativity, aesthetic experience, and critical practice may impact our capacities of care.
The capacities of care is a concept framework to understand and explore how care relationships manifest in our lives in distinct and interconnected ways. The capacity of care framework includes five interlinking domains:
- self-care: acts in consideration of one’s own wellbeing
- caregiving: acts invested in the wellbeing of another
- care receiving: awareness of another’s contribution to one’s own wellbeing
- community care: collective acts whereby individual and group considerations for wellbeing are exchanged
- artificial care: awareness of nonhuman, sometimes technological, contributions to wellbeing
Works in the exhibit, which include painting, photography, sculpture, textile, and new media, weave these capacities together in nuanced ways from the deeply personal to the collective, asking questions of what it means to care for ourselves and for others in times of uncertainty.
Aaron D. Knochel is a mixed methods researcher, curriculum theorist, and artist with interests in transdisciplinary learning, critical social theory, and media arts. He has worked in various visual arts learning spaces, including schools, museums, and community arts programs, both domestically and internationally. Most recently, he was a 2022-23 Fulbright Scholar in the Digital Culture program at the University of Bergen, Norway. Capacities of Care is a part of a larger effort in research-creation in arts in health focused on care ethics, creative practice, and narrative inquiry. Knochel’s research project led by an interdisciplinary team of Penn State faculty titled “Expanding Capacities of Care: Methodological and Pedagogical Opportunities in Narrative Ethics and Creative Inquiry for Nursing Education and Professional Development.” The project has many different activity streams from developing art exhibitions to workshops engaging creative practice and resilience for healthcare and educational professionals. The research is jointly funded by Penn State’s College of Arts & Architecture and Huck Institutes of the Life Sciences.
Featured Artists: Eric Anthony Berdis, Rachel Epp Buller, Anne Cutri, Rachel Fitzpatrick, Brandi Lewis, Zsuzsanna Nagy, Jessica Roseman, Steven Rubin, Sue Uhlig, Helen G. Velásquez Martínez, and Emily Van Walleghen.
- /
nosegay | Caitlin McCormack
March 15, 2025 – June 1, 2025 | Exhibition Cases
University Park, PA – HUB-Robeson Galleries is excited to present nosegay, an exhibition of textile-based sculpture by Philadelphia-based fiber artist and educator Caitlin McCormack. nosegay is on view in HUB-Robeson Galleries’ Exhibition Cases from March 15th, 2025 – June 1st, 2025, in HUB-Robeson Center’s Lobby.
Caitlin McCormack’s sculpture explores the complexities of crochet to straddle the line between fine art and craft, and its cultural ubiquity. Their body of work synthesizes an interest in phytosemiotics, the oft-scrutinized study of the potential for intercommunication between plants, fungi, and rhizospheric organisms, with research into floriography, the Victorian practice of using plants and flowers as symbolic messaging devices. nosegay refers to Victorian miniature floral bouquets intended to relay a secret message to the wearer’s object of affection and McCormack embodies this idea by betokening their works with sentiments that frequently remain unspoken. Though, unlike the exhibition’s namesake, they do not smell quite so sweet. In fact, the components of this series both directly and subversively impart spiraling, abject meditations on loss, trauma, and frustration.
The heavily embellished sculptures showcased in nosegay assume the form of domestic and sartorial objects laden with text, as well as silent, observational beings. Each artifact bears a message that is simultaneously emphasized and softened by intricate botanical motifs and rendered in hand-crocheted cotton thread. McCormack believes that whether it’s a beloved sweater, crafting to pass time, or for soothing trauma, we all have some relationship with crochet. However, McCormack’s work delivers something unorthodox. Where we expect to find beauty and practicality, they defy tradition without abandoning crochet’s innate attention to detail, which incites conversations pertaining to these relationships. The works in nosegay show us that a therapeutic practice has the ability to ease grief in the face of disease, war, mental illness, and climate change. Most importantly, as McCormack’s crochet expresses internal trepidations, existing in a volatile world, their unique sculptural process serves the power to heal in surprising ways.
Bio
Caitlin McCormack has contributed works to solo and group exhibitions at Elijah Wheat Showroom, Hashimoto Contemporary, The Mütter Museum, Museum Rijswijk, The Mesa Contemporary Art Museum, The Taubman Museum of Art, The Fort Wayne Museum of Art, Feinkünst Krüger, Field Projects, SPRING/BREAK Art Show, and Future Fair in NYC. Their sculptures have appeared in publications including The New York Times, Hyperallergic, Juxtapoz, Whitehot Magazine, Smithsonian, and Bust Magazine. In addition to holding teaching positions at The Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and Hussian College of Art and Design, McCormack has participated in numerous artist residencies includ-ing Vermont Studio Center (VT), The Peter Bullough Foundation (VA), The Wassaic Project (NY), Byrdcliffe Artist Colony (NY), Monson Arts (ME), and The Provincetown C-Scape Dune Shack Artist Residency (MA). McCormack was the recipient of a Joseph Robert Foundation grant in 2021 and received the Woodmere Art Museum’s Maurice Freed Memorial Prize in 2023.
