Current Exhibitions
2025 Frances Niederer Artist-in-Residence Rita Koehler, Glitch Mommy: Forty Days and Forty Nights
January 30 – April 13, 2025
Photographer and lens-based multimedia artist Rita Koehler investigates how political, economic, and religious structures are used to control others in defense of misogyny, racism, and bigotry. She scrutinizes contemporary American social structures to investigate what constitutes an intelligible life. For her series Glitch Mommy: Forty Days and Forty Nights, Koehler follows the fragments of adoption disruption into a world of fairytale where lyrical gestures of staining and fluid mark-making bring about the discovery of fantastical landscapes that tilt the field towards a new era.
Koehler earned her B.A. in Psychology and Theology from Saint Mary’s College, Notre Dame, IN, and her M.F.A. in Visual Studies from Lesley University College of Art and Design, Cambridge, MA. Her work has been featured in solo and group exhibitions across the United States and is in the permanent collection of the Kinsey Institute Gallery.
The Frances Niederer Artist-in-Residence program allows Hollins University to bring a nationally recognized artist to campus every year. In residence during the spring semester, the Artist-in-Residence creates work in a campus studio and teaches a seminar open to all students.
IMAGE: Rita Koehler, Playground, 2024 from the Glitch Mommy series, 2021-present. Mixed media on Hahnemühle Museum Etching. Limited series. Courtesy of the artist.
Dream, America
February 13 – April 13, 2025
Dream, America confronts the polarization felt throughout today’s American political system. Guest curator Arden Cone, Hollins class of 2012, writes, “An act of defiance turned experiment in democracy, the United States of America is a contradiction at work. While its founding documents rest in the National Archives, absolute and immutable, the checks and balances they outline exist as mere principles, susceptible to the whims of change… Though the nation’s archive is highly contested and evermore divisive, the artists in Dream, America speak to what is shared: our longing to repair the fractures within it. In doing so, they bring accountability to the front and center.”
Where groups are excluded from a national narrative, this exhibition seeks to include them and validate their perspectives. Artists Arden Cone, Allison Rae Johnson, Jason Patterson, Rachel Ahava Rosenfeld-Dlatt, and Benjamin Winans are socially and politically engaged, creating multimedia works in response to questions relevant to their varied demographics. Ethnicity, gender, socioeconomic status, nostalgia, and faith inform their contemporary viewpoints on the accepted American historical chronology.
This exhibition and its associated programs are sponsored in part by the City of Roanoke through the Roanoke Arts Commission.
Expanding Narratives: Conversations with the Collection
currently available online
Faculty members from across academic divisions have collaborated with museum staff to select works from the collection that investigate key course concepts and provide extended access to the individual works of art. Participating departments include art history, biology, classics, English, gender and women studies, history, philosophy, psychology, sociology, and studio art.
Unveiling the Past: Reckoning with Our History of Enslavement at Hollins
currently available online
In spring 2020, students in the Cultural Property, Rights and Museum course began working on an exhibit, Unveiling the Past: Reckoning with Our History of Enslavement at Hollins University, in conjunction with members of the Hollins University Working Group on Slavery and Its Contemporary Legacies. The exhibit examines objects and images held by the University Archives in the Wyndham Robertson Library at Hollins University. Material researched by students are on display in this virtual exhibit. Those working on this exhibit wanted to create a public space to reckon with our Hollins past and give a forum to those who were not given a voice, name, space, or attention in the past. It is the goal of this exhibit to show the lasting effects slavery has had, and continues to have, here; and, to recognize that Hollins continues to benefit from a history of enslavement.
Exploring Visual and Conceptual Space: Student Selections from the Eleanor D. Wilson Museum
currently available online
Using selected works from the Eleanor D. Wilson Museum’s permanent collection, student curators put theory into practice in this virtual exhibit which is the culmination of the spring class, “Behind the Scenes: Principles and Practice.” As part of the class, students collaborate and share responsibility for conceptualizing, researching, designing, and interpreting a cohesive exhibition. Each student selected two works that spoke to them based on academic, personal, and aesthetic interests. The exhibit features works created by well-known artists Giovanni Battista Piranesi, John James Audubon, Käthe Kollwitz, Paul Klee, Salvador Dalí, and Andy Warhol, as well as works by Hedley Fitton, Jean Lurçat, Paule Gobillard, Eudora Welty, and others.
When placed together, these works form an image of the Eleanor D. Wilson collection as a small but artistically and historically rich collection – especially when seen through the eyes of Hollins student curators Madelyn Farrow, Faith Herrington, Sylvia Lane, Mairwen Minson, Kaiya Ortiz, Valerie Sargeant, and Maddie Zanie.