Kniznick Gallery
The Kniznick Gallery is committed to feminist exhibitions of artistic excellence that reflect the activities of the Women's Studies Research Center Scholars and engage communities within and beyond Brandeis University.
Photo Credit: Wrong & RIGHTS Installation View, Dawn Williams Boyd, Bev Grant, Frank Selby, Guerilla Girls, Hannah Wilke, Scott Hunt, Judy Chicago, Wrongs & RIGHTS, 2024-2025, Curated by Laura Dvorkin and Maynard Monrow, Kniznick Gallery, Women's Studies Research Center, Photo by Sasha Pedro.
The art on display is a vehicle through which the center seeks to promote dialogue about important issues and address the ever-changing challenges related to women and gender.
Current Exhibition
A Gathering: Gardens, Portals, Protests
June 25-August 21, 2025
Opening Reception: Wednesday, June 25, 5-7 PM | RSVP
Featuring: Bhen Alan | Liza Bingham | Dara Benno | Marisa Finos | Lu Heintz | Damien Hoar de Galvan | Kate Holcomb Hale | Kristy Hughes | Lavaughan Jenkins | Crystalle Lacouture | Destiny Palmer | Orli Swergold | Kevin Umaña | Eva Zasloff
It begins with a gathering.
The 14 artists’ works in A Gathering: Gardens, Portals, Protests center on materiality, color, and care. Set against the precarity of this moment, the exhibition celebrates acts of making and gathering that lead to a community. Much like the layered, interlocking circles declaring “YES” in Crystalle Lacouture’s Flags to Fit In Pocket, the artists defy tidy categorization. Within this shared space, their work reaffirms art’s capacity to hold complexity and resistance, and to act as a regenerative force: a garden, a portal, a protest.
Culled from paper, wood, fiber, oils, ceramic, and steel, the artists’ work resists material hierarchies, transforming natural and discarded materials, fragments, loaded substrates, and everyday objects. Laying bare or disguising their origins, the artists stretch the boundaries of what their materials can do and what these gestures mean. Many derive palettes from the color samples of plants, sky, and moss found in landscapes, rural and urban. They respond to the vibrancy of natural elements, changing light, the scale of the sky, the effects of fire and smog, and the feeling of a new place. Some embed secret codes in their work. And just as they look to color for sustenance and joy, they also approach it as a system worthy of interrogation.
Care, connection, and community reverberate across these artists’ works, charging us to participate. The artists consider life cycles: birth, death, grief, and the capacities and limits of our bodies. From a 20-foot slack and billowing ladder to a steel and fiber sculpture derived from every possible method of folding a t-shirt, the works require us to feel our relationship with gendered labor.
In gardens and landscapes, we witness renewal. A vegetable garden returns after fire; lichen grows on a tree, falls to the earth, and becomes natural dye. Implicit within the artists’ practices is the reciprocal nature of artmaking: it contributes to the collective even as it sustains us.