Mandeville Gallery

Reception today February 3, 4:30-6:30 pm for "Research, and the Wilderness of Looking" at the Crowell West Galleries in the Visual Arts department.

The exhibition will be on view from until March 11, 2022.

This exhibition examines the intersections between collecting, biographies and multiple temporalities. It presents an artwork within an artwork. Specifically, artist Chadwick Augustine has designed an installation of wood and other mixed media that enfolds and converses with selected works from the Robert M. Finks Collection of East Asian Ceramics, which is part of the Union College Permanent Collection.

More about the artist:

Chadwick Augustine is an artist working in Brooklyn and in Upstate New York. He earned his MFA in Ceramics from the New York State College of Ceramics at Alfred University in 2004, and his BFA from the University of Wisconsin at the Peck School of the Arts in Milwaukee, Wisconsin in 2001.

More about the donor:

The late Dr. Robert M. Finks (1927-2014) was a Research Professor of Geology at Union College from 2003-2011. Before that, he was a Professor of Paleontology at Queens College, City University of New York, from 1961-2001. He specialized in the research and description of early to middle Paleozoic sponges, many new species of which he named. Dr. Finks is said to have had a large collection of fossil specimens and antiquities in addition to the eighty-four ceramic vessels that he donated to the Union College Permanent Collection just before his passing.

Dr. Finks is well-remembered as a devoted scientist, and a
wonderful mentor and teacher. At Union, he was affectionately known as “Sponge Bob” because of his research focus.

Union College Department of Visual Arts Union College Schaffer Library at Union College