The University Art Museum (UAM) presents Body Maps: Works from the University at Albany Fine Art Collections in Conversation with Past Exhibiting Artists.

Navigating personal geographies and histories, the artists in Body Maps explore the relationship between the body and the self in video, photography, painting, printmaking, and sculpture. Past exhibiting artists on view include Keltie Ferris, Kate Gilmore, Gracelee Lawrence, Pope. L, Ronny Quevedo, Sara Greenberger Rafferty, Carrie Schneider, and Rirkrit Tiravanija, presented alongside nine artists from the University at Albany Fine Art Collections including Marisol and Robert Rauschenberg.

The artists in Body Maps explore the relationship between the body and the self. As they navigate personal geographies and histories, their bodies act as stand-ins for larger cultural experiences. The surfaces they explore— the picture plane, maps, skin, walls, floors, city streets—always contain multitudinous depths revealed through traces of their actions. These actions include navigating real spaces in performances and feats of physical endurance documented through video or photographs, mapping the flat terrain of prints or paintings, or translating bodily surfaces into 3D-printed forms.

The artist’s own body is frequently the subject of the work, often presented as fragments or traces whose unexpected combinations generate new meanings. And the artist’s body is in many cases also a medium and material, the very thing the artists manipulate and explore. This intimate connection between the artist and their body is often reinforced by the work’s setting, often in the private space of the artist’s studio.

Part of the University Art Museum’s mission is to create a space for new ideas to emerge by placing its Collections in dialogue with contemporary artists, particularly those who have had a hand in shaping our museum’s history through their past exhibitions. Recontextualized in this exhibition, the work of these artists continues to offer new ways of thinking about the way our bodies navigate the physical and conceptual spaces of the museum and our world.