Across a diverse selection of prints, sculpture, photographs, and drawings, this exhibition presents disruptive combinations of texts and images. Dating from the nineteenth century to the present day, the works on display employ visual and semantic tactics that are surprising, satirical, and sometimes unsettling. Individual objects feature captions, labels, speech banderoles, narratives, poems, as well as words and letters shaped into artful forms. The artworks provoke their beholders to question assumptions, consider difficult truths, and cast a critical eye on the social world.

Italian artist, archaeologist, and architect Giovanni Battista Piranesi (1720-1778) combined his multi-disciplinary interests to produce dramatic depictions of Roman temples, aqueducts, monuments, and ruins. In the eighteenth century, Piranesi’s prints often inspired travelers to embark on the Grand Tour through Europe. Some tourists then brought home an engraving by Piranesi to commemorate their experiences among these newly excavated sites. Other travelers, such as Commodore Jesse Duncan Elliott (1782-1845), a former Dickinson College Trustee and resident of Carlisle, acquired eclectic collections of antique fragments during their Mediterranean travels. Curated by Dickinson student Emily Angelucci ’24, this exhibition features a wide selection of Piranesi’s romanticized perspectives of Roman ruins alongside Elliott’s artifacts, which include pieces of the Parthenon, sarcophagi, and statuary. Seen in dialogue with Elliott’s antiquities, Piranesi’s prints demonstrate the Grand Tourists’ shared desire for tangible connections to the ancient world.

In celebration of the 40th anniversary of The Trout Gallery, this exhibition will showcase works of art from the permanent collection selected by Gallery audiences. In place of traditional object labels, Dickinson students, staff and alumni as well as Trout fans and Carlisle community members of all ages share their personal interpretations of objects through statements they’ve written placed next to their chosen objects. These objects represent a range of time periods, cultures and media just as the Trout permanent collection, which has grown to a total of 11,000 works over the past forty years, contains objects from six continents dating from the Neolithic period to the present. The object perspectives provided by Trout audiences allow for intimate, moving, and unique reflections on the significance of humans in contact with original works of art.

From sports to hairstyles and tanks to bicycles, this exhibition presents an array of contemporary photography recently acquired by The Trout Gallery. While eclectic in nature, these representations provide provocative investigations of the role photography plays in constructing perceptions of power.

This exhibition features projects by senior studio art majors Kate Altman, Nate Chaves, Josephine Cook, FaSade Fagoroye, Stephanie Henderson, Caitlyn Longest, Anika Naimpally, Belle O’Shaughnessy, Matthew Presite, Olivia Schapiro, Iris Shaker-Check and Han Trinh under the guidance of Eleanor Conover with with the assistance of Todd Arsenault, Andy Bale, Rachel Eng, and Amy Boone-McCreesh.

In East Asia, artists have long dedicated themselves to capturing the fleeting moments of nature through the lively renderings of birds, insects, flowers, and animals. Collectively known as "bird-and-flower" images, the genre's rich symbolisms make them an ideal vehicle to mark and celebrate auspicious events. In the early 20th century, high demand of bird-and-flower images from the Western market prompted the production of modern prints of flora and fauna, especially in Japan. This exhibition features prints of the natural world created primarily for the Western market. Balancing naturalism with artifice in the vivid depictions of birds, insects, flowers, and other auspicious animals, artists honored the prestigious tradition while also innovating the genre with modern techniques and methods. This exhibition was curated by senior art history majors Ellie Mariani, Sydney Nguyen and Ava Zadrima under the direction Ren Wei.

Noise brings recent drawings, paintings, prints, and photographs by Dickinson Professor Emeritus of Art Ward Davenny into dialogue with original music composed to accompany his work. Davenny received his BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute in 1977, and his MFA from Yale in 1982. He has received two National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship Grants, in 1985 and 1993, and two Mid-Atlantic/Pennsylvania Council for the Arts Individual Fellowship Grants, in 1996 and 2006. Davenny is represented in numerous collections, including The British Museum in London, The Fogg Museum, Cambridge, Massachusetts, The Minneapolis Institute of Art, and The Honolulu Academy of Arts, among many others.

Favored for its durability and distinctive appearance, metalworkers have used bronze since the second millennium B.C.E. for functional and decorative objects. This exhibition highlights examples of figural bronze sculpture from The Trout Gallery permanent collection, including objects that span four continents and eleven centuries.