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will present “New In: Recent Acquisitions at the ���ӽ� University Art Museum” at the Louise and Bernard Palitz Gallery through June 4, 2026. Featuring paintings, photographs, prints, sculpture and ceramics acquired since 2021, the exhibition reveals how the academic museum puts new acquisitions to work in its galleries and study room, in faculty research and in conversations that reach beyond the museum walls.

“The museum’s wide-ranging collection provides opportunities to practice visual literacy and communication skills—essential to many fields and professions—across the University’s departments, schools, and colleges,” says curator of education and academic outreach Kate Holohan. “In addition, teaching with objects is active, experiential and student-centered. Students themselves analyze visual evidence in real time in order to pose critical questions, develop interpretations of artworks and make interdisciplinary connections.”

Many of the works on view have already been activated at the museum with University students and faculty. “Hotel Paradise Café,” a resist-ground etching and engraving by Peter Milton, is a layered composition of mirrors and reflections and other works by Milton were featured in an exhibition co-curated by Lyndsay Gratch, associate professor of communication and rhetorical studies, and a 2024-2025 Art Museum Faculty Fellow.

Gratch brought students from her course Performance Studies into the galleries, and using Milton’s print, explored questions of reflexivity, positionality and how the act of looking is never neutral. The Faculty Fellows program, , engages professors from disciplines across the University with the permanent collection to develop this kind of object-based teaching.

The Faculty Fellows program and others like it are part of a broader effort. The museum routinely welcomes classes into its galleries and study room, where students examine original works firsthand. In 2025, over 200 classes from 38 different departments on campus made observations, weighed evidence and built research questions in real time. It is the kind of sustained, object-driven engagement that distinguishes the teaching museum, and one reason the SU Art Museum has made expanding the perspectives and lived experiences in the collection a priority.

That priority is on full display here.

A photograph by Chinese American artist Jarod Lew, from his series “In Between You and Your Shadow” grapples with the limits of knowing your family history within the social context of Asian American by recreating a scene from his childhood. In “Untitled (Snack),” a handwritten Post-it note sits before a plate of cut fruit left by his mother as an after-school snack. It’s a quiet, intimate photograph, but one that carries the weight of a larger history: Lew’s mother was the fiancée of Vincent Chin, whose 1982 murder became a turning point in Asian American history.

A monocast rubber sculpture by Niho Kozuru points toward the kind of interdisciplinary conversations the museum aims to foster, with the potential of catalyzing conversations with material scientists in chemistry and the College of Engineering and Computer Science and curators of the plastics collection in the Special Collections Ressarch Center at Bird Library.

The exhibition also includes a screenprint by painter, College of Visual and Performing Arts  alumnus and ���ӽ� University Art Museum Advisory Board member James Little, made to support the 150th anniversary of the Art Students League where he now teaches; a print from the Helen Frankenthaler Foundation, donated through ; and press photographs that build on the museum’s connection to the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications. Many of these works are on public view for the first time.

“These acquisitions are a testament to the Orange community’s commitment to the University’s mission of teaching and research, and demonstrate how a diverse collection strengthens those efforts,” says curator Melisa Yuen. “We are grateful for the generous donations that made this exhibition possible, through both gifts of art and through funds that allow us to purchase work strategically.”

“New In” presents a portrait of a museum where acquiring a work of art is only the first step. At ���ӽ�, students catalogue, curate and build research questions through direct engagement with original art. This exhibition invites visitors to explore that process and encounter the works that make it possible.

“New In: Recent Acquisitions at the ���ӽ� University Art Museum” is on view now through June 4, 2026, at the Louise and Bernard Palitz Gallery in midtown Manhattan. For more information, visit ���ǰ� .