Guajiros Retratos de Otoño, an exhibition of work by Lázaro Niebla
2023-09-01 00:00 - 2023-12-15 23:59 (America/New_York) | Pollak Gallery
Lázaro Niebla, a resident of Trinidad de Cuba, documents the connection to the past through reverse woodcut portraits of those that understand it best: his elders. His process begins by collecting discarded colonial window panels that were used to protect the homes in Trinidad de Cuba during the Spanish colonization. He then photographs his subjects, capturing them in a spontaneous moment. Working off of his photograph, Lázaro meticulously carves layer after layer from the repurposed panel, exposing the perfectly preserved wood under the surface. Using acrylic paint, Lázaro adds touches of color to the piece, choosing to leave the skin of the subject wood tone — connecting the person he has chosen to portray to the material that he has chosen to work with. The life of the tree, the window shutter, the home it protected, the subject portrayed, and the artist are all represented in each piece of art.
Artist Demonstration: September 27 from 6pm – 8pm |Great Hall Auditorium
Lázaro Niebla, Cuban wood sculptor, explains his concept, technique, tools and cultural aspects of his work. He’ll show an example of a work in progress and how he accomplishes the carved details of his subjects to create the multi-dimensional texture of his works.

NEW!!! Opening Reception – RESCHEDULED FOR November 10 from 6pm – 8 pm | Pollak Gallery
Please join us for a meet and greet with the artist!

PAT CRESSON - Taking a Leap –The Power of the Natural World - 45 Years of Creative Work
2023-09-05 00:00 - 2023-12-08 23:59 | DiMattio and Ice House Galleries, 400 Cedar Ave, West Long Branch, nj, 07764
Closing Reception and lecture/walking tour: Thursday December 7 – Tour begins at 4pm; Reception (light refreshments) from 5-6pm
This retrospective show, PAT CRESSON Taking a Leap –The Power of the Natural World 45 Years of Creative Work is a combined visual statement of over 45 years of artmaking. It covers 21 different categories ranging from painting, drawing, collage, printmaking, and digital imaging to sculpture. CRESSON have always been interested in a broad range of art topics, styles and techniques and has followed her heart and not limited herself to just one or two topics, series or styles.
Ancient cultures and architecture, botanicals, maps & ephemera, the landscape, weather systems and climate, insects, birds, Asian culture, kimonos, bonsai design, endangered species, marine life and the seashore – these are all topics that have interested her for many years and she returns again and again to them for inspiration. Using these as inspiration and metaphor her interest is also in the exploration of human interaction and the natural world – the navigation between what is hidden and what is revealed.
Recently she has concentrated her explorations into the connection between geometry and Nature. She has explored this by juxtaposing hard edge geometric design form, scientific illustrations, and pattern against organic landscape shapes, portions of sketches, and textured paint.
Many of the artist’s pieces combine drawing, type, painting, graphic design, digital imagery, and original photography. A majority of her prints and images over the years have reflected interests in nature and landscape, legend, myth, storytelling, and spirituality. They complement a 35-year interest in anthropology and archaeology with particular interest in the cultures of Egypt, Japan, China, South American Mayan and the Anastazi.

Pat Cresson – Taj Mahal

Pat Cresson – Vintage Fish

Pat Cresson – Blue-Lagoon-Kimona-Series-Green-Frog

Pat Cresson – Prevailing Winds

Pat Cresson – Moose and Elk

“Cresson has often taken a collage approach in her creative work and this is clear in both paintings and prints. In painting, the artist’s use of oils, wax, and mixed media enhances both the collage look of her work and her atmospheric approach to color. In printmaking, her use of chine-collé and the collograph process heightens the variety of textures and colors in her work. Whether one looks at the paintings and the prints on display here, or the drawings and digital images available on the artist’s website, there are opposing areas of abstract color, a wide array of textures and transparencies, and recognizable images (or in some cases, the vague suggestion of images). Color is one of the artist’s strengths, and her use of it ranges from the poetic to the dramatic. The paintings, which tend to be more abstract than the prints, contain some of her most ethereal color combinations. Line is another strength, especially in the prints that utilize the inherently linear process of intaglio etching.”
Dr. Kate Ogden, Professor of Art History, Stockton State University, NJ
This work was supported, in part, by several Grant-in-Aid-for-Creativity awards and the Urban Coast Institute at Monmouth University.

BORROMINI AND BERNINI: THE CHALLENGE FOR PERFECTION
2023-11-13 19:30 - 21:30 | Pollak Theatre
A journey into the great beauty of Baroque Rome, when the city was the centre of western art and where every ambitious painter, sculptor and architect had to be.
This is the story of the most famous artistic rivalry of all time, the one between Borromini and Bernini, but also the story of Borromini’s rivalry with himself: a genius so absorbed by his art that he turns it into a demon that devours him from the inside forcing him to choose death to reach eternity.
Borromini deprived himself of everything to pursue a dream: to conquer Rome. It is the story of the architectural revolution of a solitary maestro who changed the appearance of Rome forever, by pushing himself to his limit, but also by battling conventions and prejudices, with the humility to learn from the past to invent the future, with the courage to pursue an idea despite knowing he would pay the price in the end.
Estimated runtime: 102 minutes

Mihaela Moscaliuc and Michael Waters
2023-11-16 16:30 - 17:45 | Great Hall 104 (Julian Abele Room)
Mihaela Moscaliuc is the author of the poetry collections Cemetery Ink (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2021), Immigrant Model (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2015) and Father Dirt (Alice James Books, 2010), translator of Liliana Ursu’s Clay and Star (Etruscan Press, 2019) and Carmelia Leonte’s The Hiss of the Viper (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2015), editor of Insane Devotion: On the Writing of Gerald Stern (Trinity University Press, 2016), and co-editor (with Michael Waters) of Border Lines: Poems of Migration (Knopf, 2020). She has published scholarship in the field of Romani Studies, on issues of representation, appropriation, exophony and code-switching, and on the works of Kimiko Hahn, Agha Shahid Ali, and Colum McCann. She is the Translation Editor for Plume.
Moscaliuc has received two Glenna Luschei Awards from Prairie Schooner, residency fellowships from The Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, MacDowell, and Le Chateau de Lavigny (Switzerland), Dairy Hollow, two Individual Artist Fellowships from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts, and a Fulbright fellowship to Romania.
She is graduate program director and associate professor of English at Monmouth University (New Jersey) and former poetry & translation faculty in the low-residency M.F.A. program at Drew University (New Jersey).
Michael Waters’ recent books include Sinnerman (Etruscan Press, 2023), Caw (BOA Editions, 2020), & The Dean of Discipline (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2018). Darling Vulgarity (BOA Editions, 2006) was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. His co-edited anthologies include Border Lines: Poems of Migration (Knopf, 2020) & Reel Verse: Poems About the Movies (Knopf, 2019). His poems have appeared in numerous journals, includingPoetry, American Poetry Review, Paris Review, Yale Review, & Kenyon Review. A 2017 Guggenheim Fellow, recipient of five Pushcart Prizes & fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, Fulbright Foundation, & NJ State Council on the Arts, Waters lives without a cell phone in Ocean, NJ.

Pippin
2023-11-16 20:00 - 22:00, 2023-11-17 20:00 - 22:00, 2023-11-18 14:00 - 16:00, 2023-11-18 20:00 - 22:00 | Lauren K. Woods Theatre
Monmouth University Department of Music and Theatre Arts presents their fall musical.
With an infectiously unforgettable score from four-time Grammy winner, three-time Oscar winner and musical theatre giant, Stephen Schwartz, Pippin is the story of one young person’s journey to be extraordinary. Winner of four 2013 Tony Awards including Best Musical Revival. Source: MTI

Anthony Davis’s X: The Life and Times of Malcolm X
2023-11-18 13:00 - 17:00 | Pollak Theatre
Anthony Davis’s groundbreaking opera, which premiered in 1986, arrives at the Met at long last. Robert O’Hara, who was nominated for a Tony Award in 2020 for his direction of Slave Play, oversees a new staging that imagines Malcolm as an everyman whose story transcends time and space. A cast of breakout artists take part in the operatic retelling of Malcom X’s life. Baritone Will Liverman, who triumphed in the Met premiere of Terence Blanchard’s Fire Shut Up in My Bones, sings Malcolm. Soprano Leah Hawkins plays his mother, Louise; mezzo-soprano Raehann Bryce-Davis is his sister Ella; bass-baritone Michael Sumuel is his brother Reginald; and tenor Victor Ryan Robertson is the Nation of Islam leader Elijah Muhammad. Kazem Abdullah conducts the newly revised score, which provides a layered, jazz-inflected setting for the esteemed writer Thulani Davis’s libretto.
Content Advisory: X: The Life and Times of Malcolm X contains strong language.
