Join music journalists John Morrison and Josh Leidy for a multimedia presentation on the history of hip-hop culture and the cultural and technological evolution of sampling, followed by performances by Blue Hawk Records Student/Artists.
Co-sponsored by the BSACAM and the Monmouth University Music and Theatre Arts Department
Meet employers & graduate school admission representatives! Open to student from ALL class years and majors! Located in Edison 201 on Wednesday, January 29th from 2:30pm to 4:30pm! Register now on Handshake.
On International Book Giving Day (Feb. 14), Sigma Tau Delta will give away 60 adult novels we collected during our December Book Drive. The event aims to promote reading across campus while suiting the occasion of Valentine’s Day. We challenge students to discover new books beyond familiar titles by concealing their covers and only listing genres. Students can look through different generic options and select a book of their choosing while supplies last.
Monmouth University’s Ice House Gallery presents Ocean Bodies, a powerful solo exhibition by multimedia artist Kimberly Callas. The exhibition will open on February 6, 2025, with an evening reception from 5:30 to 7:30 PM, and will run through April 4, 2025. Ocean Bodies offers an immersive exploration of humanity’s interconnectedness with the ocean, drawing on symbols, archetypes, and ecological narratives to invite contemplation and action.
Through sculptures, large-scale drawings, and mixed-media works, Callas examines the “crisis of meaning” at the heart of the climate crisis and advocates for a shift in consciousness toward an “ecological self.” This concept, central to her work, reflects humanity’s integral role within nature rather than apart from it. In Ocean Bodies, she uses water-based materials, such as dyed fabrics, India ink, and water-soluble graphite, to invoke the sea’s physical presence while exploring the symbolic depth of whales, the horizon, and the ocean itself as metaphors for the psyche and cosmos.
Among the featured works is a series of 10-foot mixed-media drawings inspired by historical nautical charts, which pair psychological journeys with the migration of critically endangered North Atlantic right whales. Complementing these works are colorful life-size figurative sculptures and reliefs, 3D-printed using bio-filament, that further explore themes of renewal and interconnection. Through these works, Callas poses urgent questions about the loss of meaning, wisdom, and biodiversity in the Anthropocene.
“The ocean has a unique way to connect with people in an immediate and emotional way. Science and data can only tell us so much; art can speak to each of us in a way that is both uniquely personal and universal. Having Kimberly as the Urban Coast Institute artist-in-residence provided inspiration for some of the artwork in the Ocean Bodies exhibit, which will in turn inspire others. She was also able to share her creative process with her students, conducting lectures and using her art and sculpture as a pathway to ‘discovering the ecological self.’ This work reminds us that the worlds of art and science are two sides of the same coin,” said Tony MacDonald, J.D., Director, Urban Coast Institute.
Callas created much of the work in Ocean Bodies during an artist residency with Monmouth University’s Urban Coast Institute, with additional research conducted at the Archive for Research in Archetypal Symbolism (ARAS) and an artist residency at the Arts Quarter Budapest. This body of work seeks to merge art, science, and archetypal symbols to foster a deeper understanding of humanity’s place within the natural world and inspire meaningful environmental action.
About the Artist
Kimberly Callas is a multimedia artist, sculptor, and the lead artist of the Social Practice project Discovering the Ecological Self. Her work delves into the human/nature relationship, focusing on the concept of the ecological self. Recently, she has incorporated cutting-edge technologies, such as 3D printing with bio-filaments and CNC, into her life-size sculptures. Art New England described her series Portrait of the Ecological Self as “unforgettable.”
Callas’s work often involves community engagement. With her Discovering the Ecological Self social practice project, featured in The Huffington Post, she has led workshops across the U.S. and internationally. Her art has been showcased in prestigious galleries and museums worldwide, earning her numerous awards and grants, including the Pollination Project Grant, the Urban Coast Artist-in-Residence award, and the Puffin Foundation Grant. Her accolades include First Place in Sculpture at the Catharine Lorillard Wolfe Art Club’s Annual Exhibit in New York City.
Callas’s recent exhibitions include the International New Media Exhibit at the CICA Museum in South Korea, Crossing Boundaries: Art and the Future of Energy at the Pensacola Museum of Art, and Ocean Swimmers (Entanglement), a solo exhibition in Budapest. In May 2025, she will unveil a public art commission for the Lambert Castle Renovation in Paterson, New Jersey.
Callas holds an MFA from the New York Academy of Art and a BFA from the University of Michigan. She is currently an Associate Professor of Art at Monmouth University and maintains studios in Maine and New Jersey.
Event Details:
Exhibition: Ocean Bodies
Location: Ice House Gallery, Monmouth University, 400 Cedar Ave # 600, West Long Branch, NJ 07764
Opening Reception: February 6, 2025, 5:30–7:30 PM
Exhibition Dates: February 6, 2025 – March 23, 2025
Gallery Hours: Mon-Fri, 10am-5pm,
For additional information, please contact Scott Knauer, 732.923.4786 or visit https://kimberlycallas.com/.
Sharma is a highly decorated short-story writer and novelist; he’s been awarded many of the most prestigious prizes and recognitions that a fiction writer can receive. His first novel, An Obedient Father (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2000), hailed in New York Magazine by Jonathan Franzen as “A great novel” and described by Hilary Mantel in the New York Review of Books as “uncompromising,” with a “first chapter . . . [that] blasts off the locks and splinters the wood,” received the PEN/Hemingway Award for Debut Novel and was chosen as a New York Times Notable Book of the Year.
Sharma’s second novel, the spectacular Family Life (Norton, 2014), received both the International Dublin Literary Award and the Folio Prize. Scholar and writer Edmund White called it “a terse, devastating account of growing up as a brilliant outsider in American culture” and described it as “a near perfect novel.”
Sharma’s third and most recent book, the story collection A Life of Adventure and Delight (Norton, 2017), prompted writer Yiyun Li to describe Sharma as “truly the Chekhov of our time.” His stories have been widely published and anthologized, appearing in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Best American Short Stories, and O. Henry Award Stories.
Indeed, Sharma is such an exacting and rigorous writer that, quite unusually, he recently published a revised and rewritten edition of An Obedient Father (McNally Editions, 2022) more than twenty years after it first appeared in print. The critic Wyatt Mason, reviewing the revised version in The New York Times Magazine, described this as “Something white-rhino rare in the history of literature”, adding, approvingly, “there is scarcely a paragraph that hasn’t been improved . . . ”
Born in Delhi, India, Sharma grew up in Edison, NJ. Before becoming a professor at Duke, where he now teaches, he was on the faculty at Rutgers. He is an engaging and surprising speaker and an excellent reader of his work
This event is sponsored by The Visiting Writers Series, with the Center for the Arts and the Intercultural Center.
