BUFFALO, NY.- This fall, UB Art Galleries launches a season with three exhibitions that explore how artists from different generations and regions use repetition, processes, and materials to address questions of belief. Natvar Bhavsar: Free Yourself, Constructed Belief, and Karle Norman: Leather Prayers showcase a range of artistic voices—from Bhavsar, now in his nineties and a key figure in postwar abstraction, to mid-career artists and those who are just starting their journeys. The exhibitions draw on traditions from India, the Middle East, Judaism, Christianity, and American subcultures. Through painting, sculpture, ceramics, textiles, and works on paper, students from various disciplines, including studio art, art history, religion, psychology, and across the humanities, will find multiple points of entry. Viewed alone or collectively, the three shows pose a common question: how do the repeated actions we take—in a studio, during a ritual, or within a community—shape the beliefs we hold?

Natvar Bhavsar: Free Yourself (September 18, 2026–April 3, 2027, UB Anderson Gallery)

Natvar Bhavsar: Free Yourself presents fifty years of the artist's vibrant color-field abstractions. Bhavsar's unique process involves soaking canvas in a clear acrylic binder and applying up to eighty layers of pure, dry pigment using handmade tools and fine mesh screens. He allows air currents and his body’s rhythm to influence the final surface. The results are richly textured up close and evoke a strong atmosphere from afar. While many of his Abstract Expressionist peers pursued the sublime through restraint, Bhavsar’s work is joyful and deeply rooted in his Indian heritage, drawing inspiration from Holi’s vibrant powders and the decorative floor patterns of rangoli. In collaboration with the Buffalo AKG Art Museum, where a related installation will also be displayed, this exhibition features major paintings from across Bhavsar's career, offering a rare, comprehensive look at an artist now in his nineties.

Natvar Bhavsar: Free Yourself is organized by the University at Buffalo Art Galleries and the Buffalo AKG Art Museum. It is curated by UB Art Galleries Director Robert Scalise and Katie O’Hara, Assistant Curator, Buffalo AKG Art Museum.

DAG is the presenting sponsor of Natvar Bhavsar: Free Yourself. Additional support is provided by Ashok G. Kaveeshwar PhD and Hariastuti Kaveeshwar. Special thanks to UB President Satish K. Tripathi supporting this exhibition through the President’s Fund for Excellence.





Constructed Belief (September 24, 2026–April 30, 2027, UB CFA Gallery, First Floor)

Constructed Belief showcases four artists—Mara Baldwin, Ben Cowan, Nicki Green, and Muhammad Z. Zaman—who use repetitive gestures to explore how rituals create and reshape belief. Baldwin’s detailed, surreal works on paper draw on the friendship rituals of Girl Scout camp culture. Cowan extracts hands, lips, and other fragments from Renaissance religious paintings and presents them in aqua-resin, creating gestural vignettes. Green’s ceramic vessels reflect on Judaism through the lens of transness and ritual transformation, treating traditional forms as sites of constant evolution. Zaman’s calligraffiti paintings blend English, Arabic, and Bangla to renegotiate his Muslim faith and identity. This exhibition encompasses drawing, painting, ceramics, and mixed media, treating ritual, gesture, and repetition as vital tools for communities and individuals to build and redefine their systems of belief.

Karle Norman: Leather Prayers (September 24, 2026–April 30, 2027, UB CFA Gallery, Second Floor)

Karle Norman: Leather Prayers features sculptural, hand-stitched leather wall hangings, a site-specific installation, and years of sketchbook work by Buffalo-based artist Karle Norman. The exhibition reflects Norman's own experience of "disfellowshipping”—the formal process of leaving a strict religious group—and gives that experience physical form through leather figures that echo Norman’s own body, blending the bodily with the fantastical. The labor-intensive method of hand-stitching leather layered over shaped molds and the use of vibrant, purposeful colors, mirrors how belief and community can be built and sometimes distorted by control. Visitors can wander through and around the work at their own pace, bringing their own perspectives on community, faith, and bodily agency to the experience.