ALBANY, NY.- The University Art Museum announces three new exhibitions: Howard Schwartzberg: Volume, Surface, Core in the first floor main gallery; mosie romney: ash, whistle & redress in the second floor main gallery; and Invitation to the Light Factory | Suzan Frecon & Marcella Durand in the Nancy Hyatt Liddle Gallery and the Collections Study Gallery.
Howard Schwartzberg: Volume, Surface, Core
Schwartzberg reconfigures painting’s constituent materials—paint, canvas, wooden stretcher bars—to create new spatial and perceptual relationships. Exploring traditional painterly ideas of support and surface, as well as illusion, his three-dimensional forms appear as volumes of paint, cradled in burlap or resting on layers of canvas and wood.
Viewers can move through Orange Slice (2026), a newly-commissioned, nine-foot-high, site-specific sculpture at the center of the museum, and become immersed in its two expansive fields of color. Appearing like a burlap container of paint sliced in half, each massive, gravity-defying volume of paint clings to the wall behind it, as if hung like a painting. The work is a culmination of Schwartzberg’s long-standing exploration of “turning painting inside out,” and also revisits themes from his 1999 land work Surface for Socrates Sculpture Park, Queens, New York, where viewers were invited to move with the piece above and below ground level to consider the relation of the work to its environs. The UAM’s architecture affords multiple vantage points for Schwartzberg’s new work. The first floor offers an intimate experience of Orange Slice, while the mezzanine above allows the viewer to grasp the work’s form in its entirety.
Earlier works in the exhibition showcase over three decades of the artist’s practice, including previously unexhibited drawings. These drawings, made with gouache, ballpoint pen, highlighter, and other media on readymade advertising templates, offer insight into Schwartzberg’s process, showing designs for realized and unrealized work, sketches, and notes.
mosie romney: ash, whistle & redress
mosie romney writes: “Our roots are not fixed in the past but pulse through dreams and echoes, guiding us across time.” In mosie romney: ash, whistle & redress, romney explores echo, remedy, and ritual through paintings, poetry, and installation. They transform the museum’s second-floor mezzanine gallery into an environment built from felled trees painted silver, paintings of ping pong matches and recreational spaces, and references to earthquake notification systems, among other elements. The exhibition draws the personal and the geological into the same field of attention, situating the body on a spectrum from joviality to catastrophe that is not past but continuous, ancestral, urgent, and unresolved.
Borrowing the approach of “affective proximity,” a term coined by Ghana-born British filmmaker and artist John Akomfrah, romney places disparate ideas in relation to one another, allowing each element to accrue new resonance through its proximity to the others. The result is a field of meaning that moves across colonialism, gender, and the environment. romney’s work is characterized by a contemporary polyglot sensibility while also drawing on a long tradition of Caribbean surrealism that looks inward to find strategies for surviving in the world.
Invitation to the Light Factory | Suzan Frecon & Marcella Durand
Painter Suzan Frecon and poet and translator Marcella Durand reimagine what collaboration can look like in the latest iteration of their project, The Light Factory. The exhibition features Frecon’s small-scale brushwork experiments with haematite pigments on paper alongside ekphrastic poetry by Durand. Over a career spanning six decades, Frecon has made contemplative abstract paintings exploring relationships between material and light, and foundational structures and color. Durand, Frecon’s daughter, writes poems that intimately recreate the sights, sounds, and smells of the painter’s studio, and that draw associations with history and the larger world.
The Light Factory project began with an exhibition at David Zwirner, Paris (2025), and their artists’ book of the same name (2025, Insurance Editions). First inspired by their stay at the Saline Royale d’Arc-et-Senans, France, the project explored the utopian visions of its architect Claude-Nicolas Ledoux (1736–1806). That exploration is now recontextualized within the University at Albany’s 1967 historic architecture, designed by Edward Durell Stone (1902–78). In one of the two exhibition galleries, Frecon’s paintings are illuminated by light from the building’s twenty-four-foot-high windows.
Frecon and Durand’s longtime friend, poet, and founder/editor of Insurance Editions (publisher of The Light Factory) Kostas Anagnopoulos, is a consultant on the exhibition’s design and public events.
Howard Schwartzberg (b. 1965, Coney Island, Brooklyn; lives and works in Brooklyn and Margaretville, New York) has had solo exhibitions at Momenta Art, Brooklyn; Dorsky Gallery, Long Island City, New York; and at numerous galleries across the United States and internationally. His work has been included in group exhibitions at the Drawing Center, New York, among other institutions and galleries. In 1999 the artist created Surface, a large environmental earthwork in Socrates Sculpture Park, Long Island City, New York. Schwartzberg also taught art in the New York City public school system, where he integrated concepts of relational aesthetics into educational programs for students, staff, and the community.
mosie romney (b. 1994, New York City) has had solo exhibitions in New York, Los Angeles, and internationally, and their work is in the permanent collections of the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami, Florida; the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, New York; Pond Society, Shanghai, China; and the Yuz Museum, Shanghai, China, among others. romney is a former archivist for the Studio Museum in Harlem and a former painter of theater and film sets.
Suzan Frecon (b. 1941, Mexico, Pennsylvania; lives and works in Germantown, New York) has exhibited her painting widely in the United States and internationally. In 2008, Frecon’s work was the subject of a major solo exhibition, form, color, illumination: Suzan Frecon painting, at The Menil Collection in Houston, Texas, which traveled to the Kunstmuseum Bern in Switzerland. She has participated in notable group exhibitions, such as the 2000 and 2010 Whitney Biennials. Frecon was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2022. In 2016, She received the Artist Award from the Artists’ Legacy Foundation in Oakland, California.
Marcella Durand (b. 1967, Pottstown, Pennsylvania; lives and works in New York, New York) is a poet, essayist, and translator. Durand’s latest book of poetry is The Temple of Happiness (Black Square, 2026). Her book, A Winter Triangle, was the 2024 Poetic Justice Institute Prize Winner and was published by Fordham University Press in 2025. Other recent books include To husband is to tender (Black Square, 2021), The Prospect (Delete, 2020), and a translation from the French of Michle Mtail’s book-length poem, Earth’s Horizons/Les Horizons du sol. Durand is the 2021 recipient of the C.D. Wright Award in Poetry from the Foundation of Contemporary Art. She is also the co-editor with Jennifer Firestone of Other Influences: The Untold History of Avant-Garde Feminist Poetry (MIT, 2024).
