Gallery at the Center

The Gallery at the Center was founded in 2012 and has as its main mission to show artistic and thematic exhibits around CSER’s key areas of interest, including immigration, citizenship, national formations, labor, public space, race, ethnicity, and/or indigeneity.

CURRENT EXHIBIT

Grounded Knowledge – A Student Exhibition
Spring 2019 – Spring 2020, 420 Hamilton Hall

CSER’s Gallery At The Center is holding the student exhibition, Grounded Knowledge, featuring prints from the Native American Heritage Month Planning Committee’s zine, Grounded Knowledge. Read more about the zine below.

​Welcome to Grounded Knowledge, the 2018 Columbia University Native American Heritage Month zine!
This year, the theme explored our experiences of education as Native students under the title Grounded Knowledge: Living Indigenous Pedagogies at Columbia. We asked our community to create zine pages that responded to the question: how do you imagine your presence as an Indigenous student at Columbia? This month is a time for educating the larger campus on Native narratives, while also focusing on nourishing the identities of those within the CU Native community. This is why we felt so strongly to produce something together as a community that would both amplify and affirm our voices. Read deeply and share widely. We hope you enjoy.

—NAHM Planning Committee

Columbia University (Map)
420 Hamilton Hall
1130 Amsterdam Avenue
New York City 10027

Gallery Hours: 10am-4pm, Monday-Friday

PAST EXHIBITS

Puerto Rico Under Water
April 19, 2018 – September 15, 2018​

Puerto Rico Under Water features the work of five Puerto Rican artists reflecting on the island’s debt crisis and its consequences, including mass migration, vulnerable infrastructure, and increased levels of personal insecurity. At the same time, the work serves as site of memory, humor, and hope as Puerto Ricans rebuild not only homes but a collective future

Apache Chronicles: The Art of Douglas Miles
November 17, 2016 – May 30, 2017

The Apache Chronicles exhibit featured the work of visual artist Douglas Miles. Indigenous resistance is one of the constant themes in Mr. Miles’ work. Using non-traditional methods and mediums, such as the skateboards displayed in this exhibit, Mr. Miles draws on social justice issues as well as the history of Native people and places these themes at the forefront of the street art movement. Exhibition page

Colors of Confinement (December 2015-May 2016)
Photographs of Japanese American Confinement in World War II

This exhibit was a traveling exhibition guest curated by Eric L. Muller, the Dan K. Moore Distinguished Professor of Law at the University of North Carolina. It featured images by amateur photographer Bill Manbo shot during his term as inmate at the Heart Mountain Relocation Center in Wyoming from 1942 to 1944. This was one of the ten camps set up by the U.S. government after the bombing of Pearl Harbor for the forced relocation of 12,000, mostly US-born Japanese American living on the West Coast.

Messages Across Time and Space: (September-December 2015)
Inupiat Drawings from the 1890s at Columbia University

Co-curated by Barnard Art History professor Elizabeth Hutchinson and her students, the show included ten nineteenth century drawings representing aspects of the kivgik (Messenger Feast), a ceremonial complex performed in many Inupiat communities in Alaska to this day. The show investigated the manifold layers of meaning present in an indigenous art produced within the violent context of settler colonialism in late nineteenth century Alaska.

The Raging 70s (October 2014-May 2015)

The exhibit drew from El Diario La Prensa’s 5,000-image collection, which is part of the Latino Arts and Activism Archive at Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Columbia University. This show highlighted one of the era’’s most talented photographers, Bolívar Arellano and featured intimate images of Latino public figures, significant events, and everyday life in Latino communities that underscored the period’s importance to New York and global histories.

Superheroes (October 2013- May 2014)

The Gallery’’s inaugural exhibit was Dulce Pinzón’s photographic tour de force, a series of portraits of superhero-clad Mexican and Central American immigrants in New York performing their jobs. Pinzón pays homage to Latino immigrants that withstand difficult labor conditions in order to help their families and communities survive and prosper.

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