There’s a well-known saying among academics: Publish or perish. Professors must continue to prove their relevance to their chosen field through show-and-tell, often in the form of lengthy peer-reviewed articles largely indecipherable to a general audience. It’s unlikely that a university would ask them to present a select few of those pages out of context, displayed on a wall for undergrads and visitors to scrutinize. Unless, of course, they teach art.
The faculty show, in general, is an unwieldy premise for an exhibition. Participants may spend most of their time working toward the same goals at the same institution but have little else in common. Yet that also makes such shows fertile ground for the unexpected conversations and spontaneous affinities that are a university’s whole raison d’être. Viewers can see those connections for themselves in “Catalyst: Art as Inquiry,” a show of works by 16 current University of Vermont studio art faculty on view at the Fleming Museum of Art in Burlington through December 12.
The exhibition’s curation offers viewers some guidance, grouping the work by broad themes. Mostly, though, “Catalyst” frames the objects on view as evidence of the profs’ broader research practices rather than stand-alone final products. The approach is a good one, given how today’s artists tend to pursue complex projects based in academic theory more than they are focused on craft. But what that means on a practical level is that to understand what’s going on, the casual visitor may need to do some homework. (Be sure to grab the book of artist statements near the show’s entrance.)
To understand what’s going on, the casual visitor may need to do some homework.
Burlingtonians may be familiar with Christopher Kojzar’s brightly colored public sculpture, “Dance in Place,” installed last year at the corner of St. Paul and Bank streets. Here, he presents an altogether different take on public art with “Plainclothes Agenda,” a series of pencil and ink drawings made in outdoor spaces. At each site, Kojzar drew until a stranger interrupted him; the drawings are titled with the place, the time until his interaction and an overheard phrase, such as “‘even i could do that’ in Paris, (time ’til interaction = 88 minutes).”
Visitors can also listen to audio from a cassette tape of recordings made during his plein air sessions. Kojzar framed each drawing in a circular format, matting out the blank area around the sketch with a solid piece of white acrylic. That adcds weight and importance to the negative space. As Kojzar says in his statement, “The absence of marks becomes a marker itself, where what isn’t drawn signals the beginning of something not seen.”
Several of the artists use what isn’t pictured to convey meaning in the work, though understanding its significance may be impossible without more information. Nicolei Buendia Gupit’s painting “Witness to Empire (1890-1902)” is a riot of tropical leaves silhouetted in indigo ink on a collage of textured handmade papers. It is satisfyingly tactile, and, looking at it, one has a sense of reclamation — that describing these leaves is vitally important to the person who has made these calligraphic, gestural marks.
That’s borne out by Buendia Gupit’s statement, in which she describes how these plants are taken from the backgrounds of photographs made by an American colonial administrator of the Philippines, who presented portraits of Filipino subjects designed to convey how they were “unfit” to self-govern. In omitting the people from the photos, Buendia Gupit writes, “I disrupt the visual logic of the colonial gaze.”
Photographer Ace Lehner purposely withholds additional information about the subjects of two portraits as a way of asking viewers to challenge their own assumptions. Lehner, who recently presented the pop-up exhibition “Barbershop: The Art of Queer Failure” at BCA Center in Burlington, has a practice centered on queer theory, identity and representation. Yet the salient factor is color in “Ruth and Clyde, Rosendale, NY,” where the subject’s bright red shoes, red fence, fire hydrant and a tree in bloom convey an overall vitality in contrast to neutral gazes from both Ruth and pup Clyde.
In “Emmett, North Adams, MA,” golden-hour light lends a luscious vibe to the scene, despite Emmett’s prosaic expression. In their statement, Lehner explains that while traditional portraiture often attempts to categorize people, “this project defies this reductive way of image-making, instead portraying people tied together by my love for them.”
Other works communicate more directly through composition and materials. Misoo Bang’s “Heavenly Guardians-Lokapalas” gives us a suite of Buddhist deities depicted using Tanghwa, a traditional Korean technique of layering pigment into paper, and surrounded by a collage of much smaller figures from Renaissance paintings. “Giant Asian Girl — Coco” is a less supernatural portrait but, depicting the subject in gold-toned clothing on a field of gold leaf, a no less reverent one. Both uphold Asian cultural identity as something to be celebrated and make a clear point that the big people in the middle of the pictures deserve center stage.
In Jaimes Mayhew’s participatory installation “The Table for Queer/Trans Utopian Imagining,” visitors are invited to sit at a table covered in a maplike tapestry and read a pamphlet that asks them to imagine a queer-centered world. Wall text poses questions such as “What does your utopia look like? Who lives in your utopia? Who can visit?” The pamphlet offers accessible and approachable guidance for starting a discussion, but given the tendency of utopian states to go terribly wrong, a pile of supplemental reading materials might not be amiss.
Viewers shouldn’t be daunted if they’ve skipped the prerequisites. Many of the works start out intriguing on an aesthetic level — Steve Budington’s reliefs, Meg McDevitt’s embroidered pillows, Heimo Wallner’s wall drawing — but reward deeper inquiry, gaining meaning with context that’s not strictly necessary. Though the works in “Catalyst” employ many different strategies, all of them provoke more questions than answers: telltale evidence of great teaching. ➆
“Catalyst: Art as Inquiry,” on view through December 12; a panel discussion with curator Heather Ferrell and artists Mildred Beltré, Misoo Bang and Erika White is Wednesday, October 14, 5 p.m., at the Fleming Museum in Burlington.
The original print version of this article was headlined “Show Your Work | University of Vermont art profs take different approaches in ‘Catalyst'”
This article appears in October 7 • 2026.
Got something to say?
Send a letter to the editor and we'll publish your feedback in print!
