Current Exhibitions
2024-25 Exhibition + Events schedule
Spring Art Exhibitions
January 21 - February 28
Closing reception: February 28 from 5:00 – 7:00 PM
Julia Betts, The Dams are Broken
McDonough Museum Lecture:
Wednesday, February 5, 5:30 PM
Julia Betts’ work combines sculpture, performance, and installation in her efforts to push a range of materials to the limits of their use while placing herself in unstable circumstances, creating metaphors of emotional and psychic vulnerability and demonstrations of intentional disarray. She is an Adjunct Professor at Carnegie Mellon University.
Anna Chapman, Underworld/Otherworld
Anna Chapman is an artist and educator. Her work aims to create reconciliatory relationships to place, community, materiality, and voice on both the personal and collective levels, influenced by the social sciences, the humanities, ecology, and the healing arts.
Emerging Artist Abby Cipar, Sometime, Somehow, For You
McDonough Museum Lecture:
Wednesday, February 12, 5:30 PM
Abby Cipar is a multidisciplinary artist, arts advocate, and curator from Northeast Ohio. They currently serve as a Community Member on the Artist Resource Committee for Akron’s Summit Artspace.
Sidney Mullis, Caught Skies & Pillowed Pines (Black Forest)
McDonough Museum Lecture:
Wednesday, February 20, 5:30 PM
Sidney Mullis is a sculptor who is currently building a make-believe forest in which our childhood selves retreat to during adulthood. Her other work has focused on puberty, the intimacy of forgetting, and the performance of gender.
Will Hutnick, QUEER HORIZONS
McDonough Museum Lecture:
Wednesday, February 27, 5:30 PM
Will Hutnick, based in Connecticut, has been an artist-in-residence at Yaddo, the Vermont Studio Center, and the Hambidge Center for the Creative Arts and Sciences. He is currently the Director of Artistic programming at the Wassaic Project, a non-profit organization that uses art to foster positive social change.
Lost and Unmade: the films of Bruce Checefsky
Film screening: Wednesday, March 12, 5:30 PM
Bruce Checefsky is a filmmaker, photographer, and writer whose independent films have been shown all over the world. Using films that were lost, destroyed, or conceived but never produced, Checefsky recreates and reimagines abstract and avant-garde shorts. He focuses on pre-1920s and post-1935 films, with a special interest in those made by Jewish filmmakers that were destroyed during World War II.
88th Annual Juried Student Art & Design Exhibition
March 21 - April 4
Reception: March 21 from 5:00 – 7:00 PM
The Annual Juried Student Art & Design Exhibition features work by YSU Department of Art students. Local businesses and individuals support the event and its artists by contributing cash awards and gift certificates to numerous award categories, including ceramics, photography, painting, drawing, sculpture, digital media, and graphic and interactive design.
2025 Spring Graduating B.F.A. Exhibition
April 18 - May 3
Reception: April 18 from 5:00 – 7:00 PM
Students in the Department of Art work closely with nationally and internationally known faculty engaged in a broad range of art and design practices. The Graduating B.F.A. Exhibition is an opportunity for students to share the original and innovative discoveries they have made in their artistic journeys, communicating to the public their creative expressions of human experience. At the culmination of each fall and spring semester we celebrate the creative accomplishments of our graduating seniors from each studio art area with this dynamic exhibition.
Summer Exhibitions
May 30 - July 19
Opening reception: May 30 from 5:00 – 7:00 PM
Ronald Jason Van Hoose, Time, The Earth and The Dream: A Retrospective
A landscape artist currently based in Youngstown Ronald Jason Van Hoose’s artistic vision is rooted in the rural landscapes of the small, western Pennsylvania steel town of his childhood. A graduate of Youngstown State University's Fine Arts program, Van Hoose received his Bachelor of Fine Arts in Painting and Ceramics in 1993. Influenced by the Regionalist School, the Hudson River School and 19th-century popular imagery and 20th-century Science Fiction illustration, Van Hoose’s paintings are found in corporate and private collections throughout the United States.
Jeffrey S. Piper, col·lo·cate
Jeffrey S. Piper is a multi-disciplinary artist with a passion for both teaching and creating. He earned his BFA from Kent State University in 2002, with a minor in education. He currently teaches art at Lakeview High School. In 2010, Piper became the first graduate student to earn a Master of Art Education degree from YSU specializing in studio painting. Though his primary focus is painting, he works in multiple mediums, including ceramics, often employing a mixed-media approach in his artwork. Piper’s work has been featured in numerous prestigious local and national exhibitions.
Mike Egan, Built By Death
Mike Egan was born outside of Pittsburgh, PA and studied fine art at Edinboro University of Pennsylvania focusing on printmaking. After finishing school and without the supplies to continue creating prints he turned to painting as his medium. His style of bold lines and dark imagery is influenced by his past printmaking as well as an appreciation of traditional tattooing. He uses his love of religious imagery, his experiences dealing with life and death, and his love for skeletons and devils to create his unique vision.
Inspiring Minds Exhibition
Inspiring Minds is a nonprofit organization that engages and empowers youth with after-school and summer programs that focus on five areas of impact: education, college and career readiness, exposure to new experiences, health and wellness, and personal development. This partnership allows the McDonough to encourage creativity and enhance the participants' arts education as well as inspiring these youths to help foster a new generation of art enthusiasts.