GAMBIER, Ohio (September 17, 2026) — The Gund at Kenyon College will present the first solo museum exhibition of photographer Doris Derby's work as part of its 2026–27 exhibition schedule. The exhibition will feature 32 photographs showcasing Black women's central role in civil rights grassroots organizing, placing Derby's largely unseen work within a broader understanding of documentary practice as social and political engagement.

In addition to the Derby exhibition, the 2026-27 schedule includes solo exhibitions by Sonja Sekula, Maria Lassnig and Raven Halfmoon, as well as a year-long presentation of The Gund's permanent collection. "This season reflects our ongoing commitment to centralizing the work of artists on the margins," said Daisy Desrosiers, Curatorial and Strategic Lead for The Gund. "From Doris Derby's civil rights photography to Maria Lassnig's experimental films, these exhibitions foreground voices that have shaped contemporary art but are too often absent from institutional collections. It is my distinct joy to bring the work of these artists to The Gund so that our students and the broader public have the chance to engage with it directly.”

Radical Care: Stories Held in the Work of Dr. Doris Derby

Through Dec. 13, 2026 "Radical Care: Stories Held in the Work of Dr. Doris Derby" will present 32 photographs documenting Black women's leadership in the civil rights movement and cultural life at historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs) during the Civil Rights Era. Derby, a pioneering photographer whose work has rarely appeared within institutional histories of photography, was also a grassroots organizer. Her images offer a vital and intimate lens onto the Civil Rights Movement, foregrounding her sustained attention to the lives and labor of Black women. Her images offer moments of care, resilience, and collective action that reshape how this history is seen and understood, while revealing HBCUs as dynamic sites where education and activism converged. Her photography operates not only as documentation but as activism in itself, insisting on visibility, proximity and the right to self-representation — contributing to a visual language of resistance that continues to resonate today.

This exhibition is curated by Daisy Desrosiers and Megan Alves and is organized in partnership with the High Museum of Art. It is made possible through a generous promised gift from Gregory Gooding (Kenyon alum '83) and David Knaus.

Where Ideas Begin: A Celebration of the Permanent Collection of The Gund at Kenyon College

Through July 11, 2027 "Where Ideas Begin: A Celebration of the Permanent Collection of The Gund" will feature more than 100 works from the museum's permanent collection, including recent acquisitions such as Claudia Alarcón's N'äyij “[Un camino / A path]” (2024); Christine Sun Kim's “Classified Digits” (2016); Gauri Gill's “Untitled (63) from Acts of Appearance” (2015-2025); Ulala Imai's “Care” (2022), and Joan Jonas’s “Mirror Pieces Installation II."

A celebration of The Gund's 15th anniversary, the exhibition unfolds as an evolving reflection of who the institution is today, and who it hopes to become. With a collection in which women artists represent more than 45% of artists, this moment signals both reflection and responsibility: to continue building a collection that is attentive, inclusive and responsive to the complexities of contemporary practice. This year-long presentation will shift and expand, creating space for new works, new perspectives and new forms of engagement, reflecting an institution shaped by dialogue — between faculty and museum educators, students and artworks, and between artists and the museum itself.

The installation will be updated halfway through the run to make room for Ragnar Kjartansson's monumental video piece, "The Visitors" (2012). The exhibition acknowledges the generosity that has made this collection possible — from Graham and Ann Gund's foundational 2012 gift, which transformed The Gund into a collecting institution, to their 2025 promised gift of 75 artworks and a $1 million endowment. The exhibition will be accompanied by a fully illustrated catalog.

The exhibition is curated by Daisy Desrosiers, former David and Francie Horvitz Family Foundation Director and Chief Curator of The Gund, and is the culminating exhibition of five years of leadership of the institution. “Where Ideas Begin: A Celebration of the Permanent Collection of The Gund at Kenyon College” is supported by the Terra Foundation for American Art.

Unruly Lines: The Art of Sonja Sekula

Through Dec. 13, 2026 "Unruly Lines: The Art of Sonja Sekula" will bring together 38 paintings by the Swiss-born Abstract Expressionist (1918-1963). Despite having long been overshadowed by her male contemporaries, Sekula's work occupies a critical position within the histories of Surrealism, queer modernism and postwar abstraction. Bridging Surrealism and the New York School, Sekula developed a visual language that expanded Surrealism's engagement with the unconscious into a more intimate exploration of psychological experience, embodiment, spirituality and identity.

Her paintings move easily between abstraction and figuration, often evoking states of emotional intensity, transformation, and psychic instability. Her work is increasingly recognized as central to conversations about the relationship between creativity and mental health, particularly in relation to women artists navigating institutionalization and psychiatric diagnosis in the 20th century. Working within avant-garde circles that included André Breton, Marcel Duchamp, Max Ernst, Roberto Matta, Peggy Guggenheim, Betty Parsons, John Cage and Merce Cunningham, Sekula both participated in and challenged the dominant frameworks of Surrealism and early Abstract Expressionism. As an openly gay woman and immigrant artist, she brought perspectives to these movements that complicated their largely male-centered narratives. Her work resisted fixed categories, instead foregrounding fluidity, vulnerability, and interior experience as generative artistic forces.

Throughout her life, Sekula experienced periods of hospitalization and was ultimately diagnosed with schizophrenia. Recent scholarship resists reducing her practice to biography, instead situating her work within interdisciplinary conversations across art history, disability studies, queer studies and the history of psychiatry. Her paintings, journals and correspondence reveal an artist deeply committed to translating complex mental and emotional states into visual form.

The original version of this exhibition was organized by the Grinnell College Museum of Art, curated by Jenny Anger, professor of art history, and Daniel Strong, associate director and curator of exhibitions. The Gund's presentation is curated by Dr. Diana Flatto, Postdoctoral Fellow for Museum Practices and Scholarly Engagements; Sacha Franjola '26, Postbaccalaureate Fellow in Museum Administration and Visitor Engagement; and Dr. Jodi Kovach, Pamela and Christopher Hoehn-Saric Deputy Director of Curatorial Affairs and Education.

Honey, You're a Wonderful Model: Maria Lassnig's Animated Films

Aug. 5–Dec. 12, 2027 "Honey, You're a Wonderful Model: Maria Lassnig's Animated Films" will be an immersive installation of moving images, presenting seven of Austrian artist Maria Lassnig's (1919-2014) hand-drawn animated films from the 1970s. Lassnig's animations are populated by a cast of characters, frequently including Lassnig herself, who engage in physical comedy and slapstick antics while addressing the complexities of relationships, sexuality, grief, artistic creation, and embodiment.

While Lassnig is best known as a painter of unflinching self-portraits, she spent a decade in New York working as an experimental and feminist filmmaker. This is her first U.S. exhibition dedicated to that work.

"Honey, You're a Wonderful Model: Maria Lassnig's Animated Films" is organized by the Des Moines Art Center and is curated by Ashton Cooper, associate curator at the Des Moines Art Center. The exhibition is made possible by the Maria Lassnig Foundation and the Harriet S. and J. Locke Macomber Art Center Fund. The exhibition is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalog with essays by Melissa Broder, Ashton Cooper, Nora Ephron, and Maria Lassnig.

Raven Halfmoon: Flags of Our Mothers

Aug. 5, 2027–March 5, 2028 "Raven Halfmoon: Flags of Our Mothers" is the artist's first major traveling exhibition, featuring 12 works made over the last five years. The title is a tribute to the matriarchs in Halfmoon’s life and the enduring work of Indigenous women to keep their stories and traditions present, active, and alive.

This exhibition includes two new commissions, including “Flagbearer,” a three-part stacked ceramic sculpture that stands more than 12 feet tall — one of her largest works to date. Halfmoon's practice spans torso-scaled and colossal glazed stoneware sculptures that reference stories of the Caddo Nation, specifically relating to her female lineage and the power of its complexities. With a strong visual presence that opposes existing stereotypes and biases, these monuments honor her ancestors and their traditions, as well as the elders who originally taught her about ceramics.

Inspired by ancient Indigenous pottery — from the Olmec heads to the Moai statues to her ancestors' earth mounds — Halfmoon fuses Caddo pottery traditions (created and maintained primarily by women) with contemporary gestures such as tagging in reference to Caddo tattooing and ancient motifs. Her surfaces show deep finger impressions and dramatic dripping glazes in a palette drawn from the clay bodies she selects: Oklahoma soil and the blood of murdered Indigenous women (red), the clay of the Red River (black) and buff creams. She often stacks and repeats imagery, creating totemic forms that honor her maternal ancestry while referencing the multiplicities inside all of us.

"Raven Halfmoon: Flags of Our Mothers" is organized by The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum and Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts. The exhibition is curated by Amy Smith-Stewart, Diana Bowes Chief Curator at The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, and Rachel Adams, Chief Curator and Director of Programs at Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts. Generous support provided by Art Bridges.

Miguel Fernández de Castro

Fall 2027 This exhibition will bring together photographs, documents, video, and objects, some made and some found by the artist over the past four years in Mexico's Gran Altar Desert — a landscape marked by smuggling routes, criminal networks, military patrols, and extractive industry. What holds Fernández de Castro's works together is a sustained exploration of the act of observation. His work asks us to consider who is watching, from where, and why.

A slideshow of highly magnified yet distant landscapes belonging to the region evokes the daily life of the punto — the watcher stationed in the hills whose job is to monitor the movement of people and things. Coded documents recovered from the area reveal the language through which those observations are relayed. A wooden bench, carved with marks by the man who once sat on it, holds the weight of that labor in material form. A 19th-century military illustration of an owl extends the question further back in time, linking the desert's older notions of watchfulness to the colonial project of frontier surveying and territorial control. A video Fernández de Castro made in collaboration with ejidatarios — members of a communal land system — on plots recovered from illegal mining operations completes the exhibition's arc. The artist turns his camera on an operation that depends on remaining unseen, and returns to visibility a landscape that had been taken from view.

This exhibition was developed in collaboration with Polygon Gallery in Vancouver. The Gund's presentation is curated by Daisy Desrosiers.

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About the Gund The Gund at Kenyon College is an accredited teaching museum presenting modern and contemporary art in Gambier, Ohio. Since opening in 2011, the museum has welcomed more than 10,000 visitors annually and grown its permanent collection to more than 550 works, with more than 45% by women artists.

In 2025, The Gund became the first museum in Knox County to receive accreditation from the American Alliance of Museums. The Gund's downtown location, the Annex, opened in 2023, and offers workshops and artist residencies. Admission is free. The gallery is open Thursday through Sunday. Learn more at https://thegund.org/.

About Kenyon College Founded in 1824, Kenyon College is the oldest private college in Ohio and the first institution in the U.S. to implement the model of faculty members serving as academic advisors. With a curriculum rooted in the liberal arts, Kenyon students and faculty aspire to a nuanced understanding of the world. Kenyon is a top producer of Fulbright Fellows and ranks second among Division III institutions for fostering NCAA postgraduate scholars.