The Fairfield University Art Museum was founded in 2010 as the Bellarmine Museum of Art and changed to its current name in 2016. The Walsh Gallery, which had operated independently, became part of the museum in 2013.
Exhibitions held at the museum since 2021 are linked below. To access and download digital materials for exhibitions between 2010-2021, you can access the museum’s digital archive.
Past Exhibitions
Monuments: Commemoration and Controversy
Bellarmine Hall Galleries
September 19 - December 20, 2025
Monuments: Commemoration and Controversy explores monuments and their representations in public spaces as flashpoints of fierce debate over national identity, politics, and race that have raged for centuries.
Stitching Time: The Social Justice Collaboration Quilts Project and Give Me Life: CPA Prison Arts Program
Walsh Gallery
September 12-December 13, 2025
Stitching Time features 12 quilts created by men who are incarcerated in the Louisiana State Penitentiary, also known as Angola Prison. These works of art, and accompanying recorded interviews, tell the story of a unique inside-outside quilt collaboration.
An Gorta Mór: Selections from Ireland's Great Hunger Museum
Walsh Gallery
April 11 – August 16, 2025
This exhibition presents highlights from the collection of Ireland’s Great Hunger Museum, which explores the impact of the Irish Famine of 1845-1852 through artwork produced by eminent Irish and Irish-American artists of the past 170 years.
Famous & Family: Through the Lens of Trude Fleischmann
Bellarmine Hall Galleries
May 2 – July 26, 2025
This landmark show will present over 100 photographs by the Austrian-born photographer Trude Fleischmann (1895-1990), one of the most accomplished female photographers of the 20th century.
A Model of the Antikythera Mechanism
Bellarmine Hall Galleries
September 12, 2024 – May 23, 2025
The Antikythera Mechanism, often described as the oldest analogue “computer,” was a device dating to the 2nd BCE used for astronomical calculations, including predicting eclipses. Pieces of the bronze device and its wooden case were first discovered in 1901 off the island of Antikythera, from which it takes its name.
Dawn & Dusk: Tonalism in Connecticut
Bellarmine Hall Galleries
January 17 – April 12, 2025
This exhibition explores Tonalism in the United States from the 1880s to the early 20th century, through artists from the Northeast such as George Inness, John Henry Twachtman, and John Francis Murphy.
To See This Place: Awakening to Our Common Home
Walsh Gallery
January 24 – March 29, 2025
Environmental threats and climate change are urgent matters of concern at Jesuit universities, where conversations on this topic often take place in reference to two documents by Pope Francis: Laudato Si’: On Care for Our Common Home (2015) and the 2023 update Laudate Deum.
Sacred Space: A Brandywine Workshop and Archives Print Exhibition
Walsh Gallery
September 21 – December 21, 2024
The exhibition serves as a portal into the interconnected realms of spirituality, time, space, memory, and culture. The artists pay homage to their forebears, drawing upon cultural traditions, rituals, and sacred practices to honor and preserve, as well as question, the invaluable heritage that shapes our identities.
Ink and Time: European Prints from the Wetmore Collection
Bellarmine Hall Galleries
September 12 – December 21, 2024
The exhibition explores themes including the collaborative nature of printmaking, the continuing demand for technical innovations, and the problem of “reproductive” prints for the modern viewer.
Peter Anton: Just Desserts
Walsh Gallery
May 10 – July 27, 2024
This whimsical exhibition of Peter Anton’s outsized, hyper-realistic sculptures of sweets will include ice cream cones, cakes and confections. Anton has experimented with various methods, including wood, metal, plaster, resin, and oil and acrylic paints to achieve the physicality of his monumental desserts.
Suzanne Chamlin: Studies in Color
Bellarmine Hall Galleries
April 5 – July 27, 2024
In this exhibition of recent work, Chamlin explores ideas about color theory and light through a series of landscape and interior stills. For each of her paintings, Chamlin sets a highly specific palette; experimentation within this limited range then guides her decisions about process and pictorial space.
The Landscape in Focus: Recent Acquisitions in Photography
Bellarmine Hall Galleries
April 5 – July 27, 2024
This exhibition of contemporary landscape photography complements the exhibition of paintings by Suzanne Chamlin on view in the Museum’s Meditz Gallery. In this intimate exhibition, remarkable landscape images share space with photographs which display poignant narratives of human interference with the natural world.
Streaming: Sculpture by Christy Rupp
Walsh Gallery
January 19 – April 27, 2024
Understood as one of the early pioneers in the field of ecological art activism, the artist, activist and thought-leader Christy Rupp has an international reputation. Streaming will feature a survey of Rupp’s intricate collages, wall installations and free-standing sculpture, which chronicle the ongoing tension between natural systems and the environment in transition.
Helen Glazer: Walking in Antarctica
Bellarmine Hall Galleries
February 2 – March 16, 2024
This interdisciplinary exhibition includes photography and sculpture made from 3D scans of ice and rock formations, inspired and informed by the artist Helen Glazer’s experiences as a grantee of the National Science Foundation Antarctic Artists and Writers Program.
In Real Times - Arthur Szyk: Artist and Soldier for Human Rights
Bellarmine Hall Galleries (Main Exhibition) and Walsh Gallery (Szyk: The Interactive Experience).
September 29 – December 16, 2023
This special exhibition, organized around the theme of human rights features more than 50 works by acclaimed Polish Jewish miniaturist and political cartoonist Arthur Szyk (1894-1951), including political cartoons, and images that honor the power and importance of democratic ideals.
In Their Element(s): Women Artists Across Media
Bellarmine Hall Galleries
April 21 – July 15, 2023
The exhibition – the first exhibition in FUAM’s history to have been fully developed and curated by an undergraduate student – features more than 50 contemporary artworks by women artists.
Women’s Rights are Human Rights
Walsh Gallery
January 20 – July 1, 2023
This exhibition features posters created by both men and women worldwide to celebrate and acknowledge the vital role that all citizens play in protecting and promoting human rights while challenging gender inequality and stereotypes.
Norma Minkowitz: Body to Soul
Bellarmine Hall Galleries
January 27 – April 6, 2023
Norma Minkowitz: Body to Soul is a solo exhibition surveying the artist’s four-decade engagement with the physical and symbolic properties of thread. Minkowitz reinvents traditional needlework by crocheting fantastical forms, coating them in resin and shellac to create rigid sculptures and hangings.
Out of the Kress Vaults: Women in Sacred Renaissance Painting
Bellarmine Hall Galleries
September 16 – December 17, 2022
The exhibition, curated by Michelle DiMarzo, PhD together with Fairfield University undergraduate students, explores representations of femininity and virtue in Renaissance paintings of the Virgin Mary, female saints, and nuns.
Gladys Triana: A Path to Enlightenment/Beyond Exile
Walsh Gallery
September 23 – December 17, 2022
Gladys Triana is a Cuban-born, New-York-based, multi-disciplinary artist whose work rebels against authoritarian rule, domination, and power. She explores themes related to the historical struggle of women and the condition of exile, as well as subjects such as ephemerality, memory, and ultimately the search for a language of transcendence.
Specimens and Reflections
Bellarmine Hall Galleries
September 16 – December 17, 2022
Digitally manipulated photographic panoramas of the interiors of Roman churches by Claudia Esslinger (Professor of Art, Kenyon College) are accompanied by the poetry of Royal Rhodes ‘68 (Professor Emeritus of Religious Studies, Kenyon College) in this unique exhibition that explores the intersection of word and image.
13 Ways of Looking at Landscape: Larry Silver's Connecticut Photographs
Walsh Gallery
March 25 – June 18, 2022
Larry Silver, a Photo League-inspired photographer still working today, moved from Greater New York to Westport, CT in 1973. With his camera, he began exploring his new regional environs, and pushing the boundaries of what landscape and looking is and can be.
Adger Cowans: Sense and Sensibility
Bellarmine Hall Galleries
January 28 – June 18, 2022
Curated by Halima Taha, PhD, this exhibition will explore how Cowans uses photography as a vehicle to articulate beauty within the human condition, and the world in which we live, and will feature over fifty works from across his illustrious career as a photographer of portraiture, landscape, and film.
SEEING IS BELIEVING: Crossings and Transpositions, Part II
Walsh Gallery
January 21 - March 5, 2022
This exhibition, organized by Professor of Studio Art Jo Yarrington, features work by five contemporary Chinese artists: He Jiancheng, Xiao Yaoning, Luo Biwu, Zuo Zhengyao and Zhang Zhengmin.
ink/stone
Walsh Gallery
January 21 – March 5, 2022
Curated by Ive Covaci, PhD, this exhibition will feature some 15 contemporary Chinese paintings and works on paper, presented together with stone sculpture, including a scholar’s rock.
Carrie Mae Weems: The Usual Suspects
Walsh Gallery
September 18 - December 18, 2021
In Carrie Mae Weems: The Usual Suspects, Weems focuses on the humanity denied in recent killings of black men, women, and children by police. She directs our attention to the constructed nature of racial identity—specifically, representations that associate black bodies with criminality.
Roberto Lugo: New Ceramics
Bellarmine Hall Galleries
September 18 – December 18, 2021
Self-described "ghetto potter" Roberto Lugo uses porcelain, a medium traditionally reserved for the wealthy, to explore inequality and racial and social justice. His work often takes familiar shapes drawn from European and Asian ceramic traditions, including ginger jars, amphorae, and teapots.
Robert Gerhardt: Mic Check
Bellarmine Hall Galleries
September 18 – December 18, 2021
Robert Gerhardt: Mic Check is a photography project by photojournalist and writer Robert Gerhardt, who relied on the #BlackLivesMatter hashtag to track and document these protests in New York City over the last seven years.
By Design: Theater and Fashion in the Photography of Lalla Essaydi
Walsh Gallery
January 29 - May 21, 2021
By Design: Theater and Fashion in the Photography of Lalla Essaydi explores the artistic process behind the creation of Essaydi’s carefully staged photographs, which deconstruct and reimagine stereotypes of Muslim womanhood.
Birds of the Northeast: Gulls to Great Auks
Bellarmine Hall Galleries
January 22 – May 14, 2021
Birds of the Northeast: Gulls to Great Auks features paintings, sculpture, prints, drawings, photographs, and natural history specimens from the early 19th century through the present day.
