UB Anderson Art Gallery FREE

Let's view the latest art exhibition on display and also over 1200 works of art donated by David K. Anderson. This art gallery is managed by the University of Buffalo. Admission and parking is free. It is located nearUB South Campus, near Englewood and Kenmore Avenues on Martha Jackson Place. It is a beautiful modern glass A structure glass museum.

WATER, GRAIN, STEEL: INDUSTRY AND THE ERIE CANAL
September 12, 2025–February 28, 2026
UB Anderson Gallery
Timed with the Erie Canal’s bicentennial, Water, Grain, Steel brings together works from the UB Art Galleries Collection and regional artists to explore the Canal’s lasting impact on labor, industry, land, and water. Historic WPA prints and twentieth-century landscapes appear alongside contemporary works that reframe the Canal’s legacy and its consequences for Buffalo and the surrounding region—past, present, and future.

EIGHTY-SIX REASONS FOR ASYLUM ADMISSION
KIMBERLY CHAPMAN

Sepia-toned silver gelatin photograph of a woman posed in character. She has glossy, tightly curled hair, dramatic false eyelashes, heavy eyeliner, and dark lipstick. Her chin rests thoughtfully in her gloved hand. She wears a dark-toned garment, possibly a dress or blouse, and gazes forward with a neutral expression—neither smiling nor frowning. The tightly framed bust portrait highlights the theatrical construction of persona through styling and pose.
Kimberly Chapman, Gold Masked Women, 2020. Porcelain, glaze, gold luster, 18 x 5 x 4 ½ inches. Courtesy of the artist.

DATES
September 12, 2025–February 28, 2026

LOCATION
UB Anderson Gallery

RELATED PROGRAMS
Opening Reception
DESCRIPTION
Ohio-based artist Kimberly Chapman creates porcelain sculptures, photographs, and assemblages that confront what women have been made to endure—both historically and in the present. In Eighty-Six Reasons for Asylum Admission, she turns her attention to the legacy of nineteenth-century asylums. The exhibition takes its title from a now-infamous list compiled by the Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum in West Virginia: “eighty-six reasons for asylum admission” that expose the deeply gendered logic of institutionalization. A lack of advocacy and control was tied together with pervasive medical misogyny. Drawn from research and driven by a sense of moral urgency, Chapman’s work gives haunting, poetic form to lives lost to silence and confinement.

Organized into thematic groupings, the exhibition invites viewers to encounter a spectrum of narratives and emotional tones. Each work reflects Chapman’s distinctive material language: porcelain objects that balance delicacy and intensity, at once beautiful and unsettling. The show traverses historical trauma and psychological interiority, foregrounding women’s resilience, vulnerability, and defiance.

Eighty-Six Reasons is presented in partnership with the Lipsey Architecture Center of Buffalo, housed within the Richardson Olmsted Campus—Buffalo’s former Kirkbride asylum. While the campus is widely celebrated for its architecture, this exhibition asks us to reckon with the human lives that passed through its halls. Chapman’s work offers a powerful and timely counter-narrative: one that insists on remembrance, accountability, and the need to tell these stories now