Between Earth and Sky: Fall Exhibitions at Kenyon’s Gund

Tucked into the campus of Kenyon College in Gambier, Ohio, the art venue known as The Gund has steadily grown into a site where the appeal of the exhibitions extends beyond its small campus. The gallery’s five current exhibitions, on view through December 14, may appear disparate at first glance. Yet the more time one spends within them, the more a connective tissue emerges: a meditation on how art not only reflects but enacts care, binding together communities, histories, and futures.

The first encounter, Marie Watt’s Tuning to the Sounds of the Skies sets the tone with works that hover at body level and overhead like dense, shimmering clouds. Made from layers of tobacco tin lids (which Watts calls “jingles”) folded and stitched together and then suspended from the ceiling, the installations catch the light in soft folds. The jingles glimmer like stars while producing a gentle metallic rustle when touched. At once airy and monumental, the forms appear both fragile and resilient—clouds made solid, holding the hum of many voices. Watt’s suspended forms recall the Coast Salish story of Lifting the Sky, as shared by Vi Hilbert of the Upper Skagit tribe, in which collective breath and rhythm lift a falling sky back into place [1]. Amongst the turmoil, people separated by language and culture discover a shared word: yəhaw̓, meaning “to proceed, to do” [2]. Here, sculpture becomes more than a passive object. Stitched together by many hands and animated by the sound of tin jingles, the work insists on participation. Viewers are not merely spectators; they are invited to brush against the hanging forms, to feel their resonance, to add their own breath to a collective chorus. The effect is subtle yet profound: a reminder that care and survival are acts carried not by individuals but by communities.

If Watt’s installation invites us to look up, Claudia Alarcón and Silät’s Everyday Anew redirects our gaze downward, toward the ground that enables such lifting. The exhibition fills the next space with woven objects—some small, dense, and utilitarian; others expansive and airy, draping like nets that catch the light. Their natural palette of earthen browns, soft ochres, and muted greens comes from chaguar, a tough native plant fiber harvested and processed by hand [3]. While the shapes often resemble clouds in their suspended, open weavings, they remain tethered to the land, their fibers unmistakably rooted in the soil of Argentina’s Gran Chaco.

The Silät collective, made up of over 100 Wichí women, sustains a practice that joins personal expression with communal knowledge. From the modest scale of yicas (handwoven bags, used daily) to larger pieces that unfurl like fragments of sky, the works carry memory, resilience, and kinship. Alarcón, who works independently but also within the collective, emphasizes that authorship here is never singular—it is an ongoing product of shared trust. The textiles’ presence in the gallery space creates a dialogue between sky and soil, weightlessness and rootedness. Each thread carries memory, resilience, and kinship, tying the work not only to individual makers but to the collective histories they sustain. Like clouds shaped by roots and reshaped by wind, these pieces remain open to transformation, shifting with context and time. Where Watt shows us how to raise the sky together, Alarcón and Silät remind us that such lifting depends on the labor of hands grounded in the land.

The presentation of Lenore Tawney: Holding Us in Wonder deepens this dialogue by situating Tawney’s radical fiber practice between earth and sky. In this gallery, long strands of woven fiber hang freely, forming cascading veils that hover somewhere between tapestry and sculpture. Their palette is understated yet luminous—warm neutrals interwoven with muted yellows and soft oranges that seem to catch and radiate the overhead natural light. Installed against a yellow wall, the works glow with a quiet intensity, creating the impression that the threads themselves are suffused with sunlight. Breaking free from the loom’s strict warp and weft, Tawney’s suspended weavings float in space with sculptural presence yet hold the contemplative gravity of ritual. Born in Ohio but aligned with the New York avant-garde, she redefined fiber as a medium capable of wonder and transcendence. Placed near the woven works of Alarcón and Silät, her practice demonstrates how weaving can serve simultaneously as grounding force and as passage into the immaterial—threads stretched not just across a loom, but across thresholds of perception.

While these exhibitions conjure clouds and fibers, Milton and Anne Rogovin: A Labor of Love brings us firmly back to earth. Rogovin’s black-and-white photographs of Appalachian mining communities are unflinching yet deeply humane. Entering this section, one is greeted by rows of black-and-white portraits, unglamorous yet deeply empathetic. The photographs depict miners, families gathered in their living rooms, neighbors leaning against wooden porches. The prints are modest in scale, matte rather than glossy, their grayscale tones lending weight to every wrinkle, crease of clothing, and line of landscape in the background. Made in collaboration with his wife, Anne, who built the community trust necessary for such intimate encounters, the portraits reveal pride and dignity in the midst of environmental extraction and labor precarity [4]. The works are not documents of labor alone but testaments to shared life: neighbors on porches, families gathered, miners returning from their shifts. In contrast to Watt’s clouds visitors begin with in the gallery, the Rogovins’ work reminds us of the ground—the extractive landscapes and the people who inhabit them. In today’s conversations around labor and environment, these portraits remain startlingly present.

The final exhibition, The Sum of Many Acts of Care, turns our eyes skyward once again, this time toward the future of the institution itself. Built on the transformative promised gift of 75 works from David Horvitz ’74 and Francie Bishop Good, alongside other recent acquisitions, the show reflects what it means to assemble a collection through generosity and intention. Here, The Gund is not just gathering objects but charting a growing body of care. Among the highlights, Naudline Pierre’s The Time is Near (Middle) (2023) rises like a dark flame, a steel chair whose silhouette flickers upward in jagged tongues of fire. Both throne and warning, it holds the tension between transcendence and danger, inviting viewers to confront the heat of transformation. Nearby, Joanna Choumali’s embroidered photograph DO YOU REMEMBER YOURSELF (2022) overlays delicate threads of yellow, green, and orange across a moody photographic ground, turning memory into a tactile surface that glows with personal reflection. In contrast, Beverly Buchanan’s Shingle Shack (1987) stands quiet and grounded. As a small, brightly painted sculpture assembled from humble scraps of wood, its patchwork of vivid reds, blues, and greens evokes resilience and memory. Both fragile and steadfast, it honors the dignity of ordinary structures that shelter community and history. Together, these works, amongst the many others in the gallery, shimmer with difference yet cohere through their shared insistence on care—whether through spiritual transcendence, acts of remembering, or the preservation of humble places. Each addition reminds us that a collection is not only a record of the past but a constellation of possible futures. In this sense, The Gund is not merely gathering clouds or grounding in earth, but also, with deliberate ambition, shooting for the stars.

Taken collectively, the five exhibitions form more than a survey of contemporary art; they create a layered journey. From Watt’s lifted skies to Alarcón and Silät’s woven earth, from Tawney’s conceptual thresholds to the Rogovins’ grounded testimony, and finally to a constellation of future care, the Gund asks its visitors to experience art as an active, communal force. Clouds, earth, stars—the metaphors shift, but the throughline remains: art is not passive. It gathers us, roots us, lifts us, and carries us forward.

Fall 2025 Exhibitions
On view through December 14
The Gund, Kenyon College
101 1/2 College Drive
Gambier, Ohio 43022

Thursdays 11 AM–7 PM, Fridays 11 AM–5 PM, and Saturdays and Sundays 10 AM-5 PM.

[1] Watt, Marie. Sky Dances Light. 2024. https://mariewattstudio.com/work/series/sky-dances-light-blanton-museum.

[2] Monteil, Anya. “Together We Lift The Sky: Yəhaw̓ and Black-Indigenous Artists Advance Social Justice.” National Museum of the American Indian vol. 21, no. 4 (Winter 2021).

[3] Celia Brunson Projects. Claudia Alarcón & Silät. 2025. https://www.ceciliabrunsonprojects.com/artists/151-claudia-alarcon-%26-silat/.

[4] See Herzog, Melanie, and Milton Rogovin. Milton Rogovin: The Making of a Social Documentary Photographer. With University of Arizona. Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona; In Association with University of Washington Press, 2006.