Union Gallery
BLACK and WHITE
the large paintings
March 8 – April 17, 2026
The Union Art Gallery at Wagner College is proud to present Ro Lohin’s powerful series of works entitled “BLACK and WHITE, the large paintings.”
With this collection of canvases, all executed on the East End of Long Island over a period of several years, Lohin pushes the physical limits of traditional Plein Air Painting.  The exhibition consists of large canvases, each painted over multiple sessions directly from the landscape.
The results are both a combat, and a communion with the natural settings that engulf her. The physical challenges of carrying the paintings, some as large as 66” x 58”, into the landscape, along with all the supplies needed for her unique painting method, underscores Lohin’s belief that the strongest work comes from extended time spent in deep observation and perception. A gifted colorist, she is sensitive to the ever shifting play of warm and cool tonalities found in landscape. Using variations of black and white only for this series, Lohin strips the paintings of the emotionality of color, but through a passionate commitment to gestural drawing, infuses the work nonetheless with a resonance and pathos. Color is replaced, and suggested, by her subtle use of value changes, creating passages of dappled light and deep shadows.
Lohin paints with her canvas flat on the ground. Using large brushes and bowls of fluid oil paint, she works her way around and through the picture with gestural splats (her word) of marks that correspond to observed phenomena. The precision of her marks comes from a decades long, daily practice of drawing. Disparate associations, from Pollock’s freewheeling drip paintings to Seurat’s calculated build up of optical dots, come to mind superficially. But Lohin’s goals seem closer to J.M.W. Turner’s, in that she is not interested in making a landscape into a picture, but rather finding and expressing the forces at work in nature which leave us with a sense of something larger than ourselves. Lohin accomplishes this in a completely contemporary way, her work stating that the materiality of the painting process is inseparable from her subject.
Spotlight Gallery
Seaview Hospital
A City Within New York City, 1912 to 1964. How New York City’s Largest Municipal Tuberculosis Hospital Helped Diversity and Create Modern Staten Island Society
March 30-April 21, 2026
Exhibit Opening: April 9, 2026 @ 4:20pm
Wagner College Lecture Series
Supported by The Archeology Society of Staten Island Endowment at Wagner College
The Wagner History Department and Horrmann Library
Thursday, April 9, 2026Â in Spiro 2 @ 5:00pm
Rita Reynolds, Professor of History
Bring Us Your Poor and Your Sick: Why Staten Island was NYC’s Choice to Treat Its TB Patients.
Lisa Holland, Horrmann Library Director
Youth Consumed: Tuberculosis in Children at Seaview Hospital
Debbie-Ann Paige, Staten Island Historian
Mary E. Dujon: A Legacy of Caring at Seaview and Serving Staten Island
James Merlino, Student Historian and PA Student
Discarded and Forgotten: The Challenge of Recovering Seaview’s Scattered History
Gallery Director: Jenny Toth
Email: jtoth@wagner.edu
Phone: (718)-420-4132 or (718)-390-3192
| Union Gallery Address: Union Hall (Main Floor), Wagner College One Campus Road Staten Island, NY 10301Gallery Hours: Monday-Sunday 7am -10:30pm |
Spotlight Gallery Address: Horrmann Library, Wagner College One Campus Road Staten Island, NY 10301Gallery Hours: Monday-Friday 9am -5pm |