Art Gallery

Rockford University Art Gallery

Rockford University Art Gallery is always free.

Open to the public:

• Current Gallery Hours: Mondays and Wednesdays 12 – 3 p.m.
• Or by appointment (contact Gallery Director Ari Norris)

Contact: Gallery Director Ari Norris, anorris@rockford.edu

The Rockford University Art Gallery provides a varied series of art exhibitions and related programming in support of the Department of Art and Art History and is an important educational and cultural resource for the campus and community. The Gallery is located in the Clark Arts Center, the locus of the University’s Department of Art and Art History.

Fall 2026 Exhibitions

Image & Influence 

On Display: August 24 – September 25
Reception: Friday, September 4, 6-8 p.m.

Image & Influence unites thirteen artists whose careers share a distinct relationship to Chicago’s Imagist movement and the region. Chicago Imagism is a post-World War II art movement of figurative, surreal, and brightly colored works created by artists associated with the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Emerging in the 1960s, these artists rejected New York-centric abstraction in favor of grotesque humor, comic books, and outsider art. Included in the exhibition at the Rockford University Art Gallery is a selection of artists that come from the generations following the movement, having been taught directly or otherwise share a distinct visual influence when viewed through the Imagist lens. Image & Influence features Tom Berenz, Lee Grantham, John Himmelfarb, Candy Hrones, Richard Hull, Madeleine Leplae, Robert Lostutter, Ben Mahmoud, Bradley Petersen, David Sharpe, Eleanor Spiess-Ferris, Brach Tiller, & Bruce White.

Periodical, Melissa Oresky

On Display: October 2 – December 4
Reception: Friday, October 2, 6-8 p.m.
Artists’ Talk: Friday, October 2, 7 p.m.

Melissa Oresky’s painting and collage-based multidisciplinary practice explores a deeply felt regard for plants as perceptive and expressive beings. Through observation, study of plant knowledges, and embodied material experimentation, she considers how vegetal life might be encountered not only as subject matter, but as model for thinking, making, and being. For over two decades, Oresky has exhibited her work nationally and internationally. Venues include Redhead Gallery, Brooklyn; K. Imperial Fine Art, San Francisco*; The Plan, Chicago; The Elmhurst Art Museum, Elmhurst, IL*; Color Club, Chicago; The College of St. Mary’s, Notre Dame, IN; Boundary, Chicago*; The Franklin, Chicago; Tripod Space Project, Busan, South Korea*; Field Projects, New York; The Hyde Park Art Center, Chicago*; The Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago*; OQBO gallery, Berlin; Massey University, Wellington, NZ; TSA New York, Brooklyn; 65GRAND, Chicago; Minnesota State University, Mankato* and others. She was awarded a 2027 residency at Interlude, Hudson, NY and an Illinois Arts Council Creative Projects Grant for Tending to Matter, an exhibition she is co-curating with Holly Cahill at the University of Illinois Springfi eld Art Gallery in March, 2027. She received her BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and her MFA from the University of Illinois at Chicago and lives and works in Normal, Illinois where she is a Professor of Art at Illinois State University.