The Sonoma State Art Department put together a virtual gallery featuring work from art department faculty members from 19 of the 23 universities in the CSU system.

While the virtual gallery displays work from multiple different schools, the virtual exhibition is unique to SSU. Interim Gallery Director, Jen Bethke, curated the work for ART@CSU, and Exhibitions Coordinator and Collections Manager, Carla Stone put everything online. 

Bethke’s intention was to spotlight one studio art faculty member from each CSU campus to create a sense of community during a time where people are isolated from each other. 

“I thought it would be interesting to bring together CSU art departments from all over the state of California in this virtual format. I was very inspired by the diverse range of remarkable work our artist faculty are producing, and I hope it’s exciting for viewers of the online exhibition to be able to see all this art gathered in one place,” she wrote in an email.

Stone wrote in an email, “When the campus closed last March… the University Art Gallery closed its doors to the public as well. We ended up cancelling the last two scheduled exhibitions of the Spring ’20 semester and when it became clear we would still be working remotely in the Fall… we decided to start producing our exhibitions online.” 

The faculty member from SSU featured in the gallery is Professor Nathan Haenlein, who teaches beginning printmaking, advanced drawing, and intermediate woodcut/etching this Spring semester. 

The three pieces he chose to show in the gallery are mixed media drawings from his series ‘Marked Time,’ which he described as a “visual calendar,” where an outside viewer would see a colorful mix of lines and patterns, he sees events in his life.

“The works… are all abstract and it’s… about me solving a composition with the tools that I have, but that I’m doing it every day. I can see the events unfolding, whether it’s personal or, you know- I can see the election of Joe Biden… I can see the lockdown,” he said.

The three drawings he submitted to ART@CSU are emblematic of his large body of work, not meant to be seen as individually meaningful but exemplify the meaning of the series as a whole. 

“I think any one of the drawings or all of the drawings are just as good as every [other drawing] … they’re interchangeable. Basically… the three examples are ones… that were photographed, but I don’t feel like any of the works are more or less important than any of the other ones,” Haenlein said.

He said the series, a body of close to 500 individual drawings, came out of a “previous body of work that were called Nap-Time Drawings,” after his first child was born. He drew small, easy-to-finish drawings while his son napped, and that inspired ‘Marked Time’. 

While virtual exhibitions make viewing art safe and accessible to students, there is a much different process of putting an online gallery together, and it results in a dramatically different effect. 

“In a physical gallery, a curator can move things around until they look right together; there is placement and lighting to consider.  In an online exhibition, the technology has limitations beyond our control that determine how artwork can–or cannot be presented,” Stone wrote.

The virtual gallery can be accessed on the Art Department website, at this link- ART@CSU | Art Gallery at Sonoma State University.