Past Exhibitions
Please note that we are continuing to update this page with past exhibitions; for more information about exhibitions prior to 2016, please contact us at museum@pepperdine.edu.
2024-2025 Exhibitions
James Clar: Powers of Ten
Saturday, January 11–Sunday, March 30, 2025
Powers of Ten is the first U.S. solo museum exhibition by light and media artist James Clar. Also
marking his Los Angeles debut, this mid-career retrospective, guest curated by Larissa
Kolesnikova, brings together a selection of works from 2011 to 2024, highlighting
Clar's mastery of video and light systems to examine how technology informs our perception
of the natural world. These explorations are grounded in Clar's film background and
his deep appreciation of the California Light and Space movement. The exhibition features
works created during Clar's time living in Dubai, New York, Tokyo, and his current
residency in Manila, as well as work made in Los Angeles specifically for this exhibition.
Isabel Yellin: Mothership
Saturday, January 11–Sunday, March 30, 2025
Over the last decade, Isabel Yellin has earned a reputation for fabric sculptures sewn into serpentine shapes suggestive of the body. The works in Mothership, her debut solo museum exhibition, mark a material turn in her practice, presenting restless silicone paintings and metal-and-silicone sculptures that oscillate between divergent tendencies: hard and soft, tight and loose, wall and floor, freedom and containment. Rooted in the language of abstraction, these works continue to summon the corporeal, but also expand to suggest the ethereal, creating a visual language for Yellin's investigation into the psyche.
Cameron Harvey: The Shape of Being
August 24–December 8, 2024
For her first solo museum exhibition, Cameron Harvey shares a new body of work inspired by her walks in the Santa Monica Mountains surrounding the Pepperdine campus. Her paintings and sculptures are based on the formal qualities of the human body and their similarities to local flora and rock formations.
Loop, Hum, Wave
August 24–December 8, 2024
Guest curated by adjunct professor Kira Maria Shewfelt, Loop, Hum, Wave presents a selection of works by Pepperdine fine arts faculty exploring the passage and movement of time. Across diverse subjects and mediums, these works engage memorialization, self-documentation, aging, childhood, nostalgia, and imagined and alien life, connected by an understanding of the flux of space and time.
2023-2024 Exhibitions
On Location in Malibu
May 11– July 28, 2024
On Location in Malibu celebrates the continued vitality of California Impressionism and plein air painting by showcasing new paintings of Malibu created by contemporary members of the historic California Art Club.
Rediscovering Constance von Briesen
May 11– July 28, 2024
A multitalented artist and craftswoman, Constance von Briesen (1915–2000) lived for nearly fifty years in southern California, making her home in Rustic Canyon. Her landscape paintings, watercolors, and drawings offer an exquisite close-up view of the California terrain, capturing creeks, root systems, bare trees, and drought-stricken desert.
The Orchard
April 11–27, 2024
The Frederick R. Weisman Museum of Art and the Art Program at Pepperdine University are pleased to present The Orchard, a group exhibition featuring the work of 12 graduating students in Art.
Jeni Spota C.: Encore!
January 13–March 31, 2024
In her thickly impastoed paintings, Jeni Spota C. explores her own Italian heritage and the power of religious imagery by obsessively reworking scenes from Giotto's 14th-century monumental fresco The Last Judgment. Spota C. abstracts her figures and collapses the neat order of Giotto's fresco, merging the zones of heaven and hell into chaos. Jeni Spota C: Encore! unites three bodies of work, putting the artist's earliest and most recent works into conversation, alongside a series that references Spota C.'s great-uncle, a magician, to consider the relationship between painting and magic, myth, and illusion.
Makoto Fujimura: Water Flames
January 13–March 31, 2024
Makoto Fujimura has earned an international reputation for his beautiful, deeply moving abstract paintings made using traditional Nihonga materials with delicate washes of natural pigments. Makoto Fujimura: Water Flames brings together a number of his major paintings of the last 20 years, focusing on the poetic paradox between the elements of water and fire, which symbolize, in Fujimura's words, art's power to "[turn] the flames of destruction into the flames of sanctification."
Hildur Ásgeirsdóttir Jónsson:
Infinite Space, Sublime Horizons
August 26–December 10, 2023
Hildur Ásgeirsdóttir Jónsson creates exquisite large-scale paintings on a loom, in a practice that blurs the boundaries between painting and weaving, fine art and craft. Born and raised in Iceland, Jónsson has spent the last 30 years in Cleveland, Ohio, where she has made increasingly ambitious work that veers between abstraction and representation, with deep connections to Iceland's otherworldly landscapes.
2022-2023 Exhibitions
Work in Progress:
The Weisman Museum Collection at 30
May 20–July 30, 2023
As the Weisman celebrates its 30th year, the museum is devoting all three of its galleries to the care and display of the growing permanent collection, which is usually tucked away in secure storage.
Whispers from the Water
April 20 - 29, 2023
The Frederick R. Weisman Museum of Art and the Studio Art Program at Pepperdine University are pleased to present Whispers from the Water, a group exhibition featuring the work of 14 graduating art majors. Considering shifting identities, untethered symbolism, and underlying structures, these artists share the culmination of their four years of research and practice.
To Bough and To Bend
August 30, 2022–March 26, 2023
Trees feature prominently in the origin stories of many world religions. Ancient history recounts how their shade and branches have been sites of contemplation, suffering, and renewal.
Thought Partners
August 30 - March 26, 2023
What role should the Weisman Museum of Art play on Pepperdine's Christian campus? As the Weisman turns 30, this conversation series seeks diverse answers to the question of how the museum can serve the University's mission, and how the mission can in turn be shaped by art and artists.
2021–2022 Exhibitions
Gwynn Murrill: Animal Nature
Gwynn Murrill's elegant sculptures of animals strike a balance between abstraction and realism.
Spring 2022
2020–2021 Exhibitions
2019–2020 Exhibitions
2017–2018 Exhibitions
Squeak Carnwath: How the Mind Works
Summer 2019
Richard Diebenkorn: Beginnings, 1942–1955
Spring 2019
2016–2017 Exhibitions
2015–2016 Exhibitions
Process & Reality
Works from the Permanent Collection Celebrating 25 Years of Acquisitions
Summer 2017
