Facebook pixel Past Exhibitions | Lisa Smith Wengler Center for the Arts | Pepperdine Skip to main content
Pepperdine | Arts

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.

 


2023-2024 Exhibitions

painting of shoreline in Malibu

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.

Read More

painting of a creek

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.

Read More

an art picture

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.

Read More

 Jeni Spota C.: Encore!

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. 

Read More

 Makoto Fujimura: Water Flames

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.”

Read More

 Hildur Ásgeirsdóttir Jónsson, Double Rainbow #1, 2022

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.

Read More

2022-2023 Exhibitions

 Work in Progress exhibition graphic

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.

Read More

 Whispers from the Water exhibit graphic

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.

Read More

To Bough and To Bend

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.

Read More

Thought Partners

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.

Read More

 

2021–2022 Exhibitions

Gwynn Murrill's Exhibition

Gwynn Murrill: Animal Nature

Gwynn Murrill's elegant sculptures of animals strike a balance between abstraction and realism. 

Spring 2022

Read More

2022 Senior Show

2022 Senior Show

Pepperdine Studio Arts Senior Thesis Exhibition

Spring 2022

Read More

Kinsey Archive

The Cultivators

Highlights from the Kinsey African American Art and History Collection

Spring 2022

Read More

Environmental Reflections Archive

Environmental Reflections

Contemporary Art from the Frederick R. Weisman Art Foundation

Fall 2021

Read More

 


 

2020–2021 Exhibitions

Archive Environmental Reflections

On Location in Malibu 2021

Paintings by the California Art Club

Summer 2021

Read More

Jessica Hibler, Untitled

Hues of Isolation

Pepperdine Studio Arts Senior Thesis Exhibition 2021

April 2021

Read More

 


 

2019–2020 Exhibitions

Rodin Archive

Rodin: Muses, Sirens, Lovers

Selections from the Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Collections

Spring 2020

Read More

Black Archive

It's All Black and White

Contemporary Art from the Frederick R. Weisman Art Foundation

Fall 2019

Read More

 


 

2017–2018 Exhibitions

pop

Squeak Carnwath: How the Mind Works

Summer 2019

Read More

Pop Art

Richard Diebenkorn: Beginnings, 1942–1955

Spring 2019

Read More

Pop Archive

Pop!
50 Years of Art & Popular Culture from the Frederick R. Weisman Art Foundation

Fall 2018

Read More

 


 

2016–2017 Exhibitions

Malibu Archive

On Location in Malibu 2018

Paintings by the California Art Club

Summer 2018

Read More

Alexis Archive

Alexis Smith

Private Lives and Public Affairs

Spring 2018

Read More

California Archive

California Dreaming

Contemporary California Art from the Weisman Art Foundation

Fall 2017

Read More

 


 

2015–2016 Exhibitions

Process Archive

Process & Reality

Works from the Permanent Collection Celebrating 25 Years of Acquisitions

Summer 2017

Read More

Larry Archive

Larry Bell

Pacific Red

Spring 2017

Read More

Altered Archive

Altered Reality

Selections from the Frederick R. Weisman Foundation

Fall 2016

Read More