Exhibitions

A place for art and exploration

The Cook Center in Maxwell Hall is home to the Process Gallery, a dedicated exhibition space, and the Grand Hall, a multi-use event and exhibition space. Exhibitions presented in these spaces highlight new work from current IU faculty members, students, and alumni, as well as community artists.

Throughout the year, the Cook Center presents exhibitions curated by and featuring the work of faculty members, visiting artists, and community members to give our guests a glimpse into the diversity of creative expression and experimentation that define the arts scene at IU Bloomington.

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Current Exhibits

Alterity: The State of Being a Woman

September 1st through October 20th, 2023

ALTERITY is a solo exhibition by Eskenazi School of Art, Architecture and Design faculty member, Jooyoung Shin featuring 12 dynamic designs.

Mon-Fri, 12:00pm-4:00pm, Cook Center Process Gallery

Opening reception: September 1st from 5-8pm

Free and open to the public.

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Liminal: Indiana in the Anthropocene

September 1st through October 6th

Photography exhibit featuring stills from the film Liminal: Indiana in the Anthropocene.

Opening reception on September 1st from 5-8pm.

Liminal: Indiana in the Anthropocene is a meditative aerial film that illustrates our state as a microcosm of this new planetary epoch. Society is accelerating into the Anthropocene where our relationship with the Earth is one of conquest, dominance, and manipulation. This new epoch encapsulates the world as human civilization fundamentally distorts ecological and planetary systems. It is incessant and expansive motion, a profound generation of power, endless extraction, and nonstop movement of materials all fed into a global metabolism. The byproduct is continuous dumping, pollution, and transformation. And yet, encased within the Anthropocene’s vast tentacles, we find it difficult to comprehend the unnerving transitions of this new world. The immensity of the Anthropocene’s broad signatures that span continents make it both ubiquitous and opaque. What if we could compress it into a defined space to better visualize and perceive it globally and locally?

Liminal captures features of this global phenomenon within the boundaries of our state, collapsing the global into the local. We present the world of the Anthropocene not as an exotic feature of a transformed landscape on the other side of the world, but in a space we inhabit; our home, Indiana. The Anthropocene isn’t “out there” but “right here”.

Entirely filmed with drone cameras by Indiana Aerials and accompanied by an original score written by Fort Wayne composer Nate Utesch (aka Metavari), Liminal reveals a compelling and uncanny view of Indiana in all its features and forms.

There will be a screening of Liminal at Buskirk-Chumley Theater on September 7, 2023. Tickets here.

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Engaged Artist in Residence Program

Hale Ekinci

Meet our Spring 2023 Artist in Residence

The Cook Center's Engaged Artist-in-Residence program brings two working artists to the Bloomington campus each year to work and interact with IU students and community members through a series of workshops, outreach projects, and exhibitions.

The residencies are designed to advance a model of “engaged” artistic practice that supports artists whose careers can be significantly furthered by access to IU’s resources in curation, collections, and research, and who can, in turn, activate those resources in new ways and demonstrate new engaged modes of artistic exchange for the campus’s largely rural, Midwestern community.

Hale Ekinci (b. 1984 in Karamursel, Turkey) is a multidisciplinary Turkish artist, designer, and educator based in Chicago. She received her MFA in Interdisciplinary Arts & Media at Columbia College Chicago and is currently an Associate Professor of Art & Design at North Central College. Exploring personal history, cultural identity, gender politics, and craft traditions, her works vary from videos to embroidery paintings embellished with vibrant colors, patterns, and autobiographical relics. She was recently a Facebook Chicago Artist in Resident. Her work has been exhibited nationally at EXPO Chicago, Studio Gang, Co-Prosperity, One After 909, Woman Made Gallery, South Bend Museum of Art, Koehnline Museum of Art, St. Louis Artists’ Guild, and Queens College Art Center. Her videos have been screened internationally, including New York City, Berlin, Warsaw, and Jerusalem. She completed residencies at ACRE, Jiwar Barcelona, Momentum Worldwide Berlin, Elsewhere Museum, and Chicago Artist Coalition.

More about Hale