O'Connor Art Gallery
The mission of the O’Connor Art Gallery is to present the Dominican University academic community with timely, relevant and focused contemporary art exhibitions that foster critical and thoughtful dialogue across disciplines. Located in Lewis Hall, steps away from many of the art department’s studios and classrooms, the gallery is particularly accessible to art students as a space for intimate engagement and reflection. In addition to curated exhibitions, the gallery is the site of an annual juried student show and senior thesis exhibitions.
The gallery is open to the public during the academic year.
- Monday–Friday, 10:00 a.m.–5:00 p.m.
- Saturday by appointment.*
Free and all are welcome.
For information, please contact Jennifer Mannebach, director, at galleryinfo@dom.edu.
Location: Lewis Hall, Fourth Floor.
*Please note that guests may have to access Lewis Hall through the side entry of the library on Saturdays.
ON EXHIBIT
Sherwin Ovid
Hallowed Scale and Compass
September 16–October 28
Reception: Wednesday, September 16, 4:00–6:00 p.m., Artist Talk 4:30 p.m.
Sherwin Ovid’s work makes productive misuse of the language of rational geometric diagrams, using drawing and hybrid media to chart speculative crossings between physical and virtual space. Through handmade and digitally altered marks drawn from Afro-Caribbean cosmograms and hidden networks, his practice navigates geographic symbols as shifting coordinates that encode presence, loss, and unsettled relations to place and to one another. His traces of broken grids and improvisational gestures are layered as provisional maps unstable diagrams that question orientation, belonging, and territorial boundaries.
Image: Notes on Broken Circuits, 22x30, graphite, colored pencil and octopus ink on paper.
Ovid is a visual artist born in Trinidad that earned his bachelor’s degree from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He was a Lincoln Fellow in 2013 at the University of Illinois at Chicago where he received his MFA. He currently teaches as an assistant professor of Instruction at Northwestern University. His commercial endeavors include collaborations with Lee Daniel’s Netflix feature The Deliverance, Lena Waithe’s Showtime drama The Chi, and Jordan Peele’s Monkey Paw Studio remake of Candyman directed by Nia DaCosta. Ovid has collaborated with
Demon Leg gallery in New York and exhibited at the Chicago Cultural Center, Lubeznik Center for the Arts, UIS Visual Arts Gallery, 6018North, Randy Alexander Gallery, Goldfinch Gallery, Gallery 400, Prison Neighborhood Arts Project, Humboldt Park Boathouse Gallery, University of Wisconsin, Cleve Carney Art Gallery, Julius Caesar, Haitian American Museum of Chicago and Iceberg Projects in Evanston. He has received support from the Illinois Arts Council, 3Arts Award, and Helen Coburn Meier and Tim Meier Foundation.
COMING SOON
Andreas Fischer and Daun Suh
Past Tense, Future Perfect
November 11–December 16
Reception: Wednesday, November 11, 4:00-6:00 p.m. Artist Talk at 4:30
Andreas Fischer has exhibited at The Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Hyde Park Art Center, Chicago; Mattress Factory, Pittsburgh; Nathalie Karg and Hudson Franklin Gallery, New York; Devening Projects, Goldfinch Gallery, and Andrew Rafacz, Chicago. Awards include Artadia Grant and The International Studio and Curatorial Program Residency, New York. He has a BFA in Studio Art from The School of The Art Institute of Chicago, an MFA in Studio Art and an MA in Art History from the University of Illinois at Chicago, and attended the Universität der Künste, Berlin.
Image: 4028, Andreas Fischer, 2026
Daun Suh is a South Korean painter based in Chicago. She received her MFA in Painting and Drawing from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and her BFA from Kookmin University in Seoul. Her work has been exhibited at venues including Epiphany Center for the Arts, Zhou B Art Center, and Bodock Gallery. Her work has been featured in New American Paintings (Midwest Issue) and Visual Art Journal, and in an interview with AATONAU.
Image: This is not here, 2025
Past Tense, Future Perfect
Andreas Fischer and Daun Suh invite us to peer in, using color and sensitively calibrated light as material. We are often missing contextual information - Suh’s emerging figures are enrobed in darkness, whereas Fischer’s canvas is so suffused with light that the figure-ground relationship is almost flattened. These artists provide a tenuous but soft landing, inviting introspection without the baggage of past or future.
Rather than function as subterfuge or avoidance, these strategies of ambiguity provide a space for deeper contemplation, hovering in the present moment that is both suggestive and inconclusive. The light that reveals can also be the light that obscures, as each artist adjusts the aperture, stopping within a space of uncertainty.
This dance with presence and absence begins with accumulated layers of mark-making, arriving at a moment that is in-flux, a provisional murmuration. Suh’s figures appear to be in the condition of emergence, inducing us to question what we are seeing, as one might see the suggestion of forms while eyes adjust to a darkened room. Darkness is a way for her to confront discomfort and uncertainty while coaxing a suffused radiance to partially materialize. This facilitates our engagement as well, perhaps allowing an ambient echo of the artist’s process. Suh alludes to a struggle with incompleteness, but through her work she finds that “living while broken” is simply a condition of being human, and coaxing this sustained attention is a gift to the viewer who takes the time to look.
Fischer’s indeterminate figure ground relationships indulge in the impossibility of fixed meaning or placement - the threshold is always moving. Formally, the edges of his figures appear to elide and disregard boundaries, but there is a buoyancy that is displaced across the picture plane which maintains a luminous equilibrium. Again, our eyes want to adjust to discover what is perceptible. The work reveals his interest in things “coming together and falling apart”, expanding that exploration quite literally in his reuse of painting scraps, disinterred from their original source and given new life in alternate formats. He generously shares his process with the viewer, including paint color tests at the margins of his work and watercolor studies that inform his paintings. Yet, like Suh, he declines to share the origins of his source material. He rebuilds, but in a discursive manner.
A ‘future perfect’ is inherently unattainable, but the striving is rich with possibilities and flashes of insight, redolent with the precarity of the present moment, expanding our definition of what connection can be.
PAST EXHIBITS
Layers of Renaissance
April 8–28
Reception
Friday, April 10, 6:00-8:00 p.m.
Senior Capstone Exhibition featuring the work of graduating seniors from art and design disciplines. At the reception, students will have an opportunity to talk about their work.
Layers of Renaissance
Wednesday, April 8, 2026
Presentation at Scholarship & Ideas Expo
Senior art and design students will display their work at this campus-wide annual event.
2026 Annual Juried Student Art Exhibit
February 25-March 25
Reception and Awards Ceremony
Wednesday, February 25, 4:00-6:00 p.m.
The Annual Student Juried Exhibition is open to all currently enrolled Dominican University students. Sponsored by the O'Connor Gallery and the Department of Art & Design, awards will be given in multiple categories, showcasing a variety of media.