The Guggenheim Gallery provides provocative exhibitions and educational programming creating a local connection to the national and international dialogue about contemporary art and a framework for an interchange between artists, scholars, students and the community at large. While the exhibitions feature contemporary art, they often address other disciplines and societal issues in general. Integrated into the curriculum, these programs contribute significantly to Chapman education.

Art in its many forms embodies a playing field of visibility, representation and writing of history. As part of the landscape of institutions that populates this field, we want to contribute to actively forming a vision of society and our campus community that is anti-racist and anti-oppression, where art is not produced and consumed as a luxury good, but as a means of convening and expressing a critical, ethical, and moral view of the world, and speaking truth to power. 

We acknowledge our responsibility to reflect the multiplicity and diversity of society and continue to commit to helping unwarp its distorted reflection in the art world. We are committed to continually educating ourselves and the community we serve, by exhibiting work that is contributing towards racial and gender equity and towards increasing diversity and inclusion. Through our exhibitions, events and virtual presence we pledge to raise the visibility and representation of Women and BIPOC Artists and their suppressed histories.

Fall 2024 Exibition
September 15, 2024 - January 19, 2025

Chapman University and Fulcrum Arts Co-Present:

Energy Fields: Vibrations of The Pacific

The Pacific Rim is a hotbed of cultural, military, electromagnetic, and seismic activity. Energy Fields: Vibrations of The Pacific examines approaches to vibration, sound, and kinetic energy shared by artists and scientists working in the Pacific region across the 20th century to the present day. An international group of contemporary artists demonstrates the ways energetic waves operate on the senses, and how these often invisible forces have been considered by artists and scientists. Artworks such as Alba Triana’s sound sculpture Music on a Bound String No. 2 (2015) and David Haines and Joyce Hinterding’s Telepathy (2008)—a single-occupancy anechoic chamber—allow audiences to experience and contemplate their relationship to sound and vibration. Malena Szlam’s film ALTIPLANO creates visual rhythms against a soundscape generated from infrasound (below human hearing) recordings of volcanoes, geysers, and Chilean blue whales. Energy Fields also reflects on the contributions of Indigenous artists and traditional environmental knowledge across four continents connected by the Pacific Ocean.
More information!

(Pictured above: Alba Triana, Music on a Bound String No. 2, vibrational sculpture | installation | visible sound interacting with a projected light beam 2015, Credits: Alba Triana Studio, Silvia Ros)