New Exhibitions Focusing on Memory to Open at VACNJ on October 2

Summit, NJ (September 8, 2026)—The Visual Arts Center of New Jersey will open three new exhibitions exploring memory on Friday, October 2, 2026. On view through January 10, 2027, the exhibitions examine how artists use photographs, moving images, inherited objects, and family archives to shape, preserve, and reconsider the past. Across all three exhibitions, memory is presented as something formed through relationships rather than simply retrieved from the past. The artists edit, translate, protect, and reimagine personal and collective histories, showing how acts of remembrance can preserve connection while acknowledging absence, change, and the limits of what any image can hold.

An opening reception for the exhibitions will be held on October 2, from 6:30 to 8:30 PM.

In the Main Gallery, the group exhibition Precious & Temporary looks at family memory as a living material rather than a fixed record. The show includes the works of Nick D’Ornellas, Nazli Efe, Colby Lamson-Gordon, Tone Miller, and Andina Marie Osorio. These five artists work across photography, sculpture, video, textiles, and installation, drawing on domestic objects, personal photographs, inherited customs, and multigenerational archives. Their interventions emphasize that preservation is never passive, and to revisit an image, object, or story is also to reshape its meaning.

The exhibition considers family as a network formed across generations, geographies, cultures, and chosen relationships. The works connect personal histories to migration, adoption, cultural inheritance, political circumstances, labor, and collective loss. Together, they suggest that memory derives its value not from permanence, but from the care required to carry something fragile forward.

In the Mitzi and Warren Eisenberg Gallery, the Art Center will present Steady Hands for Wandering Eyes. In this exhibition, filmmaker Chantal Feitosa-Desouza analyzes the screen as both a tool of witness and a site of limitation. At a moment when complex events are routinely compressed into clips, headlines, and rapidly circulating images, Feitosa-Desouza asks viewers to meditate with stories that cannot be contained in a single frame.

Blending documentary and fiction, the exhibition layers interviews, sourced media, family history, collage, and sound. Split screens, scans, printed matter, and iterative filmmaking create connections on themes of diaspora, migration, ambiguous loss, and reinvention. Instead of resolving these materials into one authoritative account, Feitosa-Desouza lets multiple times and perspectives coexist, making room for voices and experiences that persist beyond the camera view.

Photographer Geoffrey Biddle’s Terms of Endearment will be on display in Marité and Joe Robinson Strolling Gallery I and follows the many roles photography has played within his family over decades. Photographs made by his parents, pictures from his childhood, and images of his children and grandchildren trace Biddle’s changing position within a multigenerational family history. Cutting, sequencing, and returning to these photographs, he treats the family album as an active form shaped by repetition, distance, and conversation.

The exhibition also speaks to the ethics of making intimate lives visible. In his practice, Biddle’s questions of consent and privacy reveal family photography as both an expression of closeness and an ongoing negotiation of trust.

Additionally, this fall will mark the return of work on display in the Art Center’s Stair-gazing Gallery, where artist Hilliary Gabryel will show her newly commissioned sculpture Morning Glory. Gabryel examines aspirational luxury and utilizes mass-produced objects to reflect this crucial part of contemporary American consumer culture. Her recent work reconstructs secondhand furniture, depicting neoclassical design motifs that have been translated from marble into vacuum-formed plastic headboards and vanity mirrors. Thousands of hand-placed steel tacks are used to upholster silicone sheeting to the contours of the furniture, transforming these objects into intimate, tactile forms that evince the body. This work will be on view in the Stair-gazing Gallery through May 9, 2027.

In addition to the opening event on October 2, the Art Center will offer programming tied to the artwork and artists represented during the fall exhibitions. Please check the Art Center website for more details.

Provisional Monument for Aunty Woll by Nick D’Ornellas