The Rowe Arts Building houses three primary exhibition spaces: the Rowe Lower Gallery, Upper Gallery and Side Gallery. Each year, exhibitions feature the work of regional, national and international visiting artists, as well as work by students, alumni and faculty from the Department of Art & Art History. The galleries offer a flexible space where viewers can experience unconventional methods of display and installation and exhibitions that support the diverse curriculum in the Department of Art & Art History.
Rowe Galleries are open Monday-Friday, from 10:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m. during the academic year. Visitor parking is available in the East Deck 1.
The galleries are currently closed until August 10.
Fall 2026 Exhibitions
Holding a Bright Untroubled Sky: Visioning a Better World Through Magic
On view Aug. 10 – Sept. 18, Lower and Upper Galleries Reception: Aug. 27, 6:00-8:00 p.m.
Holding a Bright Untroubled Sky: Visioning a Better World Through Magic comprises fourteen diverse, international artists and collectives. The exhibition is designed to ignite the senses and to inspire us to cultivate our own imaginative capacity through game play, interactive digital stations, performance, immersive installations and thought-provoking paintings and works on paper.
Curated by writer and folklorist Dr. Amy Hale, this exhibition asks us not to be afraid to dream as we are invited to consider a new way of seeing and engaging with each other. The first step toward a beautiful new world lies within each of us, and the artists in this exhibition want to help plant those first seeds through inspiring joy, connection and wonder, helping us all to become visionary co-creators of our shared future.
Exhibiting artists include John Abell, Alice Bucknell, CROSSLUCID, Angela Fraleigh, Heather Freeman, Edgar Fabian Frias, Hilma’s Ghost, Loni Johnson, Alessandro Keegan, Anna Kenar, Tai Shani, Mark Titchner, Suzanne Triester, and Erik Waterkotte.
Our biennial Roderick MacKillop Memorial Alumni Art Exhibition returns with a multidimensional show of ceramic and fiber. Sara Catapano (BFA ‘12) builds voluptuous ceramic sculptures that land somewhere between earthly flora and otherworldly organisms. Jen Clay (BFA ‘10) uses vibrant prints and expressive stitching to create fiber-based works that seem to suspend and project from another far frontier. When shown together, the beautiful contrast between the artists’ chosen materials is encapsulated by a flair for the extraterrestrial. We thank the Roderick MacKillop Memorial Alumni Art Exhibition Endowment for supporting this exhibition.
“If these organs could talk, would they repeat back what we’ve said about them? Can they feel the uselessness inside them? What is uselessness?”
-“Hardly Creatures” by Rob Macaisa Colgate
When we feel the eyes of a disapproving gaze, our fluids, pigments and tissues stagnate with shame. These materials remain ever present, yet intentionally closeted; shameful in the company of our bodies. Through paintings, herbs and zines, Raleigh-based artist Isabel Lu explores existence and exploitation. By connecting shared experiences of shame and wonder in bodily fluids and agricultural foods, Lu encourages us to reflect on binary views and moral hysteria surrounding function, gender and disorder. Holding a Masters of Public Health in Dietetics from UNC Gillings School of Global Public Health, Lu explores routes of medicine that echo and overlap. Through painting, practicing herbalism and engaging with ancestry, they learn and unlearn rigid and binary concepts of health and medicine through Western and Eastern perspectives.
The Roderick MacKillop Memorial Alumni Art Exhibition: Rod MacKillop was a beloved painting professor from 1973 until his retirement in 2003. In 1988, he initiated a juried art exhibition of alumni work at the University, a practice that has continued biannually in the galleries of Rowe Arts building. In June 2017, the MacKillop family established three endowments at UNC Charlotte in his memory to fund student scholarships and the recurring alumni exhibition.
