Rowe Galleries

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 and faculty from the Department of Art & Art History. The Rowe Arts Side Gallery is usually a student-centered exhibition venue that provides an opportunity for current UNC Charlotte studio art students to participate in a variety of exhibitions. The gallery is designed as a flexible space where students can explore unconventional methods of display and installation, as well as juried or curated exhibitions hosted by student organizations, classes, and studio areas of study.

Fall 2025 exhibitions

“Mei Mei 妹妹” is on view August 13 to September 19 in Rowe Galleries with a reception August 28. This exhibition is a tribute to the sisters the “Mei Mei 妹妹” who have lifted, shaped, and stood beside ookee throughout his unfolding path. While Mei Mei in Chinese traditionally means sister, this show embraces a broader meaning: a constellation of chosen sisters, nurturing spirits, and fierce allies whose love has left quiet yet indelible marks.

The works gathered here echo moments of mischief, care, resilience, and tenderness – qualities that sisters, in all their forms, so effortlessly embody. “Mei Mei” is not merely an offering of gratitude; it is a celebration of shared becoming. A space to honor those who saw beyond the surface, who understood that ookee was never just a doodle, but a living embodiment of love, connection, and kinship.

Raised in Singapore, Duff Woon Kee Yong (b. 1976) received his M.F.A in Computer Art with a focus on Motion Graphics in 2001 from the Savannah College of Art and Design. He has been a professor of Motion Media Design at SCAD since the early 2000s and was the director of Mr. Beast Gallery, formerly located on Bull Street, between 2010-1. Yong has exhibited in Taiwan and Savannah and has collaborated with local artists on numerous street art projects.

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This exhibition offers a collaborative escape into a fantasy realm unbound from generative technology. Scenes in an illusory world conceived by the human mind’s creative spark and born from the technical expertise of skilled human hands. It is a world limited only by the time it takes to create it; rather than being hastily crafted with computers, this world has been meticulously developed by-hand over the course of hours and days.

Elliana Esquivel and Chris Nichol are not Ai converts. They prefer a hands-on approach, intending for their creations to reflect the mental and physical challenges inherent in the act of making. In a time dominated by artificial intelligence, they fear the decline of genuine artistic expression and question if there is still room for those who dedicate themselves to creating in a world increasingly influenced by AI.

The worlds they create, much like the spaces in which they work, are not defined by the presence of generative technology. Their characters, landscapes, and surreal settings harken back to a time of tangible experiences and natural existence. Elliana Esquivel is a self-taught, multidisciplinary artist whose minimalistic works explore social and psychological aspects of human life. Delving into themes of identity, survival, personal agency, social unease, and introspection, her artworks are vehicles for navigating through chaos in search of meaning. Chris Nichol is a multimedia visual artist dedicated to the manual practice of drawing, painting, and sculpture. His pieces often satirize modern society, offering a form of escapism through peculiar world-building and exaggerated perspectives. They maintain a shared studio space at Goodyear Arts.

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Current attempts to integrate the arts into the ideological system of the ruling party or the tech industry have eroded our faith in art as an independent, liberating force. But is this forced evolution of art intentionally perverse? Or, is it just a product of our time? In our desperate attempts to find “the Left’s Jo Rogan” and escape red tweets for blue skies, we accept that the revolution will be uploaded. But, on what platform?

Rather than deny art’s inevitable role in shaping both power and resistance, perhaps we should embrace it. In Controlled Oppositions, Clay Harper envisions a world where image-making is surrendered to generative AI’s stock footage libraries, allowing their inherent contradictions to unfold in tangles of physical and virtual space. By highlighting these friction points, he searches for a form of media that does more than simply rebrand existing modes of content consumption; it aims to render such modes obsolete.

Clay Harper is a video artist and media scholar. He received an MFA in Art, Technology, and Emerging Communication from The University of Texas at Dallas in 2018 and BA in English from Principia College in Alongside teaching digital media courses at UNC Charlotte, he is also completing a PhD in Virginia Commonwealth University’s Media, Art, and Text program. Harper’s current research investigates how computational media such as generative AI are used to define and disqualify humanness. His past work, ranging from multi-channel video to experimental game design, is broadly interested in how computer interfaces shape our imagination of politics on and off the screen.

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Grief is an emotion often seen as taboo in contemporary American culture, unruly and sometimes frightening to behold. And yet, to ignore grief is to deny the love we feel, which can result in curdled anger. In Breathing By the Wound, Daisy Patton sources photographs of mourning from various times and places and re-presents them in bloom. An adult child posing with photos of their deceased parents, a woman holding a photo of a baby no longer alive—all these images show how those in mourning carry forward memories of lost loved ones into the present and beyond. Their losses linger beyond their own time, speaking to ours.

Alongside her re-presentations of historic photographs, Patton includes her own pictures of people who lost loved ones due to the ongoing COVID pandemic. The deliberate erasure of this pandemic and its effects on our world has, like the 1918 flu pandemic before it, led to a rise of authoritarianism and acceptance of mass death. Honoring the memory of those we have lost is one way to refuse eugenics and the harms caused by the abandonment of public health. Grief is a call to action, to remember and to care—Breathing By the Wound invites viewers to commune with those who have lost and rekindle their own feelings, remembering that we are all connected in our humanity.

Daisy Patton is a multi-disciplinary artist born in Los Angeles, CA to a white mother from the American South and an Iranian father she never met. She spent her childhood moving between California and Oklahoma, deeply affected by these conflicting cultural landscapes and the ambiguous absences within her family. Influenced by collective and political histories, Patton explores storytelling and story-carrying, the meaning and social conventions of families, and what shapes living memory. Her work a so examines in-between spaces and identities, including the fallibility of the body and the complexities of relationship and connection. Patton earned her MFA from The School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston/Tufts University, a multi-disciplinary program, and has a BFA in Studio Arts from the University of Oklahoma with minors in History and Art History and an Honors degree.

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Past exhibitions

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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 find student scholarships and the recurring alumni exhibition.

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