WoskobFamily Gallery
Contemporary arts + culture
The Woskob Family Gallery is a contemporary art space in downtown State College that brings a cohesive and carefully curated program of exhibitions and events to central Pennsylvania. Run by Penn State’s College of Arts and Architecture, the gallery serves as a laboratory for exploring how the arts can catalyze creative placemaking.
The gallery’s mission is to forge new relationships between the university and local communities, increase the perception of downtown State College as a cultural destination, and spark new creative enterprises. Through partnerships with the borough, local government, and arts and cultural organizations, we seek greater local investment in arts and culture projects.
The gallery is generously supported by the Borough of State College.
Current Exhibitions
Yeonhye Park: The Eternity of the Moment
Artist statement
I feel closer to the core of a subject’s nature when I focus on the complexity of human emotions hidden beneath the composure of our everyday life. When I paint a portrait, I strive to visualize, amplify, and heighten the visceral connection and empathy that I experience between me and my subject. I navigate this emotional landscape with an ever-expanding visual language of re-imagined and projected patterns, techniques, colors, and forms.
I use various patterns to express the complexity of the human condition and ultimately attempt to articulate the inner beauty of people. While painting my subject’s portrait, I think about the imagined and real circumstances of their life. I construct the portrait with many different painting techniques, deliberately confusing figure-ground relationships and hierarchies. Each portrait has a set of specific patterns on the figure and background. This shared pattern creates the charged emotional space that I seek to visualize.
The show consists of three ceramic pieces, an installation, a motion graphic, and nine paintings. I picked some parts from my traditional cut-out works and added digital images to create a site-specific painting that accommodates and expands using the architectural details of the gallery.
Bio
Yeonhye Park received her BFA in Painting & BA in Buddhist Philosophy from Dongguk University in South Korea. Upon completing her bachelor’s degree, Park received a scholarship from the Chinese government for a 3-year-long MFA program at the Central Academy of Fine Arts in China. During her academic studies, she took a 3-year apprenticeship with a master artisan, Jinkyung Lee, to study traditional Korean art.
Park depicts the complexity of human emotions by using a wide range of art languages such as cut-out painting, clay work, canvas-based painting, and sculpture. Her artwork has been shown in exhibitions in South Korea, China, and the U.S. She currently lives and works in State College, PA where she is a graduate student at Penn State University.
Past Exhibitions
Jack and the Beanstalk
Inspired by Flora Annie Steel’s 1918 edition of “Jack and the Beanstalk,” the collaborative team of MFA Scenic Design candidates and BFA Lighting Design students from the Penn State School of Theatre used their collective skills, knowledge, and creativity to create a storybook world for Jack and his beanstalk in the windows of the Downtown Theatre.
Brian Alfred: Kinda Lovely
Kinda Lovely is a music video Alfred created for the musical artist Poolside in 2020. The video animation captures the vibe of California and the feeling of Poolside’s music.
Joshua Frankel: Animation from A Marvelous Order
The animations presented are from the body of work created by Frankel for “A Marvelous Order,” a forthcoming multimedia opera about cities and how they change, about power and how it is confronted, and about two nearly-mythological figures from 20th century New York—Jane Jacobs and Robert Moses—who clashed through a battle of ideas that manifested itself in the streets.
Rachel Hayes: Syzygy
Rachel Hayes was commissioned to create our 2019-2020 Woskob-Wall installation. Hayes creates fabric structures that vibrantly explore painting processes, quilt making, architectural space, light, and shadow.
Dannielle Tegeder: Seigolomsoc/Cosmologies
Seigolomsoc/Cosmologies, a wall drawing in two acts, encompasses the gallery walls with a visual dialect for viewers to decipher.
Alec Spangler: Folded Section
Folded Section is a site-specific wall (and floor) drawing that re-imagines the local Ridge and Valley landscape and invites viewers to find their place within it.
Learn More
We are located on Allen Street in downtown State College, in the Penn State Downtown Centre Theatre.
Visit the Gallery
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