Bertha and Karl Leubsdorf Gallery

Hunter College Campus

132 East 68th Street

New York, NY 10065

(212) 772-4991

http://www.leubsdorf.org

http://huntercollegeartgalleries.org/

https://huntercollegeart.org/galleries

https://hunter.cuny.edu/organizer/hunter-college-art-galleries/

Open: Sunday-Monday Closed/Tuesday-Saturday: 11:00am-5:00pm-See website when open.

Admission: Free

My review on TripAdvisor:

The Hunter College Museum-The Bertha and Karl Leubsdorf Gallery at 132 East 68th Street

I visited this wonderful little gallery on the main campus of Hunter College on the Upper East Side of Manhattan on my project, “MywalkinManhattan.com”. It is an interesting, small gallery that exhibits more fringe artists and collections. The best part of the gallery is that it is not overwhelming like the bigger museums in the City and you can see the whole gallery in about an hour or a little more (See my review on TripAdvisor).

A former exhibition was: Axis Mundo: Queer Networks in Chicano L.A. is an interesting look at the Los Angeles based queer Chicanx artists between the late 1960’s and early 1990’s and is the first of its kind to excavate histories of experimental art practice, collaboration and exchange by a group of artists in Los Angeles (Hunter College Gallery).

The Axis Mundo Exhibition

Currently the museum is hosting the BFA Final Projects and there is a combination of video, paintings and photography to choose from. There is some interesting sculpture work by some of the graduating seniors so take some time in the afternoon to visit the gallery.

The Axis Mundo Exhibition

I visited the Gallery again in March of 2021, when the campus open after COVID rules lifted. The exhibition being shown was entitled “The Black Index”, a series of Black artists were being featured.

“The Black Index” features the works of artists Dennis Delgado, Alicia Henry, Kenyatta A.C. Hinkle, Titus Kaphar, Whitfield Lovell and Lava Thomas. The artists included in The Black Index build upon the tradition of Black self-representation as an antidote to colonialist images. Using drawing, perform, performance, printmaking, sculpture and digital technology to transform the recorded image, these artists question our reliance on photography as a privileged source for documentary objectivity and understanding. Their works offer an alternative practice-a Black Index-that still serves as a finding aid for information about Black subjects, but also challenges viewers desire for classification (Hunter Gallery website).

Artist Alicia Henry’s work “Analogan III”

The works in The Black Index make viewers aware of their own expectations of Black figuration by interrupting traditional epismologies of portraiture through unexpected and unconventional depictions. These works image the Black body through a conceptual lens that acknowledges the legacy of Black containment that is always present in viewing strategies. The approaches used by Delgado, Henry, Hinkle, Kaphar, Lovell, and Thomas suggest understandings of Blackness and the racial terms of our neo-liberal condition that counter legal and popular interpretations and in turn offer a paradigmatic shift within Black visual culture (Hunter Gallery website).

“The Black Index” works (Hunter Gallery)

The nice part of these galleries are that it takes about 45 minutes to view the whole exhibition.

The BFA Art Show at the Hunter College Galleries

In the Spring 2025, I stopped into the galleries to visit the Undergraduate show, CODA.

The students featured in the show

The front galleries

The entrance to the main gallery

This piece is called “Flushed Toast”

Then in the main part of the gallery, there were a few pieces of yarn work that I thought were very interesting.

The works made of acrylic yarn by artist Demi Artemisa Espinoza

Artist Demi Artemisa Espinoza works

My favorite work in the show ‘Smiling Cheek to Cheek’

In the middle of the gallery, there were interesting modern sculptures.

The middle gallery

This was quite unique

Paintings in the show

Video works from student artist Aviella Holle

Video Artist Aviella Holle

The undergraduates in this Art program did an excellent job and I thought the works were very original.

The History of the Berth and Karl Leubsdorf Gallery:

(From the Hunter College Art Galleries website)

The Bertha and Karl Leubsdorf Gallery focuses on presenting historical and scholarly exhibitions and programming that provide new scholarship on important and often under-represented artists and art movements. Located on the Hunter College’s main campus, the gallery also hosts the BFA degree exhibitions each semester.

The Hunter College Art Galleries, under the auspices of the Department of Art and Art History, have been a vital aspect of the New York cultural landscape since their inception over a quarter of a century ago. The galleries provide a space for critical engagement with art and pedagogy, bringing together historical scholarship, contemporary artistic practice and experimental methodology. The galleries are committed to producing exhibitions, events and scholarship in dialogue with the intellectual discourse generated by the faculty and students at Hunter and serve as an integral extension to the department’s academic programs.