W&L’s Staniar Gallery Presents Joey Fauerso’s ‘In a Classroom’ The solo exhibition will open Jan. 8, 2026, with an artist’s talk slated for Jan. 13.

Office of Communications and Public Affairs
December 9, 2025

Washington and Lee University’s Staniar Gallery is pleased to present “In a Classroom,” a solo exhibition by multimedia artist Joey Fauerso. The exhibit will be on view from Jan. 8 through Feb. 6, 2026. Fauerso will also give an artist’s talk on Jan. 13 at 5:30 p.m. in Wilson Concert Hall in the Lenfest Center for the Arts, followed by a reception.

The exhibition and reception events are free and open to the public.

Taking its title from Adrienne Rich’s 1971 poem, “In a Classroom,” Fauerso’s exhibition presents new work begun during her residency at the ARCUS Project in Moriya, Japan, housed in the historic Oisawa Elementary School building. Inspired by her residency studio – a classroom until the school’s closure in 1944 – Fauerso’s exhibit contrasts structured, geometric materials and spaces, such as paper sandwich bags, blackboards and modular cubbies, with the movements and irregularities of bodies in the natural world.

“In a Classroom” begins with an open-ended curiosity about the physical and acoustic properties of everyday materials and extends to broader conversations on the physics of “crumple theory,” the complexities and limitations of learning environments and the nature of embodied perception. The exhibition will debut a new large-scale projected video installation, along with a series of two- and three-dimensional works installed on the gallery walls. The exhibition is also accompanied by a catalogue featuring essays by the artist; Tatiana Istomina, a New York-based contemporary artist; and Andrea LePage, the Pamela H. Simpson Professor of Art History and head of the Department of Art and Art History at W&L.

Fauerso is an interdisciplinary artist working across painting, sculpture, installation, video and performance. Her subject matter is both personal and political, centering on family, gender, humor, figuration and representation. Her work has been exhibited at the Blanton Museum of Art, Ruby City Museum, Galveston Arts Center, Western Exhibitions Gallery, Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts, Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art and the Drawing Center in New York. Fauerso has received numerous grants and residencies, including the 2022 Guggenheim Fellowship, a 2021 Sustainable Arts Foundation grant, a 2020 Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters & Sculptors Grant and the RAIR artist-in-residence grant, as well as fellowships from Yaddo, MacDowell and Kunstlerhaus Bethanien in Berlin. Fauerso is a professor in the School of Art and Design at Texas State University and lives with her family in San Antonio, Texas.

This exhibition is co-curated by LePage and Laura Jane Ramsburg, director of the Staniar Gallery, and is supported by W&L’s Department of Art and Art History, Department of History and Education Studies Program.

For more information about the 2025-26 exhibition and programming schedule, visit Staniar Gallery’s website.

Staniar Gallery is located on the second floor of Wilson Hall, in Washington and Lee University’s Lenfest Center for the Arts. When the campus is open to the public, gallery hours are Monday through Friday, 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. For more information, please call 540-458-8861.