The Expanded Caribbean: Contemporary Photography at the Crossroads features work by 16 artists with projects based in several different nations and communities neighboring the Caribbean Sea.  The exhibition brings together images that document, interrogate, challenge, and otherwise engage the meaning of place in an area with a rich history as a target of exploration and conquest, voluntary and forced migration, trade, travel, and tourism. Responding variously to cultural, historical, mythological, and personal aspects the region, artists initiate dialogues about how events of the past inform contemporary experience in a continually shifting and evolving environment.

 The exhibition is accompanied by a quality print and electronic catalog that includes images of all works as well as contextual scholarly essays by Dr. Mimi Sheller, Professor of Sociology at Drexel University, and Dr. Susanna W. Gold, Curator. This publication was supported in part by the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, a state agency funded by the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania and the National Endowment for the Arts, a federal agency.

Curated by Maori Karmael Holmes 

For the past 40 years Bob Gruen has captured the essence of Rock and Roll in his photos. From the Ramones to Led Zeppelin, Blondie to Bowie, Bob Dylan, Joan Jett and the Rolling Stones, Bob Gruen’s Rockers is an insider’s look behind the scenes at the lives of culture icons. But Gruen is no paparazzo; his candid photographs are wild and intimate family portraits of electric subculture. Rockers brings you on tour with stadium headliners, bears witness to the rise of Punk, and shines a light on the private lives of Gruen’s friends John Lennon and Yoko Ono.

“125 Years: Drexel & the City” will showcase themes of exploration, invention and conversation using artifacts, images and stories that celebrate the history of Drexel’s urban setting.  Anthony J. Drexel built his institute of art, science and industry at the heart of a vibrant district where rail yards, factories and warehouses operated in close proximity to the Powelton and Mantua neighborhoods. Then, Philadelphia was the “workshop of the world” and the Drexel Institute would be “central to the best of the working population of a great industrial city.” How have we changed? The exhibition will transform the Pearlstein Gallery into the “neighborhood,” a place where visitors will be able to engage and discuss Drexel’s changing relationship with its neighbors.  Faculty, staff, and students (undergraduate and graduate) from Westphal as well as the college of Arts and Science, and the Dornsife Center, are curating the exhibition, and will be involved in key programming with residents of Powelton and Mantua.