Dr. M. T. Geoffrey Yeh Art Gallery

Cevallos Brothers 
September 21–December 9, 2023 

The Yeh Art Gallery presents the first exhibition ever devoted to the hand-painted signs of the legendary Cevallos Brothers—Carlos and Miguel— who along with their late brother Victor have made signs, murals, and banners for many Queens and NYC-based businesses for nearly fifty years. The exhibition focuses on an archive of signs collected from small businesses along a stretch of Roosevelt Ave in Queens that connects Jackson Heights to Corona, and also includes photographs, news clippings and exhibition ephemera tracing their story from Ecuador, where they were born, to the many years working and producing signs in Bogotá and then to each of their eventual moves to New York City.

Kit-Yin Snyder and Richard Haas 
September 21–December 9, 2023 

In 1985, the New York City Percent for Art program commissioned artists Kit-Yin Snyder and Richard Haas to create a public artwork at the site of the Manhattan Detention Center complex in Chinatown. Completed between 1989 and 1992, this work consisted of site-specific sculptures and pavement design by Snyder, and wall murals and friezes by Haas that together conveyed themes and iconography related to stories of civic justice and immigration in New York City. In 2021, as part of New York City’s borough-based jails plan and the redevelopment of this site into a larger prison complex, this public artwork was removed and partially destroyed—with some parts placed in temporary storage at Rikers Island. Calling attention to the precarity of public art in a city that is constantly in flux and examining the range of production by two artists with extensive careers working in the public realm, this exhibition looks at the indeterminate status of this public artwork as an opportunity to consider the full life cycle of the public artwork—from proposed, imagined, or never-realized works to those that no longer exist and all of the material generated throughout these endeavors. 

Cecilia Caldiera, Ada Friedman, Brandon Morris 
September 21–December 9, 2023 

This group exhibition presents three contemporary artists working across painting, drawing, printmaking, sculpture and performance—all radically engaged with the power of daily ritual and the transformative potential of everyday activities or materials to speak to the cosmic, the mythological and the phantasmagoric. Often incorporating found objects or traces of found objects and artifacts from ephemeral activities or performances, the artworks included address the ultimate paradox of the artist working in the palimpsest of New York City: to digest, contend with and reflect on the contemporary moment amidst the perpetual exposure to residual energies of the past and the expansive possibilities of the future. 

Ezra Wube: Five Animations 
September 21–December 9, 2023 

Taking over the Yeh Art Gallery’s hallway vitrines, Ethiopian-born, New York-based artist Ezra Wube presents five stop-motion animations that span a period of eight years of his work. Wube’s animations utilize painting, drawing and assemblage to tell stories than traverse places and cultures “in a continuous dialogue negotiating the ‘Here’ and ‘There.’” From a poetic recollection of his daily commute in NYC to an interpretation of Ethiopian folktales and an investigation into concerns of environmental sustainability in Ethiopia, Wube weaves together vivid imagery that stems from a confluence of collective storytelling, knowledge-gathering, and his own personal lived experiences. 

Dr. M. T. Geoffrey Yeh Art Gallery

Sun Yat Sen Hall
8000 Utopia Parkway
Queens, NY 11439
718-990-7476

Gallery Hours

Tuesday - Friday 10 a.m. - 5 p.m., Saturdays 12 p.m. - 5 p.m., and by appointment.

Any views, findings, conclusions or recommendations expressed within this website do not necessarily represent those held by St. John's University.