In 1982, students and faculty advocated for a gallery space on campus to exhibit student artworks. Over a decade later, Union Gallery became the manifestation of this student-centric gallery space, opening in 1994 with Jocelyn Purdie as gallery director. Union Gallery organizes exhibitions of student, emerging, and professional artists - creating opportunities for students to lead arts programming, facilitate artist interviews, and publishing student writing in the gallery’s newsletter Untitled and exhibition publications.
As a teaching space, Union Gallery is foundational to the arts ecosystem in Kingston and beyond. This model allows students to gain practical experiences in art gallery operations and programming, applying knowledge learned in classrooms in professional settings.
Union Gallery is a central hub for experiential learning in arts curating, administration, exhibition design, and experimental artistic and academic projects. The students who volunteer and staff the gallery have myriad academic backgrounds, from Film & Media, Art History, Fine Art, Cultural Studies, and Screen Cultures. With art as a mediator for students to discuss independent research projects, collaborative learning is a core tenet of the space.
Through conversations, workshops, and mentorships, the gallery facilitates peer-to-peer leanring that is multi-perspectival and interdisciplinary which is, in turn, reflected in the projects at the gallery. Guided by Carina Magazzeni, the gallery director, and Abby Nowakowski, the gallery manager, Union Gallery is a reflection of the ideas and aspirations of the students, artists, and mentors that use the gallery. The original mission of the gallery, providing a space for fine art students to exhibit their art, remains a crucial function of the space.