The Center for Art and Social Engagement serves as a venue for investigating social issues through arts-based methods. Anchored by a permanent display of The Sister Chapel, a historic collaborative feminist installation, CASE draws inspiration from the cooperative spirit of the women’s art movement.

Painting in a style reminiscent of vintage tourist postcards, The Disappointed Tourist is an ongoing project of 300 paintings of lost sites suggested by members of the public. It was inspired by the urge to repair what has been lost due to the forces of war, time, ideology, gentrification, and natural disasters. It attempts to honor the trauma underlying the nostalgia that results from our collective and individual losses, while celebrating the human attachment to places both real and aspirational.

The Lightness of Bearing is a selection of works by Virginia Maksymowicz that considers the symbolic resilience and strength of the female figure in art and architecture by blending the mythology of caryatids, (architectural columns of women effortlessly bearing the weight of massive architectural structures) with images of women from indigenous and ethnic cultures bearing the weight of ritualistic traditions. 

SuperCellular was a site-specific immersive art gallery experience that combined sculpture, light, sound and moving imagery as a reflection of the astonishing and almost incomprehensible density and activity of the chemical molecules in our bodies. Inspired by neuroscience, cellular biology, and genetics, the installation contemplated the complexities and intricacies of living processes and the mysteries of cellular interactions.