Dear Guggenheim Gallery Community,
We are retiring this website. Please find regularly updated information about the gallery and our programming here:
https://www.chapman.edu/wilkinson/art/gallery/index.aspx
Thank you for your interest, and we look forward to welcoming you at Chapman University’s Guggenheim Gallery this fall!
Guggenheim Gallery Mission Statement
The Guggenheim Gallery presents contemporary art as a site of inquiry, experimentation, and critical engagement. Through exhibitions and public programs, the gallery brings artistic practices into relation with questions that extend across culture, history, technology, science, ecology, politics, and the conditions of everyday life.
The program moves between focused presentations of individual practices and exhibitions that consider broader social, material, and intellectual formations. It is attentive to the ways artists work through questions of place, perception, memory, technology, labor, environment, and the production of images and knowledge. The gallery seeks out work that is formally and conceptually rigorous, and that can shift the terms through which a subject is understood.
Situated within a university, the Guggenheim Gallery is both a public exhibition space and a setting for sustained exchange. Artists, students, faculty, scholars, and audiences encounter contemporary practices in relation to one another, creating opportunities for close looking, discussion, experimentation, and further inquiry.
History
The Guggenheim Gallery was founded at Chapman University in 1972 by Professor Richard Turner. In 1975, the gallery moved into its current facility in Moulton Hall, made possible by a gift from Robert and Shirley Guggenheim. From its beginnings, the gallery has presented exhibitions by professional artists alongside exhibitions developed by Chapman students, establishing contemporary art as an important part of the university’s academic and cultural life.
Turner directed the gallery for more than three decades, curating more than seventy exhibitions. During this period, the Guggenheim developed a reputation for presenting ambitious contemporary art exhibitions while building connections among artists, students, faculty, and the broader Southern California art community. Maggi Owens joined the gallery in 1991 and became co-director and co-curator with Turner in 1997, contributing significantly to the breadth and development of its exhibition program.
The Guggenheim has participated in major regional initiatives and collaborations, including the California-Pacific Triennial, Getty’s Pacific Standard Time: Art in L.A. 1945–1980, and Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA. In 2024–25, the gallery participated in Getty’s Pacific Standard Time: Art & Science Collide with Energy Fields: Vibrations of the Pacific, presented in collaboration with Fulcrum Arts and bringing artists, scientists, and researchers together around vibration, sound, ecology, and the interconnected systems of the Pacific.
Over time, the Guggenheim Gallery and the Escalette Permanent Collection developed as distinct programs, with the Escalette focused on public art and the Guggenheim focused on temporary exhibitions and student shows. Today, the Guggenheim Gallery operates within Wilkinson College of Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences, continuing its longstanding role as a venue for contemporary art, student exhibition-making, and exchange between the university and the wider art community.
Guggenheim Gallery at Chapman University
Moulton Hall, One University Drive
Tel: 714.997.6800
Monday - Friday: 12:00-5:00 PM
Saturday: 11:00 AM - 4:00 PM