This guide is sponsored by Rochester Art Center
This fall, Rochester Art Center is filled with ways to experience art, from powerful exhibitions to hands-on activities. Exhibitions on view include Extraordinary Elsewhere, which highlights the work of international artists based in Minnesota; Primordial Shift by glass artist and third-generation farmer Mick Meilahn; Celebrations in Fiber organized by the Zumbro River Fiber Arts Guild; and solo exhibitions by Ryan Woodring and MacKenzie “MAC” Mitzuk. Each brings a unique perspective on art, culture, and community.
Beyond the galleries, free Public Art Tours offer a chance to see Rochester in a new way. Join a Peace Plaza tour at 1 PM starting at the Historic Chateau Theater, or a Mayo Park tour beginning at 1 PM at the Art Center’s main entrance. Both last about 45 minutes and feature celebrated local and international artists.
For those who want to create, monthly figure drawing sessions welcome artists ages 18+ to practice sketching from live models. The Creative Studio is also open for all ages, offering a space with self-guided activities inspired by current exhibitions. No experience is needed, and all materials are provided.
Whether you’re visiting for an exhibition, a tour, or a chance to make art yourself, the Art Center offers something for everyone this season!
EXHIBITS | ROCHESTER ART CENTER
Primordial Shift
ARTIST: Mick Meilahn
DATES: June 1 – September 28, 2025
Rochester Art Center is proud to present a powerful new exhibition by glass artist and third-generation farmer Mick Meilahn. Known for his striking sculpture installations, Meilahn examines the complex relationship between genetic engineering, agriculture, and ecological sustainability, with a particular focus on corn, a crop first cultivated by Native Americans and introduced to Europeans more than 500 years ago.
A pioneer of the American Studio Glass Movement, Meilahn began working with glass in Wisconsin during the 1960s. His career has grown at the intersection of contemporary art and his deep farming roots.
About the Installation
Primordial Shift features 32 hand-blown glass ears of corn, each averaging four feet high. The glass forms are suspended on stalks of cord with cast bronze leaves, set against a backdrop of projected video that creates the illusion of corn swaying in the breeze. The installation shifts in scale depending on the space. To evoke the feel of a cornfield, the work is best experienced in a square space of approximately 30 by 30 feet, hung from a 16-foot ceiling, with video of cornfields from Meilahn’s own family farm projected around the gallery walls. The immersive environment is completed with surround-sound audio of birdsong and rustling leaves.
Celebrations in Fiber
DATES: March 12, 2025 – March 31, 2026
ARTISTS: Zumbro River Fiber Arts Guild
Rochester Art Center is proud to present Celebrations in Fiber, a dynamic exhibition that showcases the rich and varied world of fiber arts. Framed works, scrolls, and installations highlight both the beauty and functionality of fiber in everyday life. We touch, wear, and admire fiber daily in the form of paper, cloth, wool, felt, patterns, yarn, thread, rugs, and clothing. Yet usefulness is only part of the story. Fiber also decorates, inspires, tells stories, commemorates events, and connects us to memory and emotion. Like a river, fiber flows through our lives in countless ways, meeting our needs and moving our spirits.
About the Installation
The atrium features a striking multi-story river and waterfall surrounded by hoops filled with fiber art. Each balcony overlooking the river offers a new perspective, drawing visitors deeper into the artistry and versatility of fiber.
About the Artists
The exhibition is organized by the Zumbro River Fiber Arts Guild, a dedicated community of fiber artists founded in 1975 during a time of renewed interest in traditional crafts. What began as a small group passionate about spinning and weaving has grown into a vibrant collective embracing every facet of fiber arts, from knitting and sewing to dyeing and contemporary practices. Over the years, the Guild has hosted style shows, retreats, workshops, and conferences, fostering creativity and connection among fiber artists and the wider community.
Relics
ARTIST: Cameron Zebrun
DATES: March 26 – November 9, 2025
Rochester Art Center presents an exhibition of sculptures and collages that explore the forces of nature through abstract and non-traditional forms. Inspired by geological time, environmental change, and human impact on the land, the artist creates work that reflects the essence of nature’s patterns and resilience.
Wooden sculptures painted with oils and watercolors are combined with plexiglass and collage elements, resulting in colorful, textured surfaces that reference maps, topography, and forms found in rivers, ridges, and waves. Collage works draw from a vast archive of photographic images, layered and manipulated into compositions that invite viewers to bring their own stories. Together, these works offer a dynamic meditation on the environment and our place within it.
Moudhi Alhajri: Qatari Heritage
ARTIST: Moudhi Abusatwa Alhajri (موضي الهاجري)
DATES: December 2024 – March 2026
Rochester Art Center presents an exhibition of photographs by Qatari artist Moudhi Abusatwa Alhajri (موضي الهاجري). Author of the documentary book Yemen, A Passion that Captivates You, Alhajri has spent years documenting cultural landscapes through travel photography and personal reflection. Her work celebrates history, tradition, and the vibrancy of daily life.
This exhibition highlights photographs of Qatari people, animals, and scenery. By layering up to six digital images, Alhajri adds depth and texture, creating a multi-sensory effect. Juxtaposing traditional occupations with contemporary skylines, her images invite viewers into the dynamic culture of a rapidly changing nation.
Ascend
ARTISTS: Alyssa Baguss & Erin Sharkey
DATES: 2024-2034
A Public Art Initiative for Bird Safety
Rochester Art Center presents a public art project at the intersection of creativity and conservation. In 2024, artists Alyssa Baguss and Erin Sharkey collaborated on two 50-foot-tall window installations designed both as powerful works of art and as deterrents to bird collisions, a longstanding challenge for the building since 2004.
Sharkey contributed a poem with themes of sky, flight, and migration, while Baguss created imagery in response. The words appear on the front windows, and the artwork, titled Ascend, fills the rear windows with geometric forms that reference migration, return, and the fragility of glass. Produced with perforated vinyl, the installations allow light to filter through while protecting birds in flight. Together, these works demonstrate how art can spark awareness, protect the natural world, and inspire new solutions.
Extraordinary Elsewhere
FEATURED ARTISTS: Dahn Gim, Ivonne Yáñez, Mayumi Amada, Peng Wu, Prima Jalichandra-Sakuntabhai, Rituparna Rana, Roshan Ganu, Shafrin Islam, and Ziba Rajabi.
CURATOR: Zoe Cinel
DATES: June 7, 2025 – February 1, 2026
Rochester Art Center presents Extraordinary Elsewhere, an exhibition that asks what we carry with us when we leave home and how objects, rituals, and stories help us connect across distance and time. Featuring nine international artists based in Minnesota, the exhibition brings together works that span dance, storytelling, poetry, site-specific installations, mixed media sculpture, expanded painting, and experimental animation.
The exhibition reflects on movement, memory, and the search for belonging in unfamiliar spaces. Both ephemeral and enduring, the works create a dialogue about living between present and past, reconciliation and discovery. An accompanying short documentary by Pawan Sharma, with interviews by Rituparna Rana, further explores how cultural histories and personal journeys shape artistic expression.
Face in Clouds, invisible ink
ARTIST: Ryan Woodring
CURATOR: Zoe Cinel
DATES: September 13, 2025 – April 2026
Ryan Woodring, spot healing 2024. Single channel video. 9 minutes. Size variable. Alt id: An HD (16×9) video still depicting three men in just about the same standing side-pose in a well-lit apartment. 2 of the characters are 3D-modeled construction workers identifiable by hard-hats and tool belts while the third is a white male in his thirties who tries imitating their posture.
Rochester Art Center presents Face in Clouds, invisible ink, a solo exhibition by New York–based artist Ryan Woodring. The exhibition brings together recent bodies of work shaped by Woodring’s ongoing reckoning with invisible illness. Drawing from ritualized visualization practices, the works trace cycles of visibility and obscurity, translating internal afflictions into speculative material forms.
Highlights include Today (and Possibly Tomorrow), a series of 3D-printed candies modeled in real time as the artist experienced symptoms, and Sick and Tired at the Met, a drawing series and installation created by rendering every object in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s database tagged with “sick” or “tired.” Across sculpture, drawing, and time-based practices, Woodring explores how pain, language, and legibility intersect in a hyper-classified, post-AI world.
Nostalgic Escapism
ARTIST: MacKenzie “MAC” Mitzuk
DATES: June 14 – October 5, 2025
Rochester Art Center presents a solo exhibition of paintings and sculptures by MacKenzie “MAC” Mitzuk, selected through a juried process and sponsored by the MFA Program at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design as part of an annual partnership.
Mitzuk is an interdisciplinary artist whose practice spans painting, sculpture, illustration, and installation. Her work draws on imagination as a form of nostalgic escapism, shaped by a childhood home steeped in the aesthetics of the 1960s through the 1990s. Surrounded by vintage media, furniture, and technology, she developed a playful yet critical lens on digital culture.
The works in this exhibition channel that upbringing into fantastical narratives populated by colorful creatures inhabiting worlds built from VHS tapes, CRT monitors, and cassette players. Reimagining childhood memories and cultural touchstones, Mitzuk invites viewers to reconnect with the innocence of play and the power of imagination.
CREATIVE STUDIO | ROCHESTER ART CENTER
Creative Studio
DATES: Fridays & Saturdays, 11 AM – 3:30 PM // September – May*
ADMISSION: FREE for Members, Non-members: $5 at the front desk plus general admission fee
The Creative Studio at Rochester Art Center is a vibrant, hands-on space where visitors of all ages can dive into self-led art activities inspired by the exhibitions on view. Whether you’re visiting with kids, friends, or flying solo, you’ll find everything you need to turn your ideas into expressive, one-of-a-kind creations—no experience needed, and all materials provided.
A friendly Creative Studio Assistant is always nearby to get you started and answer questions. Just bring your curiosity and we’ll supply the rest.
Come get inspired, get messy, and leave with something you made yourself. Art is for everyone—and so is the Creative Studio.
*The Creative Studio will be closed on the following dates:
-
Friday, November 28 & Saturday, November 29, 2025
-
Friday, December 26 & Saturday, December 27, 2025
-
Friday, January 2 & Saturday, January 3, 2026
FIGURE DRAWING | ROCHESTER ART CENTER
Figure Drawing
DATES:
-
Traditional Figure Drawing (nude model) on select Tuesdays, 6 – 8 PM*
-
Costumed Figure Drawing on the following Wednesdays, 6 – 8 PM*
$15/session | Art Center Members and Mayo Clinic Staff/Students
$25/session | General Public (Join as a member today and get your discount!)
Step into the joy of drawing from life in our open sessions, designed for artists and enthusiasts ages 18 and up. Whether you’re just beginning or you’ve been sketching for years, you’ll find a welcoming space to explore your creativity. Each session features a live model who may be nude, semi-clothed, or in costume, offering a variety of poses to inspire your work. We’ll begin with short, energetic gesture poses to loosen up, then move into longer holds for careful study and detail.
What to Bring
Bring your own paper pad and favorite drawing supplies (oil paint is not permitted). We provide easels, drawing horses, and a calm, focused environment where your creativity can thrive. Headphones and water bottles are welcome. Please note: photography is not allowed. Doors open at 5:45 PM so you can get settled before the session begins.
Why It Matters
Your registration directly supports the live model and the mission of the Rochester Art Center, your community non-profit dedicated to connection, creativity, and the arts.
Registration Details
Advance registration is required and sessions often fill quickly. No refunds or exchanges are available. If you cannot attend, please cancel at least 24 hours in advance so someone from the waiting list can join. Questions? Reach out at info@rochesterartcenter.org
*Registration is OPEN for these dates:
-
Wednesday, September 24, 2025 | 6 – 8 PM Traditional Figure Drawing
* Registration will open soon for these upcoming dates:
-
Tuesday, October 14 – Traditional Figure Drawing
-
Wednesday, October 15 – Costumed Figure Drawing
-
Tuesday, November 18 – Traditional Figure Drawing
-
Wednesday, November 19 – Costumed Figure Drawing
.. and more dates coming in 2026!
TOURS | ROCHESTER ART CENTER
Peace Plaza Public Art Tour
Once a month on Sundays at 1 PM
2025 Dates: September 7 and October 5
No reservations required. Free and open to all.
Meet outside of Chateau Theatre, 15 First Street SW, Rochester, 55902
Discover the extraordinary works of art in Peace Plaza, Rochester’s “Heart of the City.” Tours meet at 1 PM in front of the Historic Chateau Theater and feature artists including Charles E. Gagnon, Gwen Westerman, and Ann Hamilton. Tours are free, last about 45 minutes, and are open to all. Comfortable shoes are recommended; tours are canceled in inclement weather.
If you enjoy your experience, please consider a suggested donation of $5, $10, or $20 online or at Rochester Art Center to help keep these programs accessible to everyone.
Outdoor Public Art Tours
Sundays at 1:00 PM June – October*
No reservations required.
Explore public artwork in Mayo Park, beginning at 1 PM at Rochester Art Center’s main entrance, Door 23 of Mayo Civic Center. The tour follows a paved path along the Zumbro River and highlights Rochester’s Art4Trails program and works by artists including Richard Brubaker, Charles Huntington, James Earl Fraser, and Po Shu Wang. Tours are free, open to all, and last about 45 minutes. Comfortable shoes are recommended; in inclement weather, the tour moves indoors to Rochester Art Center galleries.
If you enjoy your experience, please consider a suggested donation of $5, $10, or $20 online or at Rochester Art Center to help keep programs like these accessible to everyone.
Drop-In Tours
Saturdays at 1 pm*
$8 for Adults, $5 for Seniors & Military
Free for Ages 21 & Under, Free for Members
No reservations required.
Enjoy a docent-led, guided tour of the Rochester Art Center’s current exhibitions featuring the work of regional, national and international artists in a contemporary architectural setting. Tours last approximately 45 minutes. Tours not available on holiday weekends.
