The Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center at Vassar has collaborated with artist and researcher, Sa’dia Rehman on a new exhibition, Water/Bodies: Sa’dia Rehman, the centerpiece of which is a massive site-responsive wall drawing that engages critically with Vassar’s founding collection of Hudson River School art. Breaking with these nineteenth-century paintings’ idealized pastoral representations, Rehman’s drawing makes visible latent themes of empire, religion, and Manifest Destiny that undergird the Hudson Valley, as well as global histories of dam-induced displacement of water and people.

“One of many remarkable things about Sa’dia’s work is their use of nontraditional materials, and how these connect to and advance their ideas and research. Materials like rebar, clay on burlap, repurposed cardboard boxes, gauze, books, and water itself,” said the Loeb’s Azra Dawood, Andrew W. Mellon Curator of Academic Programs, who organized the exhibition. “The ephemeral nature of these substances and objects—for example, the clay in the wall drawing that may gradually fall or the rebar in a sculpture that is rusting over time—speaks to Sa’dia’s attention to fragility and displacement, and their interest in working with architectural and memory fragments. Perhaps they also indicate the unreliability, and hopefully the cracking, of canonical histories.”

The wall drawing, with dimensions spanning approximately 15 ft tall and 18 ft wide, is in dialogue with other multimedia works also by Rehman, folding architectural and memory fragments with imagination and scientific data. Across this body of work, the artist pulls from their travel, archival research, and dialogues with family members, communities, scientists and environmentalists to ultimately perform an act of “re-surfacing,” in which disregarded histories of people, flora, and fauna rise again to repair and reform canonical histories and heroic narratives of water management.

“My wall drawing at the Loeb Art Center explores the sublime and the sacrifice, which evoke the ecosystem of Hudson River School’s paintings and current themes of my own work regarding empire and labor,” said Rehman. “I am also thinking of the words extinction and erasure as material. Extinction is defined as having no living member or no longer in existence. And in erasure there is still hope in a remnant or a visible layer of knowing of what once lived. The wall drawing extends three-dimensionally from the wall, creating an architectural narrative of loss, of resiliency and endurance.”

“We are very excited to be working with Sa'dia Rehman on this exhibition, which will greatly enhance our efforts to recontextualize the Hudson River School paintings in the collection,” said Bart Thurber, the Anne Hendricks Bass Director of the Loeb.

Sa’dia Rehman’s work surfaces the histories of power and displacement concealed within water bodies. If seen primarily as a commodity or landscape feature, water—aided by the human, geographic, and institutional bodies that attempt to control it—hides its complexity. Yet, across its different behaviors and forms, water is central to our lives. It indelibly constructs our physical, personal, and political landscapes. Rehman draws out the stories of these landscapes by paying attention to water’s material nature, and to its varying relationships to land (flooding, draining out of, contained within).

Rehman’s practice springs from the history of the Indus River, a body of water flowing through Tibet, Kashmir, and Pakistan. It particularly engages with the cultural and environmental costs of dam construction, a focus that has emerged from their family’s history. The construction of the Tarbela Dam on the Indus displaced the artist’s family from their lands in the 1970s. More recently, Rehman’s focus has expanded to global sites, such as the Balearic Sea, California Mission Dams, and the Bagmati and Hudson Rivers.

Water/Bodies: Sa’dia Rehman is a two-part exhibition. Part One opened on February 22, 2025 and on April 15, 2025, the exhibition will expand to a second gallery. The show is in conversation with two other Loeb exhibitions, Great Green Hope for the Urban Blues (February 15–August 17, 2025) and Between a Rock and a Hard Place: Black Space-Making from Harlem to the Hudson Valley (February 8–August 17, 2025). Together, the three will kickstart a Loeb initiative to reinterpret and reinstall the museum’s collection of art from the Hudson River School.

“On view concurrently in adjacent galleries, Water/Bodies and Great Green Hope for the Urban Blues differ in format and approach, yet they complement each other in concept and theme,” said Mary-Kay Lombino, Deputy Director and the Emily Hargroves Fisher ’57 and Richard B. Fisher Curator of the Loeb. “Each exhibition presents artist responses to the relationship between the urban and the rural, industrialization and environmental preservation, and the effects of that exchange across time and space.”

Organizer

Azra Dawood, Andrew W. Mellon Curator of Academic Programs

Support

Support for the exhibition is provided by the Mellon Foundation

Key Dates & Programming

April 15, 2025: Part two of the exhibit opens to the public, Gallery 2

May 1, 2025: A conversation with artist Sa’dia Rehman, Public Program (5:30 p.m.); Reception (7:00 p.m.) Loeb Atrium and Galleries

August 17, 2025: Exhibition closes

About the Artist

Sa’dia Rehman (all pronouns) is a multidisciplinary artist and educator focusing on race, empire, and labor. Rehman experiments with hard and soft materials, from reconstruction steel bar to charcoal and plaster, found objects and denim, water and rust. They use these substances and materials to illustrate erasure across generations and geographies. Rehman’s artistic practice has interacted with their family’s histories of migration and loss in various ways. They engage with family photos and architectural forms to investigate the idea of nations and borders in a way that encompasses not only detention and surveillance, but also resistance and survival. In doing so, they bring attention to the fragmented and hybrid realities in which we live, fight, participate.

Rehman has exhibited work at venues including the Wexner Center for the Arts (Columbus, Ohio), The Fabric Workshop and Museum (Philadelphia, PA), Frost Museum of Art (Miami, Florida), Governors Island (New York), Queens Museum (NYC) and Pakistan National Council of the Arts (Islamabad), among others. Rehman received the Ohio Excellence Award, Aminah Brenda Lynn Robinson Fellowship and the Meredith Morabito and Henrietta Mantooth Fellowship. Rehman was awarded residencies at the ArtLab at Harvard University, Film/Video Studio at the Wexner Center for the Arts, Art Omi, Abrons Art Center, KODA, Asian American Arts Alliance, Edward Albee Foundation, Vermont Studio Center, and NARS Foundation.

About the Loeb Art Center | vassar.edu/theloeb

The Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center is a teaching and learning museum, free and open to all, supporting Vassar College’s educational mission and communities. Formerly the Vassar College Art Gallery, the Loeb is the first art museum at a college or university that was part of the institution’s original plan. Today, the permanent collection includes over 22,000 works, comprising paintings, sculptures, drawings, photographs, textiles, and glass and ceramic wares. The Loeb strives to be a catalyst for scholarly, creative, and social justice work by Vassar students and others. It aims to reflect a commitment to broaden, and amplify, the voices represented in the museum setting, and to ensure that the Loeb’s programs and practices have a positive impact on campus and beyond. To learn more, please visit vassar.edu/theloeb or follow on Facebook, Instagram and YouTube.

Commitment to DEAI

The Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center at Vassar College commits to Diversity, Equity, Access, and Inclusion (DEAI) as core values across its culture, systems, and practices. We pledge to allocate resources (human and financial) to create and sustain a museum culture in which difference is celebrated. The Loeb staff is dedicated to integrating DEAI priorities into gallery installations, programming, interpretation, collections management, acquisitions, and internal processes. Our ongoing work is guided by an intention to care for all people engaged with the Loeb while welcoming the exchange of ideas, enriching experiences, and diverse perspectives through art.

Admission to the Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center is free and all galleries are wheelchair accessible. The Loeb is now open to the public every day (except Monday) from 10:00am to 5:00pm. The Loeb is located at 124 Raymond Avenue near the entrance to the Vassar College campus. Parking is available on Raymond Avenue. Directions to the Vassar campus in Poughkeepsie, NY, are available at https://www.vassar.edu/visit/tour#directions.

The Art Center is also accessible via the Dutchess County Public Transit, Bus Route L. For additional information, the public may call 845-437-5632 or visit https://www.vassar.edu/theloeb.

Land Acknowledgement

We acknowledge that Vassar stands upon the homelands of the Munsee Lenape, Indigenous peoples who have an enduring connection to this place despite being forcibly displaced by European colonization. Munsee Lenape peoples continue today as the Stockbridge–Munsee Community in Wisconsin, the Delaware Tribe and the Delaware Nation in Oklahoma, and the Munsee-Delaware Nation in Ontario. This acknowledgment, however, is insufficient without our reckoning with the reality that every member of the Vassar community since 1861 has benefited from these Native peoples’ displacement, and it is hollow without our efforts to counter the effects of structures that have long enabled—and that still perpetuate—injustice against Indigenous Americans. To that end, we commit to build and sustain relationships with Native communities; to expand opportunities at Vassar for Native students, as well as Native faculty and other employees; and to collaborate with Native nations to know better the Indigenous peoples, past and present, who care for this land.

Vassar College is a coeducational, independent, residential liberal arts college founded in 1861.