Located within a university context, the Anya and Andrew Shiva Gallery is, first and foremost, a space for educational engagement. The Gallery is, in this respect, a kind of classroom. A university art gallery, when it is generous, provides a platform. It gives voice to rich & nuanced conversations which cannot necessarily happen in the marketplace or in spaces catering to a more general audience.
As a university gallery, we aim to be interdisciplinary, reaching across fields, departments, cultural contexts and lived experiences to offer visual, somatic and material ways of thinking about topics that are pertinent to the John Jay community. We provide an education kit for each exhibition which, alongside the exhibition catalogue, gives concrete information and pedagogical tools to faculty who are using the gallery as an educational tool.