Come if you're a maker grappling with how to document loss, a Pennsylvanian reckoning with your region's extraction history, or a designer/artist interrogating textiles and images as political tools. This is for people who believe that beauty and documentation can be forms of resistance.
Pearlstein Gallery is pleased to present two concurrent exhibitions in Spring 2026, with artists selected from our 2025-26 Call for Entries. Collective Landscapes: Photographs by Matthew Ludak and Textiles by Maris Van Vlack brings together two artists who mine collective histories to investigate the impacts of time, disinvestment, and conflict on architectural landscapes. Ludak’s photography takes inspiration from his grandmother’s life amidst the rugged towns of Western Pennsylvania's coal-mining communities, expanding his lens to capture current themes of urban and rural life amongst spaces ridden by structural neglect. In her multifaceted practice, Van Vlack uses textile, sculpture, and collage practices to create tapestries that investigate the impacts of war and weather on landscapes from her family’s history. Her unique layering techniques mirror the cycles of accumulation, entropy, and regeneration on the built environment over time. Conflagrations, a group show featuring recent works by Viola Bordon, Evan Curtis Charles Hall, Narendra Haynes, and Emmanuela Soria Ruiz, investigates fire as force, event, and aftermath. Moving between active burn and residual trace, the artists ask how we might respond to fire's capacity to clear, consume, reveal, and reorder. As fire increasingly shapes our ecological context, these works reflect on how fire constructs and destroys in the same gesture, reshaping ecologies, infrastructures, and collective memory. What burns. What survives. What returns. RSVP HEREAbout Pearlstein Gallery: The Leonard Pearlstein Gallery is an inclusive gallery space that welcomes the public to experience free exhibitions of contemporary art and design. Located on Drexel University’s campus, the Pearlstein Gallery is committed to cultivating engagement with emerging artists, Drexel’s faculty and student populations, and community partners in the nearby neighborhoods of Powelton Village and Mantua. Since its creation in 2012, the Gallery has fostered innovation and collaboration, developing strong relationships within Philadelphia’s arts and culture sector.
As climate collapse forces a reckoning with extractive economies and their abandoned communities, these artists ask: what do we owe to the landscapes and people we've mined for profit? This exhibition arrives exactly when we need to see disinvestment not as history, but as an ongoing crisis demanding witness.