Hillel Gallery Project is a student run gallery that curates and selects exhibits by Brown and RISD students and professional artists. The gallery is located inside The Glenn and Darcy Weiner Center at: Brown RISD Hillel, 80 Brown Street Providence, RI 02906

Current Exhibitions

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Over winter break, a group of students embarked on a life-changing, yet inspiring trip through Poland. They followed the remnants of what once was a thriving Jewish community, destroyed by the Nazis during the Holocaust. They returned proud of their Jewish heritage, and inspired to build their roots deep. This powerful photo exhibition, enriched by student stories, provides a glimpse into that experience. 

*Can't make it to the Gallery? CLICK HERE to view the photo exhibition.

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​POETRY. Brown RISD Hillel recently hosted a reading by Rachel Landau & friends. We had Rachel's poem, "death bouquet", installed along the breadth of a gallery wall. The poem serendipitously references the aggadic cemetery stories captured on Talmud pages we just read in the daf yomi cycle. Everything is aligned. If you're on College Hill, come see it yourself.

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To learn more, email us at gallery@brownrisdhillel.org to join the mailing list.

Exhibit Your Works

Past Exhibits

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​Cut From The Same Cloth
​The story of my family tells itself through collected and revered items such as bananas, cortizone tubes, hockey skates and various Jewish ritual objects. In my studio, these souvenirs are a lens through which I interpret the disintegration of culture over generations, the role of objects in society, and the nature of identity.

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"Thread in the Tapestry"
The photographs in this exhibit represent a variety of perspectives from a shared experience. Students all traveled to Israel through Birthright Israel on a trip for Brown and RISD, one group in summer 2015 and one in winter 2016. Trip participants came from a variety of backgrounds, from orthodox to non-practicing, atheist to deeply spiritual. These perspectives allowed students to engage in meaningful discussions and helped shape each group's discourse.

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"This is What a Jewish Woman Looks Like"
This exhibit featured artwork and photographs of Jewish women in the Brown and RISD community. The focus of the show is celebrating the beauty and diversity of Jewish women and challenging the often negative representation of Jewish femininity in mainstream culture. Come to the exhibit to see that there is no one way to "look Jewish."

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"Empowering A Generation"
Photo Essay by Liza Yeager '17 Started by Scott Warren ’09, Generation Citizen has become a new movement in American civics education. The organization is based on a semester-long curriculum designed to teach students in low-income schools to be engaged citizens. ​This year ​ Generation Citizen will reach 9,500 students in 380 classrooms ​in four ​cities, including Providence. See their work in action through a photographic essay created by Storyteller for Good Liza Yeager '17 through a program of the Swearer Center for Public Service. More stories of social change like Liza's are online at brown.edu/swearersparks. In partnership with the Swearer Center for Public Service.

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Shmattes (www.shmattes.org) is an exhibition project that explores the issue of cultural Jewish identity through t-shirts. These t-shirts have been acquired from all over the contemporary Jewish world-- eBay auctions, bat and bar mitzvahs, youth conferences, independent visual artists, among many other sources. The project's goal is to "track" through these t-shirts the ways in which individuals and institutions deal with the question of Jewish identity when that identity is not about religion. As t-shirts are cheap to make and sell and offer limitless design possibilities, these items provide an exceptionally good look at how people are creatively dealing with the question of Jewishness. Ultimately, Shmattes aims to provide a visual and tactile launch pad for conversations about cultural Jewish identity through the display of these t-shirts.

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In February 2014, the gallery featured a solo show by Xavier Donnelly (RISD '14). Entitled "Constructed Landscapes", the exhibit was curated by Caroline Hoffman (Brown '14). Donnelly's work was subsequently featured in a group show at the David Zwirner gallery in New York in "To do as one would" (http://www.davidzwirner.com/exhibition/to-do-as-one-would/).