Professor emerita Gina Werfel is featured in the group show Alchemies of Place at the Col Gallery in San Francisco.

The exhibition traces a pivotal shift in the history of painting: the moment when landscape ceased to function purely as representation and instead became a site of abstraction, metaphor, and subjective experience. From the grandeur of the Hudson River School to the fleeting impressions of plein-air painters, landscape has long served as a means to observe, document, and idealize the natural world. With the rise of modernism and the accelerating pace of industrialization, artists began to look inward—reflecting not how the world is, but how it feels. The result was a radical reimagining of the genre: land rendered not through likeness, but through gesture, rhythm, material, and sensation.

Participating artist include Lynne Drexler, Claire Falkenstein, Ashley Garrett, Deborah Hede, Suzanne Jackson, Terran Last Gun, George Morrison, Anna Grace Nwosu, Benjamin Saperstein, Joan Snyder, Vivian Springford, Joan Tanner, Gina Werfel, and Jonas Wood.

Alchemies of Place opens Jan. 23, 2026.