Krista Svalbonas: Silent Witness

Wednesday, February 4 — Friday, March 6, 2026 
Artist’s Talk: Wednesday, February 4, 5-6 pm
Opening Reception: Wednesday, February 4, 6-7 pm

Mueller Gallery Presents: Silent Witness — New Work by Krista Svalbonas

The Mueller Gallery at Caldwell University is pleased to announce Silent Witness, a solo exhibition by Latvian-American artist Krista Svalbonas, on view February 4 through March 6, 2026. Svalbonas’s research-driven practice explores the lasting psychological and cultural effects of forced displacement, Soviet occupation, and resistance throughout the Baltic region. Drawing from her family’s history as Latvian and Lithuanian refugees, she investigates how architecture and landscape function as repositories of memory.

The exhibition features three major bodies of work — Displacement, What Remains, and Echoes of Resistance. Using laser-cutting and historical photographic techniques, Svalbonas merges archival materials with her own photographs to reveal the tension between erasure and endurance. Her work addresses themes of statelessness, identity, and the resilience of cultural traditions in the face of systemic oppression.

Across these series, Svalbonas reveals how built environments and landscapes become repositories of collective memory. Her work contends with the ways people resist and adapt in the face of geopolitical violence, and how cultural identity survives through craft, ritual, and the stories embedded in place.

Silent Witness invites viewers to consider how the traces of displacement, survival, and quiet defiance linger in the world around us — and to reflect on the landscapes that hold history long after the people who lived it have gone.

Krista Svalbonas holds a BFA in Photography and an MFA in Interdisciplinary Studies. Her work has been exhibited at prestigious venues, including Paris Photo, Utah Museum of Contemporary Art, Spartanburg Art Museum in South Carolina, Howard Yezerski Gallery in Boston, Klompching Gallery, and ISE Cultural Foundation in New York. Her pieces are included in private collections and public institutions such as LACMA in Los Angeles, the Cesis Art Museum in Latvia, the Gregg Museum of Art and Design in North Carolina, and the Woodmere Art Museum and Temple University in Philadelphia.

Svalbonas has received numerous awards, including the Center for Photographic Art Artist Grant (2022), the Baumanis Creative Projects Grant (2020), the Rhonda Wilson Award (2017), the Puffin Foundation Grant (2016), and a Bemis Fellowship (2015). Recently, she held solo exhibitions of her series “Displacement” at the Copenhagen Photography Festival in Denmark, the Tallinn City Museum in Estonia, the Museum of Textile and Industry in Augsburg, Germany, the Kazys Varnelis Museum in Vilnius, Lithuania, and the Janina Monkute Marks Museum in Kedainiai, Lithuania. She is an associate professor of photography at St. Joseph’s University and resides in Philadelphia, where she continues her work.