Lehigh University is celebrating its Sesquicentennial Anniversary as a teaching institution through the arts. As part of its 150-year celebration, Lehigh University Art Galleries (LUAG) is opening three art exhibits this fall:

"Object As Subject: The LUAG Teaching Collection," "Of The Americas: Contemporary Latin American Art" and "Revisiting South Bethlehem: 150 Years of Photography." The three exhibitions were curated from The Lehigh University Art Galleries Teaching Collection.

"Object As Subject" opens Aug. 26 and continues through May 27, 2016, LUAG Main Gallery, Zoellner Arts Center, 420 E. Packer Avenue, Bethlehem.

The exhibition includes Kôshirô Onchi, "Portrait of a Poet (Sakutaro Hagiwara)" (1943, Woodblock print on paper) and Meindert Hobbema, "Landscape With Footbridge Over A Stream" (c. 1700, Oil On Canvas), images of which accompany this article.

Ricardo Viera, Professor of Art, Director-Curator, LU Art Galleries, explains, "The first part is 'Object As Subject,' an exhibition partially funded by the Pennsylvania Council for the Arts."

"I often tell my students: Museums collect more than objects. They collect ideas," Viera says. "Art objects are ideas that communicate through their forms."

Viera points out from an LUAG brochure how in the past 150 years Lehigh University, which was founded in 1865, has "amassed a world-class collection of over 12,000 art objects, representing a broad range of cultures and materials." He asserts, "Lehigh University has an amazing art collection from all over the world."

The Main Gallery will present selected works from the LUAG Teaching Collection. The art works include paintings by Picasso, Rembrandt and Goya. An excited Viera exclaims, "These are the grand masters."

Also opening Aug. 26 is "Of The Americas: Contemporary Latin American Art," Lower Gallery, Zoellner, where it continues through June 4, 2017.

"Of The Americas" is an exhibition of prints, photographs, drawings and mixed media by Mexican artists Diego Rivera and Jose Clemente Orozco; Cuban artist Wilfredo Lam, and artists from Brazil, Chile, Jamaica and Ecuador. The exhibition is a portrait of the 20th and 21st centuries from a perspective of politics, gender and cultural identity, and a diaspora in a multi-cultural world.

"Revisiting South Bethlehem: 150 Years of Photography" opens Aug. 24, DuBois Gallery, Maginnes Hall, where it continues through May 18, 2016.

"Revisiting South Bethlehem" includes William Rau's Lehigh Valley Railroad photographs; images by Walker Evans, who documented the 1930's Great Depression era, and images of industrial and post-industrial United States.

Guest essayist Nicholas Sawicki, Frank Hook Assistant Professor of Art History at Lehigh University, wrote, "A campus art collection … is an open window to cultures and times distant from our own, and a signpost directing us to the things we hold in common."

Of the trio of exhibitions, Viera says, "They speak for themselves. They speak to one another. And they speak to us, the viewers of the past, present and future."