Premiere | Parenthetic Passages: A Conversation with Camille Hoffman

Meet artist Camille Hoffman in the student led short film, Parenthetic Passages – A Conversation with Camille Hoffman, premiering October 9th from 6:00 – 8:00 pm in Freeman Auditorium. Presented by HUB-Robeson Galleries, this twenty-minute interview was directed by Venus Bayat, and edited by Lamisse Hamouda and Mars Sparrow.

Camille Hoffman’s site-specific installation Parenthetic Passages is currently on view in HUB Gallery through October 30, 2025. The artist created the installation on-site and, upon its completion, was interviewed by Exhibition Coordinator Sarah Kipp. The film takes a closer look at Hoffman’s background and artistic practice while providing context for the exhibition in HUB Gallery. Light refreshments will be served, and the gallery will extend its hours to 8:00 p.m. for this special screening event. Join us to learn more about Camille’s practice, then experience the exhibition in HUB Gallery.

In Parenthetic Passages, Camille Hoffman has created an environment that emphasizes the wisdom of water and the concept of shell memory, reflecting on the evolving relationships and accumulated human experiences alongside oceanic knowledge.

Drawing inspiration from her ancestral roots in the Philippines and meaningful transoceanic exchanges with Indigenous wisdom keepers from the Americas, Hoffman poetically transforms unconventional materials, such as nurses’ gowns, mass-produced landscape prints, and piña cloth, into layered geographies. Mastering a handwork of collage, sewing, and painterly gesture, Hoffman’s creations challenge colonial narratives while serving as portals for healing and reconnection. She builds sacred in-between spaces through this tactile transformation, evoking a sensory experience of moving between multiple places and identities at once.

About the Artist

Camille Hoffman (b.1987 Chicago, IL) earned an MFA from Yale University (2015), a BFA from California College of the Arts (2009), and was a recipient of the Carol Schlosberg Memorial Prize for excellence in painting from Yale University, a National Endowment for the Arts scholarship, a Benjamin A. Gilman International Scholarship, and the Van Lier Fellowship from the Museum of Arts and Design (MAD). She has exhibited her work throughout the United States and abroad, and has been featured in Art in America, the Los Angeles Times, Hyperallergic, and The New Yorker. Solo exhibitions include Motherlands at Form & Concept (2022), See and Missed at San Luis Obispo Museum of Art (2022), Landing For Lolo at NADA House Governors Island (2021), Excelsior: Ever Upward, Ever Afloat at the Queens Museum (2019), and Pieceable Kingdom at the Museum of Arts and Design, New York, NY (2018).

Camille Hoffman currently lives and works in New York, NY and teaches at The Cooper Union and Yale University.

For more information on this and other exhibitions, contact HUB-Robeson Galleries. Class, student organization and office visits are welcome! Email Galleries@psu.edu with inquiries. Keep up to date with HUB-Robeson Galleries by signing up for their Listserv or follow them on Instagram @hubrobesongalleries.

Contact: Robert Sparrow Jones, Curator and Senior Gallery Manager, HUB-Robeson Galleries (814) 865-2563, rkj5315@psu.edu