Upcoming Exhibitions

In Carrie Mae Weems: The Usual Suspects, Weems focuses on the humanity denied in recent killings of black men, women, and children by police. She directs our attention to the constructed nature of racial identity—specifically, representations that associate black bodies with criminality. Our imaginings have real—often deadly—outcomes. Blocks of color obscure faces just as our assumptions around race obscure individual humanity. Through a formal language of blurred images, color blocks, stated facts, and meditative narration, Weems directs our attention toward the repeated pattern of judicial inaction—the repeated denials and the repeated lack of acknowledgement.

This exhibition is organized by LSU Museum of Art in collaboration with LSU College of Art + Design, and LSU School of Art. At the Fairfield University Art Museum, this exhibition is made possible by the generous support of the #UNLOAD Foundation. The Mary and Eliza Freeman Center for History and Community is a community partner for the museum’s programming this fall.

Image: Carrie Mae Weems, All the Boys (Profile 1), 2016, archival pigment mounted on gesso board. Courtesy of Jack Shainman Gallery

Self-described "ghetto potter" Roberto Lugo uses porcelain, a medium traditionally reserved for the wealthy, to explore inequality and racial and social justice. His work often takes familiar shapes drawn from European and Asian ceramic traditions, including ginger jars, amphorae, and teapots, but their hand-painted surfaces take inspiration from street art and feature contemporary iconography, including celebrations of Black and Latino figures. A number of the pieces in this exhibition, which features all-new work, also incorporate gun parts from decommissioned handguns obtained in a Connecticut gun buyback sponsored by #UNLOAD Foundation.

This exhibition is made possible by the generous support of the #UNLOAD Foundation. The Mary and Eliza Freeman Center for History and Community is a community partner for the museum’s programming this fall.

Image:Roberto Lugo, Vengo dal Ghetto, AOC, 2020, cerámica vidriada. Fotografía de Dominic Episcopo por cortesía de la Wexler Gallery

Robert Gerhardt: Mic Check is a photography project by photojournalist and writer Robert Gerhardt, who relied on the #BlackLivesMatter hashtag to track and document these protests in New York City over the last seven years. This remarkable body of work includes photographs of protests from 2014 through 2021, across New York, in massive crowds, in rain and sun, during night and day, in motion during marches and stationary during speeches, and in the past year in the midst of a global pandemic. These candid works capture the passion, righteous anger, and frustration of the protestors. The title comes from the shouts of “mic check!” which mobilized protestors into a game of repeat-after-me, a technique that united the crowd and enabled the spread of the speaker’s comments and instructions without amplification.

Image: Robert Gerhardt, Protestors Marching through Times Square on the 5th Anniversary of the Death of Michael Brown, Times Square, New York City, August 9, 2019, silver gelatin print. Courtesy of the artist