Upcoming Exhibitions

Stitching Time features 12 quilts created by men who are incarcerated in the Louisiana State Penitentiary, also known as Angola Prison. These works of art, and accompanying recorded interviews, tell the story of a unique inside-outside quilt collaboration. The exhibition focuses our attention on the quilt creators, people often forgotten by society when discussing the history of the U.S. criminal justice system. Also on view in the gallery will be Give Me Life, a selection of works from women artists presently or formerly incarcerated at York Correctional Institution, a maximum security state prison in Niantic, CT, courtesy of Community Partners in Action (CPA). The CPA’s Prison Arts program was initiated in 1978 and is one of the longest-running projects of its kind in the United States. Founded in 1875, CPA is celebrating 150 years of working within the criminal justice system.

Image: Kenny “Zulu” Whitmore, Etienne, Mutulu Shakur, and Maureen Kelleher (quilt design); Maureen Kelleher (quilting), James Baldwin: Quote #3, 2019, mixed cotton blends. Lent by Maureen Kelleher, © Maureen Kelleher

Organized by The New York Historical

Monuments: Commemoration and Controversy explores monuments and their representations in public spaces as flashpoints of fierce debate over national identity, politics, and race that have raged for centuries. Offering a historical foundation for understanding today’s controversies, the exhibition features fragments of a statue of King George III torn down by American Revolutionaries, a souvenir replica of a bulldozed monument by Harlem Renaissance sculptor Augusta Savage, and a maquette of New York City’s first public monument to a Black woman, Harriet Tubman, among other objects from The New York Historical's collection. The exhibition reveals how monument-making and monument-breaking have long shaped American life as public statues have been celebrated, attacked, protested, altered, and removed. 

The exhibition is curated by Wendy Nālani E. Ikemoto,Vice President and Chief Curator at the New York Historical.

Image: Johannes Adam Simon Oertel, Pulling Down the Statue of King George III, New York City, 11852-1853, oil on canvas. Gift of Samuel V. Hoffman. The New York Historical, 1925.6

This exhibition will focus on depictions of the American flag over the course of the last century, ranging from the straightforwardly patriotic to overtly political works that interrogate just who the American flag represents, and whether justice is available to all. It will include works ranging from Childe Hassam’s Italian Day, May 1918 (which is being lent by the Art Bridges Foundation) to a new textile work by Maria de Los Angeles commissioned for the exhibition, in media including paintings, prints, drawings, photographs, sculpture, and a work in digital animation.

For Which it Stands… joins a campus-wide series of cultural and visual and performing arts events being presented as part of the national celebrations surrounding the semiquincentennial (250th anniversary) of the founding of the United States of America on July 4, 1776. 

This exhibition is curated by Museum Director Carey Mack Weber.

Image: Sara Rahbar, I don’t trust you any more, Flag #59, 2019, mixed media, collected vintage objects, on vintage US flag. Courtesy of the artist. © Sara Rahbar

This exhibition will explore the enduring fascination with ancient Egyptian art and culture (dubbed “Egyptomania” by 19th-century Europeans) through a selection of paintings, prints, photographs, and decorative art ranging from the early 19th century through the present day. These objects, from the humble to the refined, from the shamelessly commercial to the Afrofuturist, represent the range of artistic responses to – and misconceptions about – ancient Egyptian visual culture. Paradoxically, this enthusiasm for Egyptian symbols and motifs contributed to the erasure of the ancient Egyptian people themselves, as their beliefs and customs became exoticized in popular memory. The exhibition will examine how these objects reflect the phenomenon of “Egyptomania” during the last two centuries, and will position their over-simplified or stereotypical narratives in conversation with current archeological understanding about ancient Egyptian culture.

The exhibition is curated by Megan Paqua (adjunct instructor of ancient Egyptian archaeology and art history and Fairfield University Art Museum Registrar). 

Image: Charles-Theodore Frère, Along the Nile, ca. 1870, oil on panel. Gift of Michael T. Vigario, ’08, 2023.11.01

This exhibition focuses on more than 40 recent works by contemporary photographer James Welling (American, born 1951). From the artist’s Cento and Personae series, these photographs of ancient sites in Italy and Greece, as well as antiquities found in museums around the world, were subjected to digital and painterly manipulation by the artist to achieve transformative effects. The photographs will be exhibited alongside a selection from the Museum’s extensive historic plaster cast collection of Greek and Roman sculpture.

As Welling explains, he is interested in “reanimating” the men and women of the ancient past through these works, and connecting them to our own time in a fresh way through his innovative combination of photography and painting. Visitors to the exhibition will feel their curiosity piqued by his elusive and often haunting evocations of the ancient Mediterranean world.

Image: James Welling, Portrait of Kore 679, 2021, oil on laser print. Courtesy of the artist. © James Welling