The Joslyn’s dynamic program of exhibitions brings people together to experience art across time and cultures.
&nbsp;

Exhibitions

Scott Pavilion S1–3
<a href="https://live-joslyn-wp.pantheonsite.io/dripping-earth-cannupa-hanska-luger-exhibition-details/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Exhibition details &amp; programs</a>
An ambitious and immersive exhibition, Dripping Earth: Cannupa Hanska Luger invites visitors on a journey into the acclaimed artist’s world, where time is nonlinear, scale is skewed, and cultural identity is fluid. The exhibition takes its title from Luger’s Hidatsa clan, the Awa xee (Dripping Dirt), who oversaw the repair of earth lodge dwellings. A trained ceramicist, Luger cites his application of clay as a natural extension of his lodge-building forebears’ labor and care for their communities. New work for the exhibition incorporates customary clay practices into a range of forms, from vessels to monumental sculptures. In using his hands to shape and transform wet earth, Luger connects with ancestors past, present, and future.
An important point of departure for Dripping Earth is The Joslyn’s renowned collection of watercolors, journals, and archives documenting the North American expedition (1832–34) of the German naturalist Prince Maximilian of Wied and the Swiss artist Karl Bodmer. Luger references depictions of his Mandan and Hidatsa ancestors in sculptures that combine materials sourced from the land with the detritus of consumer culture. Clay, willow branches, crocheted blankets, industrial-grade felt, and used sports equipment come together to tell new stories and disrupt expectations.
Presenting new work across media, this exhibition expands Luger’s speculative fiction series, Future Ancestral Technologies, an ongoing project spanning sculpture, printmaking, video, and performance that embraces the role of imagination in shaping cultural narratives. The artist draws inspiration from his ancestral connection to the Northern Plains, referencing the arts and technologies of past generations to envision a future rooted in Indigenous knowledge. Situating visitors within Missouri River landscapes now submerged by colonial damming projects, Luger reveals how such interventions continue to shape the land and its people.
Dripping Earth: Cannupa Hanska Luger is organized by the Margre H. Durham Center for Western Studies at the Joslyn Art Museum. It is accompanied by an exhibition catalogue featuring reflections by the artist, scholars, and knowledge bearers.
&nbsp;
<img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="" src="https://live-joslyn-wp.pantheonsite.io/app/uploads/2025/10/Updated-10-30-DE-Sponsors-scaled.png" width="420" height="458" />
&nbsp;
Pictured: Cannupa Hanska Luger (Mandan/Hidatsa/Arikara/Lakota, b. 1979), We Survive You—Midéegaadi, editorial photograph featuring seven mixed media bison regalia made of repurposed materials, © Cannupa Hanska Luger. Courtesy of the artist and Garth Greenan Gallery, New York. Photo by: Brandon Soder, 2023

Scott Pavillion S1–3
With this ambitious and immersive exhibition, Cannupa Hanska Luger draws inspiration from his ancestral connection to the Northern Plains in newly created ceramics, video projections, prints, and monumental sculpture. Luger’s playful and innovative approach invites visitors to envision a future where land, identity, and culture are reclaimed and transformed.

Dripping Earth: Cannupa Hanska Luger

Hawks Pavilion 
Media Gallery H6
Deploying an array of digital technologies, Paul Pfeiffer explores popular culture, including concerts, Hollywood films, and live sporting events. Red Green Blue stitches together audio and video recordings the artist made of the University of Georgia Redcoat Marching Band. Named for an image display system that responds to how the human eye perceives color, this immersive video installation layers sensory components to reproduce the experience of attending a college football game. Upending expectations, Pfeiffer shifts focus away from the competing teams to the student musicians, band conductors, and support staff who collaborate to execute such carefully-orchestrated performances.
Pfeiffer became interested in the location of the UGA stadium while teaching at the school from 2016 to 2019. Adjacent to the towering arena sits Oconee Hill Cemetery, a sprawling campus established in the mid-nineteenth century where those who died while enslaved are interred alongside Confederate soldiers. On gameday, the sounds of the pageantry within the stadium pierce the reverent silence of the cemetery. Pfeiffer highlights the startling juxtaposition of these two sites, while also subtly identifying a throughline from the origins of athletic competition in ancient Greece to bloody wars on American soil to legacies of violence enacted against communities of color. In Red Green Blue, the cemetery is both a repository of historical spectacle and an incidental witness to the contemporary spectacle playing out next door.
&nbsp;
<img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="" src="https://live-joslyn-wp.pantheonsite.io/app/uploads/2025/10/Pfieffer-Sponsorship-Website.png" width="464" height="130" />
&nbsp;
Pictured: Paul Pfeiffer (American, b. 1966), Red Green Blue, 2022, single channel video with surround sound, dimensions variable, running time: 31 minutes, 23 seconds. © Paul Pfeiffer. Courtesy Paula Cooper Gallery, New York.

Hawks Pavilion 
Media Gallery H6
Paul Pfeiffer is known for his inventive applications of digital technologies. Red Green Blue stitches together audio and video recordings the artist made of the University of Georgia Redcoat Marching Band. Named for an image display system that responds to how the human eye perceives color, this immersive video installation layers sensory components to reproduce the experience of attending a college football game.

Paul Pfeiffer: Red Green Blue

Hawks Pavilion 
Works on Paper Gallery H5
Lucas Samaras was already well known as a sculptor, painter, and performance artist when he began experimenting with photography in 1969. Driven by a desire to document and explore his own body, he used a Polaroid camera to create thousands of lush, idiosyncratic images that pushed the boundaries of both the photographic medium and the genre of self-portraiture. Featuring twenty-four works from The Joslyn’s collection, this exhibition celebrates the innovations and legacy of Samaras’s photography.
Lucas Samaras: Polaroids includes photographs from two iconic series. Between 1969 and 1971, Samaras used a Polaroid 360 camera to produce self-portraits he titled AutoPolaroids. Engaging a process he called “unconscious working,” the artist removed the protective film from the photos following their development and then applied colored ink to the surfaces of the prints to make vivid photo-works. In 1973, he purchased a Polaroid SX-70, a new model that boasted technological advancements in analog photography, while also allowing prints to retain the size and appearance typical of earlier processes. In the Photo-Transformations series, Samaras modified the photographs as they developed using swift, intuitive gestures, such as scraping, incising, and rubbing. By intervening in the development process, Samaras extended the formal possibilities of instant film to create fluid and fantastical images. Intimate, irreverent, and at times disconcerting, the Polaroid photographs of Samaras are some of the most original representations of the self in art history.
Pictured: Lucas Samaras (American, b. Greece, 1936–2024), AutoPolaroid, 1969–71, dye diffusion transfer print (Polaroid film), 2 7/8 × 3 3/4 in. (7.3 × 9.5 cm), Gift of the artist, 2024.6.1.3, © Lucas Samaras, Courtesy Pace Gallery

Hawks Pavilion 
Works on Paper Gallery H5
Driven by a desire to document and explore his own body, Lucas Samaras used a Polaroid camera to create lush, idiosyncratic, and personal images. Featuring twenty-four works gifted by the artist to The Joslyn, this exhibition celebrates the innovations and legacy of Samaras’s photography.

Lucas Samaras: Polaroids

Scott Pavilion 
Riley CAP Gallery S8
Using an industrial sewing machine and delicate polyester and nylon thread, Jessie Henson builds on the language of postwar American abstraction, while writing a new chapter in the long history of embroidery. Henson, who learned to embroider during her childhood in Cincinnati, Ohio, engages a labor-intensive and time-consuming process to repeatedly sew onto paper. As the thread accrues to form a dense, velvety coating, the paper can no longer sustain the surface tension, leading to warping, creasing, and tearing. Henson applies shimmering gold leaf to some of the works, encouraging light to dance across their surfaces, lending the already jewel-like objects an air of opulence. Her exhibition in the Riley CAP Gallery features several small bronze casts made from found embroideries that nod to her early interest in the possibilities of thread alongside a selection of sewn paper works in vibrant colors, including a new multi-component installation that transforms one wall of the gallery into an undulating topography.
Pictured: Jessie Henson (American, b. 1977), On the Line VI, 2024, polyester and rayon thread on paper, framed: 48 1/4 × 33 15/16 × 3 1/2 in. (122.6 × 86.4 × 8.9 cm), © Jessie Henson, Courtesy the artist and Broadway Gallery, New York

Scott Pavilion 
Riley CAP Gallery S8
Using an industrial sewing machine, Jessie Henson builds on the language of postwar American abstraction, while writing a new chapter in the long history of embroidery. Her Riley CAP Gallery exhibition features a selection of sewn paper works in vibrant colors, alongside several small bronze casts made from found embroideries that nod to her interest in the possibilities of thread.

Jessie Henson: Everything Comes Next

Scott Pavilion S1–3
At the turn of the twentieth century, the once highly technical, specialized process of photography transformed into a readily available and accessible medium, engaged by a growing number of practitioners towards documentary, commercial, and artistic ends. In the decades since, photographers have turned a lens to the United States and its people, bridging the nation’s vast and varied landscape with a visual record of communities, places, and historic events. Through the Lens presents a selection of more than fifty works from the Amon Carter Museum of American Art, demonstrating the aesthetic potential, documentary value, and social power of photography.
The exhibition encompasses a range of approaches and genres—including landscape, street photography, photojournalism, and portraiture—highlighting a range of images and artists that contributed to and challenged the construction of a national photographic tradition. Images of prominent national figures and decisive historical moments are featured alongside monumental landscapes by photographers such as Ansel Adams and Laura Gilpin, innovations in color by William Eggleston and Eliot Porter, candid documents of American life by Robert Frank and Gordon Parks, and idiosyncratic portraits by Deana Lawson and Alec Soth. Presented in the nation’s 250th year, Through the Lens features a plurality of perspectives across a century of images, illustrating the role of photography in shaping a collective vision of the United States and its histories.
Through the Lens: American Photographs from the Carter Collection is organized by the Amon Carter Museum of American Art.
Pictured: Laura Gilpin (American, 1891–1979), White Sands, 1945, gelatin silver print, 7 5/8 × 9 9/16 in. (42.6 × 50.2 cm), Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Fort Worth, Texas, Bequest of the artist, P1979.123.144, © 1979 Amon Carter Museum of American Art

Scott Pavilion S1–3
Turning a lens to the nation and its people, photographers across the vast and varied United States have created an expansive visual record of places, communities, and historical events. A thematic survey of American photography from 1920 to today, this exhibition celebrates the aesthetic potential, documentary value, and social power of the medium.

Through the Lens: American Photographs from the Carter Collection

Henry Payer: Appliqué sur le terrain

A black and white cat lounges comfortably on a person's lap. The person is wearing a yellow dress with white floral patterns, and their hands gently rest on the cat. The scene appears to be painted in a soft, realistic style.

Animals In Art

.

More to See

The Joslyn will close at 4 pm today (Thu, Feb 19) due to inclement weather.

Art, architecture, and a storied history make The Joslyn a premier event venue that your guests will talk about for years to come. Your vision, paired with our one-of-a-kind spaces, equals unforgettable moments. From large celebrations to intimate gatherings, social occasions to business meetings, there is no event quite like a Joslyn event. Explore your options and contact our events staff today to start planning.