Left: Allison Janae Hamilton (American, born 1984), All the Stars Appointed to Their Places (detail), 2021, archival pigment print, framed: 40 7/8 x 60 7/8 in.,
© Allison Janae Hamilton, Courtesy the artist and Marianne Boesky Gallery, New York and Aspen

Working across media, Allison Janae Hamilton (American, born 1984) brings together place-based folklore and personal family anecdotes to create mythologies that address the changing social and physical landscapes of the American South. Her exhibition will be a compact, midcareer survey comprising work that responds to her home region of North Florida.

Left: Yuyi Morales, "Someday we will become something we haven't even imagined" (detail) from Dreamers, 2018, digital print, © Yuyi Morales

This exhibition features over 60 artworks from 14 picture books by award-winning author-illustrator Yuyi Morales, including paintings and digital prints (capturing the artist’s handmade puppets and “scenery”) from the Caldecott Honor book Viva Frida and Dreamers, Morales’s own immigration story and tribute to the transformative power of hope and reading.

A Mind’s Eye Gallery exhibition. Organized by the National Center for Children’s Illustrated Literature (Abilene, TX).

Left: Joshua Reynolds (British, 1723–1792), Portrait of Miss Franks, 1766, oil on canvas, 30 ¼ x 25 ¼ in., Gift of Mrs. Sarah Joslyn, 1934.42. Photograph © Bruce M. White, 2019.

Sir Joshua Reynold’s portrait of a young woman was first exhibited at the Museum in 1931, on loan from founder Sarah Joslyn. She gifted the painting to the Joslyn Memorial in 1934.

Featuring a graphic timeline, highlights from across the permanent collection, and architectural renderings, Ninety Years of Joslyn Art Museum brings to life the remarkable stories of the formation and evolution of the Museum as it celebrates its 90th anniversary.

   

Left: Karl Bodmer (Swiss, 1809–1893), Péhriska-Rúhpa, Hidatsa Man, 1834, watercolor and graphite on paper, 17 1/8 x 11 15/16 inches. Joslyn Art Museum, Gift of the Enron Art Foundation, 1986.49.275. Photograph © Bruce M. White, 2019.

Faces from the Interior is the first Museum project to focus exclusively on Karl Bodmer’s watercolor portraits of Native Americans. The exhibition features over sixty recently conserved watercolors, drawn entirely from Joslyn Art Museum’s renowned Maximilian-Bodmer collection. This includes portraits of individuals from Omaha, Yankton, Lakota, Mandan, Hidatsa, Assiniboine, and Blackfoot tribes, among many Native communities encountered by Maximilian and Bodmer during their travels along the Missouri River from Saint Louis to Fort McKenzie, in present-day Montana.

Organized by the Margre H. Durham Center for Western Studies, Joslyn Art Museum, in association with The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Left: Guy Goldstein (Israeli, born 1974), Der Sekundenmacher, 2020, single-channel video, Duration: 10 min. 21 sec., Courtesy the artist, © Guy Goldstein

Guy Goldstein maintains a hybrid practice as a multimedia artist and musician. Exploring the shifting relationship between sound and image, Goldstein considers how sonic and visual experiences overlap and inform one another.

A Karen and Doug Riley Contemporary Artists Project (CAP) Gallery exhibition.

Exhibition Sponsor:

Left: Paul T. Frankl, designer (American, born Austria, 1887–1958), Warren Telechron Company, manufacturer (Ashland, Massachusetts, 1926–1992), Modernique Clock, 1928, chromium-plated and enameled metal, molded Bakelite, brush-burnished silver, Collection Kirkland Museum of Fine & Decorative Art, Denver, Gift of Michael Merson, 2010.0670. Courtesy of Kirkland Museum of Fine & Decorative Art, Denver. Photo by Wes Magyar.

American Art Deco: Designing for the People, 1918–1939 investigates a dynamic period in American history and culture when the country and its citizens went through political, economic, social, and artistic transformation and revolution. From stylish decorative art objects to products of industrial design, modern American paintings to compelling photographic images, the multi-media works of art in this exhibition reflect both the glamour and optimism of the 1920s and the devastation and escapism of the 1930s.

Organized by Joslyn Art Museum and The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, MO.

 

Left: Diedrick Brackens (American, born 1989), grief has no gills, 2020, woven cotton and acrylic yarn, 81 x 79 in., © Diedrick Brackens. Courtesy the artist and Various Small Fires, Los Angeles/Seoul

Drawing on textile and weaving traditions from across the Americas, Africa, and Europe, Diedrick Brackens creates intricate tapestries that interrogate personal stories and shared cultural experiences. Formally rooted in postwar American art movements, Brackens’ compositions fuse the language of abstraction with narrative-driven figuration.

A Karen and Doug Riley Contemporary Artists Project (CAP) Gallery exhibition.

Left: Wendy Red Star (Apsáalooke, born 1981), The Indian Congress, 2021, mixed media installation.

Wendy Red Star (Apsáalooke, born 1981) works across media to explore the intersections of Native American ideologies and colonialist structures, both historically and in contemporary society. Her installations and photographic practice build upon years of research in photographic archives and museum collections of historical Apsáalooke artwork.

A Karen and Doug Riley Contemporary Artists Project (CAP) Gallery exhibition.

Left: George Henry Durrie (American, 1820–1863) Winter in the Country.
A Cold Morning, 1864, lithograph, Gift of Conagra Brands, 2016.20.417

In 2016, ConAgra Foods, Inc. (now Conagra Brands) donated nearly 600 Currier & Ives lithographs to Joslyn Art Museum. Revisiting America: The Prints of Currier & Ives sheds new light on the famous firm’s artistic and commercial practices, revealing the complex social relationships and surprising modernity of its lavish prints, which found their way into the homes of tens of thousands of Americans in the nineteenth century.

This exhibition will have a ticket fee. $10 general public adults; $5 college students with ID; free for Joslyn members and youth ages 17 and younger.

Left: Tuan Andrew Nguyen (Vietnamese, b. 1976), The Boat People, 2020, single-channel video, 4k, Super 16mm transferred to digital, color, 5.1 surround sound, 20 mins. Co-produced by Bellas Artes Projects and James Cohan, New York. © Tuan Andrew Nguyen 2020. Image courtesy the artist and James Cohan, New York.

A masterful storyteller, Tuan Andrew Nguyen (Vietnamese, b. 1976) weaves together historical narratives with supernatural elements in his sculptures and videos. A Karen and Doug Riley Contemporary Artists Project (CAP) Gallery exhibition.

This exhibition is free. Timed tickets are required for all Museum visitors. Make your free reservation today.

Left: Decisions, digital photography, Sarah Al-Hilfy Leon, Lincoln Southeast High School (Lincoln, NE), grade 12

This national traveling exhibition of the Scholastic Art & Writing Awards showcases exceptional drawing, painting, photography, sculpture, video, and works of writing, created by teens from all across the country. A Mind’s Eye Gallery exhibition.

Left: John Divola (American, born 1949), On the Occasion of My 60th Birthday, 2009, archival pigment print, 59 3/4 x 96 7/8 in., Museum purchase with funds from the James Art Acquisition Fund, 2017.4

Photography met the twenty-first century in a precarious position – more ubiquitous than at any point in its history, yet fundamentally less believable. Ranging from images exposed on film and printed in a darkroom to compositions constructed from multiple digital captures, these photographs subvert our assumptions about their subjects in surprising ways.

Left: Amy Cutler, Clementine, 2018, graphite on paper, 30 x 22 in, © Amy Cutler, Courtesy Leslie Tonkonow Artworks + Projects

In Amy Cutler’s drawings, uncanny and often impossible scenarios unfold in stunning detail. A skilled draughtsman, Cutler calls upon transformative personal life experiences to process the collision of the inner psyche and the outside world. A Riley CAP Gallery exhibition.

Left: Psalms Frontispiece, Donald Jackson, © 2004, The Saint John’s Bible, Saint John’s University, Collegeville, Minnesota, USA.

Featuring the first handwritten illuminated Bible commissioned by a Benedictine Monastery since the fifteenth century, The Saint John’s Bible incorporates contemporary imagery and events to connect traditional medieval craftsmanship with the twenty-first century.

This exhibition will have a ticket fee. $10 general public adults; $5 college students with ID; free for Joslyn members and youth ages 17 and younger.

Left: Paul Anthony Smith (Jamaican, born 1988), Untitled, 7 Women, 2019, unique picotage on inkjet print, colored pencil, spray paint on museum board, 40 x 50 in., © Paul Anthony Smith. Image courtesy the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York.

Drawing on the art historical traditions of Pointilism and Geometric Abstraction, Paul Anthony Smith creates "picotages," named for a pattern printing technique that entails pressing textured blocks onto fabric. Trained in ceramics, Smith uses sharp, wooden tools to stipple the surfaces of photographs he has taken in New York City and Jamaica that examine the African and Caribbean diasporas. Having emigrated to the United States from his native Jamaica, Smith has long been captivated by the concept of hybrid identity–often experienced acutely by those who have migrated across borders–while mining the fraught intersections of place, memory, and dislocation. By incising his images, Smith references several cultural traditions, including African tribal masking and scarification, in which the skin is cut, leaving indelible patterns on the body. Just as these practices alter appearances, Smith's interventions complicate the surfaces of his photographs and, at times, even completely obscure portions of the images, calling into question their authority as representations of "truth." A Riley CAP Gallery exhibition.

Left: "Then one night the quilt was done." from Sweet Clara and the Freedom Quilt, 1993, oil on paper, © James E. Ransome

This exhibition includes picture book illustrations celebrating inspiring stories of unknown characters, as well as individuals who made history, like Sojourner Truth, Frederick Douglass, and Louis Armstrong. A Mind’s Eye Gallery exhibition.

Left: Designed and Manufactured by Vivian Beer (b. 1977), Penland, NC, Current, 2004; Photo by Douglas J. Eng

Pulling this familiar everyday object out from under the desk and dining table, The Art of Seating: 200 Years of American Design surprises us with the imaginative style and creativity found in this seemingly humble piece of furniture.

This exhibition will have a ticket fee. $10 general public adults; $5 college students with ID (tickets for those with a UNMC student ID are free; free weekend for all college students: Auust 24 and 25); free for Joslyn members and youth ages 17 and younger.

Jay Heikes’ diverse practice engages a range of traditional media, including graphite, oil paint, and bronze, as well as found materials, such as dirt, rocks, and sheet music. Often conceiving strange or unexpected pairings of these and other materials, Heikes questions the relationships among the substances that make up the universe, an inquiry that stems from his lifelong interest in the natural sciences. A Riley CAP Gallery exhibition.

See work by Garth Williams (1912-1996), illustrator of dozens of children’s classics, including E.B. White’s Charlotte’s Web and Stuart Little, Laura Ingalls Wilder’s The Little House series, and many Golden Books. A Mind’s Eye Gallery exhibition.

Left: Rashid Johnson (b. 1977, Chicago, IL), The New Negro Escapist Social and Athletic Club (Thurgood), 2008, Lambda print, 65 x 55 1/2 in., Courtesy of the Rubell Family Collection, Miami. Photo by Chi Lam.

This exhibition brings together over 60 works by contemporary African American artists focusing on important issues of racial, gender, and sexual identity; ongoing narratives of racial inequality in the United States; poverty; racial stereotyping; and the power of protest. Through painting, photography, works on paper, sculpture, installation, and video, these nationally and internationally recognized black artists offer a challenging account of race in the United States and how our shared history continues to shape the ways we interact and engage with our fellow citizens today.

This exhibition will have a ticket fee. $10 general public adults; $5 college students with ID (tickets for those with a UNMC student ID are free); free for Joslyn members and youth ages 17 and younger. Free First Weekends (30 Americans admission is free to all the first weekend of each month).

Left: Fred Tomaselli (American, b. 1956), Oct. 12, 2018, 2018, gouache, collage, and archival inkjet print on watercolor paper, 11 5/8 x 12 3/4 in., © Fred Tomaselli. Image Courtesy of James Cohan, New York.

Fred Tomaselli’s newspaper paintings transform front pages of The New York Times into lively abstractions. Featuring complex patterns, these compositions ponder the absurdity of news cycles and allow Tomaselli to respond to a range of important contemporary issues. A Riley CAP Gallery exhibition.

Left: Cover for The Day the Crayons Quit, 2013, mixed media, gouache, crayon, and pencil on watercolor paper, © Oliver Jeffers

This exhibition chronicles Oliver Jeffers’ development and success as a children’s book artist, including illustrations from The Day the Crayons Quit and The Day the Crayons Came Home, both The New York Times #1 Best Sellers. A Mind’s Eye Gallery exhibition.

Celebrate the 150th anniversary of the “Meeting of the Rails” at Promontory Summit, Utah in 1869 through photographs and stereographs of Andrew Joseph Russell and Alfred A. Hart. Organized with the Union Pacific Railroad Museum, this exhibition traces the construction of the transcontinental railroad across the American West.

Left: Richard Mosse. Photo by Bjoern Behrens, courtesy the artist.

Through a conceptual approach to documentary photography, Richard Mosse (Irish, b. 1980) studies localized conflicts that have broad social, political, and humanitarian implications. His most well-known work employs photographic methods or materials originally developed for the military, such as reconnaissance infrared film. Joslyn’s exhibition will feature a selection of works from Mosse’s recent series, The Castle, which chronicles the refugee crisis that has gripped Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa over the last several years. The Castle documents refugee camps and staging sites using a powerful telephoto military-grade camera that can detect thermal radiation, including body heat, at a great distance. Mosse uses the camera against its intended purpose of border and combat surveillance to map landscapes of human displacement. Reading heat as both metaphor and index, these images reveal the migrants’ struggle for survival that is witnessed, yet still ignored by many. A Riley CAP Gallery exhibition.