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Exhibitions

Upcoming Exhibitions

The Art Museum of WVU is closed during the summer, and will reopen in August. More information about upcoming exhibitions will be available soon. The Nath Sculpture Garden is accessible year-round, and an audio tour is available.

Take the Nath Sculpture Garden Audio Tour

Past Exhibitions

Radiant Pages: The Art of the Book

This exhibition invites visitors to explore how a book can “radiate” beyond the page to the wider world. How do books work? What is their impact, both on individuals and the broader society? How have our answers to these questions changed over time, and what is yet to come?

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Thirty: Celebrating 30 Years of the Deem Distinguished Lecture Series

This exhibition honors the 30-year legacy of support by Alison and Patrick Deem to the School of Art & Design at West Virginia University for an annual lecture by an outstanding guest artist. Since 1995, the Deem Distinguished Lecture has brought artists and arts professionals of international reputation to campus including three MacArthur Foundation “genius” awardees. This exhibition highlights some of those artists work which highlights the quality and diversity of this lecture series.

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Screams and Whispers: Karin Broker and Patricia Bellan-Gillen

This two-person exhibition of recent drawings and sculptures created by Pittsburgh artist Patricia Bellan-Gillen and Texas artist Karin Broker, is inspired by the creative dialog the artists have engaged in for years. Both artists are known for carefully crafted, elaborate artworks that suggest narratives influenced equally by traditional myths and contemporary society. The surrealist tendency in their artmaking is also heavily imbued with feminist themes.

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Mapping Climate Change: The Knitting Map and The Tempestry Project

This installation features two innovative textile art projects that give visual and tangible presence to our warming world at a crucial moment of environmental precariousness. By translating temperature, precipitation, humidity, or windspeed data into stitch and color, these vibrant works potently and poignantly reveal the centrality of weather to notions of identity and experiences of place, and thus “map” a range of encounters from environmental to phenomenological. 

Read More: Mapping Climate Change: The Knitting Map and The Tempestry Project

Our Votes, Our Values

One of the most powerful ways you can take an active role in politics is by voting. Your votes reveal your values - what you consider to be most important in your life and in the lives of people in your community. This exhibition is organized around ongoing national conversations that explore connections between the values we maintain and how those values influence our voting.

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Off Kilter, On Point: Art of the 1960s

Off Kilter, On Point: Art of the 1960s from Colorado State University highlights the breadth and depth of mid-century artworks in the permanent collection of the Gregory Allicar Museum of Art at Colorado State University. The exhibition showcases a wide range of media and styles, from abstraction to pop art, and presents novel juxtapositions that reflect the tumult and innovations of their time, exhibiting most of the major stylistic trends in art of the 1960s in the U.S. and Europe.

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Nina Chanel Abney

The Art Museum of WVU presents a solo exhibition by Nina Chanel Abney (b. 1982), an artist whose bold, colorful works on paper draw inspiration from current events and invite viewers into timely conversations.

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In Concert: Photography and the Violin

For nearly the entire history of the medium, violins have appeared in photographs in ways that signify talent, status, geography, and culture – and have often been presented as beautiful objects unto themselves. This exhibition, featuring 250 original photographs, spans a period of more than 175 years from the 1840s to today, and includes examples of nearly every photographic process.

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In/Humanity: Combat and War in Art

War and combat are inextricably part of the human experience, and art helps us make sense of the ways such conflict brings out the worst—and sometimes the best—in us. This exhibition, in conjunction with the WVU class “The Holocaust in East European Literature and Film,” brings together objects in the Art Museum’s collection for viewers to consider how creative expression in any medium helps us to both understand and reckon the violence of war and combat that permeates our world.

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Interior Lives/Deep Focus: Reflections on "Interior Chinatown: A Novel"

This off-site exhibition explores themes related to the 2022-23 Campus Read common reading experience, Interior Chinatown: A Novel by Charles Yu. It features several objects from the collection of the Art Museum of WVU that explore how visual artists have chosen to express diverse aspects of both personal and collective identities.

Read More: Interior Lives/Deep Focus: Reflections on "Interior Chinatown: A Novel"

Storywork: The Prints of Marie Watt

Marie Watt (Seneca, b. 1967) is one of the country’s most celebrated contemporary artists, whose work draws on personal experience, indigenous traditions, proto-feminism, mythology, and art history. Drawing on the collections of Jordan D. Schnitzer and his family foundation, Storywork is a comprehensive look at Watt’s 30-year career, including more than 60 original prints and sculptural works.

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Water Between Us: Art and Campus Read

This off-site exhibition explores themes related to the 2021-22 Campus Read common reading experience, The Line Becomes a River: Dispatches from the Border by Francisco Cantú. It features several photographs of Mexico and its people from the 1930s by American photographer Paul Strand alongside a series of lithographs that look at borders, boundaries, and the social and political implications of mapping and identity.

Read More: Water Between Us: Art and Campus Read