In conjunction with Walker Evans American Photographs, on display in the Upper Gallery, the Art Museum is featuring the work of four contemporary photographers in an adjacent gallery installation. Matt Eich, Mitch Epstein, Andrea Modica, and Jared Thorne each make pictures that resonate with Walker Evans’s photographs in distinctive ways, both visually and conceptually—and sometimes unexpectedly. Together they demonstrate how Evans’s work continues to influence artists today, nearly a century after he first visited the region.
Walker Evans American Photographs
The Art Museum of WVU is the first venue on a national tour of an installation that
celebrates photographer Walker Evans’s landmark solo exhibition at New York’s
Museum of Modern Art in 1938.
Personal to Political: Celebrating the African American Artists of Paulson Fontaine Press
There is no singular way to look at the complexities of race and representation
in contemporary art. Drawing on the diverse practices of several African
American artists from across the US, this exhibition features more than 50
prints, paintings, quilts, and sculptural objects.
Brilliant: Recent Acquisitions to the Permanent Collection
“Brilliant” celebrates acquisitions made by the Art Museum of WVU over the past several
years and includes a number of rarely seen treasures from its permanent collection—many
exhibited for the first time. Together, the works in this exhibition exemplify
art of the present and recent past, as expressed by artists that seek intelligence
and intensity in the objects they create.
Learn more: Brilliant: Recent Acquisitions to the Permanent Collection
Modern Movement: Figurative Works by Arthur Bowen Davies
On loan from the Maier Museum of Art, this exhibition features rarely exhibited works on paper and oil paintings, including Arthur B. Davies Figurative Works on Paper from the Randolph College and Mac Cosgrove-Davies Collections and Arthur B. Davies Paintings from the Randolph College Collection.
Learn more: Modern Movement: Figurative Works by Arthur Bowen Davies
Collective Insight: The Harvey and Jennifer Peyton Collection
Harvey and Jennifer Peyton have assembled one of the premier collections of art in West Virginia. It is significant for being both regional and national in scope, and for representing a diversity of American artists—including a number who were committed to advancing social justice through their artistic pursuits.
Learn more: Collective Insight: The Harvey and Jennifer Peyton Collection
Cut Up/Cut Out
Cut Up/Cut Out celebrates the tradition, innovation, and surprising beauty of decorative piercing and cutting as practiced by contemporary artists today. The transformative nature of cutting into and through a surface provides endless possibilities for converting a material from opaque to transparent, from flat to sculptural, from rigid to delicate, and from ordinary to exquisite.
William Kentridge: Universal Archive
Internationally acclaimed South African artist William Kentridge has produced a vast body of interrelated work in drawing, printmaking, sculpture, film, theatre, opera, and puppetry. This exhibition presents more than 75 original linocuts from an ongoing series the artist began in 2012. Featuring a repertoire of images frequently used by Kentridge across media—trees, coffee pots, cats, typewriters, birds, horses, self-portraits— Universal Archive explores how the interplay of text and images serves as a metaphor for the interaction between rational and creative processes.
Paintings and Sculptures by Sally and Peter Saul
Peter Saul has been a practicing artist for more than 50 years. His paintings engage
the viewer with a riot of color and images that seem to be a strange hybrid of
Surrealism, Pop Art and political cartoons mixed with a Mad Magazine sensibility.
His work is both beautiful and repelling as it reflects upon our political and
social environment.
Learn more: Paintings and Sculptures by Sally and Peter Saul
Impulse: A Trip Inside
Human beings have an innate need to create. Artists express their creative impulses through a variety of forms and media. Whether it is a Yoruba carver from Nigeria fashioning a wooden figure as a memorial to twins who have died, or Thad Mosley, a contemporary sculptor from Pittsburgh using those same carving techniques to create abstract modernist forms, both seek to visually communicate their thoughts and feelings with the world.