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.
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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.
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Storywork: The Print 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.
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From the Mountain: Malcolm Davis and the Art of Shino
Malcolm Davis (1937–2011) was an internationally recognized ceramic artist who maintained a studio for more than 25 years in Upshur County, West Virginia. He discovered ceramics later in life and became a successful potter and teacher renowned for developing a Japanese-style glaze widely known as “Malcolm Davis Shino.”
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True Colors: Picturing Identity
rue Colors: Picturing Identity features selections from the New York collection of James Cottrell and Joseph Lovett exhibited for the very first time in West Virginia—including major works by Keith Haring, Deborah Kass, Robert Mapplethorpe, Cindy Sherman, and Andy Warhol, among others.
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Rauschenberg in China: The Lotus Series
Robert Rauschenberg (1925–2008) was a groundbreaking and influential American artist who worked in diverse mediums over a six-decade career, including painting, sculpture, photography, performance, and printmaking. This exhibition highlights Rauschenberg’s extended artistic interest in China, from photographs made during his first trip there 1982 to the final large-scale graphic works he completed shortly before his death: The Lotus Series.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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. Sally Saul has been making sculpture for 30 years. Her recent body of small brightly colored figurative ceramic works are carefully crafted to look quick and easy, and full of humor.
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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.
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My Hero!
My Hero! Contemporary Art & Superhero Action presents a collection of international artworks that explore iconic superhero imagery, along with reimagined interpretations of our classic heroes. The artists in the exhibition both pay homage to these universal idols, and also present critical questions about their popularity and God-like stature. Some artists in the exhibition spin the fantasy further by imagining the hero as a child, as an aging being and even as an animal.
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Flowing Beyond Heaven and Earth
“Flowing Beyond Heaven and Earth” opened at the Art Museum of West Virginia University in Morgantown on March 2, 2018. This exhibit examines the dynamic interplay between millennia of tradition and recent years of rapid innovation. Chinese artist and curator Xiaoping Luo writes, “In Chinese contemporary ceramics, twined streams of heritage and innovation flow together to form a mighty river.”
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20th Biennial West Virginia Juried Exhibition
The 20th biennial West Virginia Juried Exhibition opened at the Art Museum of West Virginia University in Morgantown on Sunday, Nov. 12, at 2 p.m. Eighty West Virginia artists were selected for the exhibit, which will feature 84 pieces, including painting, drawing, mixed media, craft, photography, digital art, sculpture and print. Twenty-eight counties are represented in the show.
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Shepard Fairey: "Work Against the Clampdown"
Shepard Fairey, a contemporary street artist, graphic designer, activist, illustrator and founder of OBEY Clothing, emerged from the skateboarding scene. Fairey attended the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD), where he first became known for his "Andre the Giant Has a Posse" (…OBEY…) sticker campaign, which appropriated images from the comedic supermarket tabloid Weekly World News.
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FABRICation
Inspired by a rich array of historical textiles from drapery to quilt. As such, the complex, multi-part works contrast our culture's rampant media consumption with the redemptive nuance of slow work wrought by hand. Individual works range from delicate illusions to layered constructions to architectural interventions.
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Studio Window: The Prints of Grace Martin Taylor
“Studio Window: The Prints of Grace Martin Taylor” in the Deem Print Gallery featured the complete collection of prints, including the important color woodblock prints, of West Virginia artist Grace Martin Taylor (1903-1995), one of America’s innovative printmakers of the 20th century.
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Independent Vision: Self-taught Artists from Appalachia
“Independent Vision: Self-Taught Artists from Appalachia” featured approximately 100 pieces of art from the Ramona Love Lampell and Millard Lampell Collection. The artists included sculptors, painters, wood carvers and basket makers who have drawn upon their life experiences, knowledge of the natural environment, and readily available materials, such as wood, clay, stone, house paint and found objects, to create their art.
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Visual Conversations: Looking and Listening
Connections were discovered among the works of art in "Visual Conversations: Looking and Listening," all from the museum’s collection. Curator Robert Bridges selected particular works for their individual expression and their dialogues with one another. The works sparked visual associations that transcended time and place, offering new possibilities and relationships.
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