CURRENT EXHIBITIONS

Dating back to the Ceramic National exhibitions, which began in 1932, the Everson has a rich history of supporting artists who explore the figure. Artists like Viktor Schreckengost, Edris Eckhardt, and Waylande Gregory routinely received awards and critical acclaim for their work. Key Figures examines the larger-than-life artists who shaped an art movement, and features select works from a new generation of artists who are building on this legacy by using the figure to explore identity, narrative, and allegory.

Founded in 1875, the Social Art Club is a women’s club dedicated to the study of art in a group setting. The Club has an extensive history of supporting the Everson, including financial support for the acquisition of some of the Museum’s most iconic pieces, such as Adrian Saxe’s Untitled vessel from 1980, which graces the cover of the Museum’s American Ceramics catalog. Over the past decade, the Social Art Club’s gifts have strengthened the Everson’s connections to Central New York through donations of work by indigenous and regional artists.

The youngest of eight children, Eddie Dominguez grew up in Tucumcari, New Mexico, between Albuquerque and Amarillo on historic Route 66. He came to national prominence in the mid–1980s for highly stylized dinnerware sets that also stack into sculptural forms. In his work, Dominguez frequently references his home state’s vegetation, landforms, weather, and Hispano–Catholic culture. The dual nature of Dominguez’s objects, which inhabit the gray area between utility and art for art’s sake, reflects his personal experience as a New Mexican who studied ceramics in the Anglo– dominated East: whether we see “art” or “craft,” local Hispano or melting pot American depends completely on the immediate context.

This exhibition is curated by the Everson Teen Arts Council, a group of high school students from Onondaga County, using the Museum’s collection as inspiration for this exhibition. Teen Council members collaborated to choose a theme, select works from the Museum’s collection, write wall text, and design the layout. This exploration provided Council members with insight into how museum exhibitions come to life.

In the 1980s, Juan Cruz began investigating his past as a method to understand where the tribal and the modern world collide. Born in Puerto Rico, Cruz briefly attended the Art Students League in 1975 and in 1995 he graduated from Syracuse University’s School of Visual and Performing Arts. This career-spanning exhibition focuses on Cruz’s work as a painter, sculptor, muralist, and community activist.

Time Returns: A Continuous Now presents a cross section of photographs that span the early twentieth century through 2019. In our current moment of peaked social activism and political engagement, the exhibition suggests new connections among seemingly disparate topics such as the horrors of war, the impact of the Anthropocene, shifting identities, and the necessity of intimacy. Time Returns: A Continuous Now features work rife with immediacy by artists living through tumultuous times that reevaluate societal divisions and reinforce the relevance and power of photography today. Co-curated by artist Judy Natal and the Everson’s Curator of Art & Programs DJ Hellerman, the exhibition is assembled from the collections of the Everson Museum and Light Work.

Showcasing the depth of the Everson’s collection, Highlights from the Permanent Collection presents 150 years of American art, from early nineteenth century portraiture to the Pop Art of the 1960s. This exhibition features many visitor favorites, including work by Albert Bierstadt, Eastman Johnson, Lee Krasner, Grandma Moses, Jackson Pollock, and Gilbert Stuart.

In celebration of the Everson’s 50th anniversary, the museum commissioned Thomas Spoerndle to create a site-specific wall drawing. Spoerndle was selected because of his interest in scale, geometric abstraction, and the ways his work creates a dialogue with artworks in the Museum’s Collection as well as architect I.M. Pei’s museum design.

In celebration of the Everson’s 50th anniversary, the Museum commissioned Elliott Katz to create site-specific installations for the spaces that architect I.M. Pei designed as planters. Katz was selected for the commission because of how his work engages with the significance of materials and questions how we form relationships to those materials, as well as his interest in contrasting the Modernist belief in controlling nature against the Wabi sabi belief in the fundamental uncontrollability of nature. Using natural and synthetic materials, photography, scale, and illusion, Katz’s serious and playful installations transform familiar objects into curious mysteries that defy simple categorization and ignite our imagination.

The Everson’s commitment to video art began in 1971 with the launch of one of the first exhibition programs in the country to feature the work of video artists, and today the Everson’s historic video art collection contains over 400 tapes. Over the last several years, the Museum has worked to conserve and digitize a significant portion of the collection and this exhibition features a number of the newly digitized works.