CURRENT EXHIBITIONS

September 5, 2020 - February 7, 2021

The ancient Andean civilizations of South America were strikingly diverse in their religious beliefs and material cultures, but each developed complex ceramics for both domestic and ritual use. This exhibition features key pieces from the Museum’s collection, including several recent acquisitions from the Nazca, Paracas, Moche, Chimú, and Chavin cultures.

Coordinated by ARISE, a non-profit agency based in Syracuse, UNIQUE celebrates the artistic talents of Central New Yorkers living with disabilities. The works included in this exhibition eloquently speak to the myriad thoughts, ideas, and feelings that all humans share, regardless of individual ability or circumstance. The annual competition invites submissions of art and literature which are then selected for display by a panel of judges, and the works are exhibited in several venues throughout CNY.

Since acquiring its first works by Adelaide Alsop Robineau in 1916, the Everson Museum of Art has built one of the finest collections of art pottery in the world. Renegades and Reformers revolves around two common personality types among potters: the “renegades” who embarked on highly personal artistic quests that pushed clay and glaze to their limits, and the “reformers,” whose modern designs and social attitudes pushed back against Victorian mores.

In 1911, the Syracuse Museum of Fine Arts (known today as the Everson) made history as the first museum in the country to declare that it would focus on collecting works made by American artists. This decision, implemented by Museum Director Fernando Carter, was the first of many made by directors that ultimately defined the Everson’s collection as it exists today. This exhibition examines over one hundred years of the Museum’s collecting priorities, from the Museum’s earliest acquisitions in 1911 to work acquired in 2019.

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.