Upcoming Exhibitions
June 1–September 1, 2019
Cauleen Smith: Give It or Leave It
Through her films, objects, and installations, Los Angeles-based artist Cauleen Smith envisions a world that is black, feminist, spiritual, and unabashedly alive. With Give It or Leave It Smith proposes a new rule for a better world: creating something, offering it, and gifting it—regardless if the gesture is accepted or rejected.
June 1–September 1, 2019
Jane Wong: After Preparing the Altar, the Ghosts Feast Feverishly
Jane Wong’s poems and essays unearth silenced histories, immigrant narratives, and intergenerational trauma. For her first museum solo exhibition, Wong draws inspiration from her upbringing in a Chinese American restaurant as well as her family’s experience of hunger and poverty in rural China to consider the ways we reconcile the gaps in our lives and histories.
June 15–September 29, 2019
End of Day: American Oil Painting Around 1900
End of Day presents a selection of portrait and landscape paintings by American artists from the Frye Art Museum’s permanent collection. Spanning the period between the Civil War and First World War, the images oscillate between an embrace of progress and a sense of nostalgia for what was perceived to be a simpler American era.
June 15–December 8, 2019
Recent Acquisitions: Toyin Ojih Odutola
Toyin Ojih Odutola’s drawings, paintings, and prints question physical and sociopolitical identities as they pertain to skin color. This suite of three lithographs, recently acquired for the Frye Art Museum’s collection, demonstrates Odutola’s signature approach to portraiture, in which the sitter is seen obliquely or from multiple, unusual angles within one composition.
June 22–December 8, 2019
Storytelling Through Animation
A Partnership for Youth exhibition, Storytelling Through Animation showcases the results of an eight-week workshop for teens led by teaching artists from Reel Grrls, during which students develop, animate, and edit their own stop-motion film projects.
September 21, 2019–January 5, 2020
Pierre Leguillon: Arbus Bonus
Pierre Leguillon’s artwork-as-exhibition Arbus Bonus calls attention to the major role famed twentieth-century photographer Diane Arbus’s work has played in defining the image of American postwar popular culture. Bringing together every published magazine spread that features her photography, Leguillon’s project considers the ways in which cultural histories are assembled and disseminated, and proposes more inclusive counter-narratives.
September 21, 2019–August 23, 2020
Unsettling Femininity: Selections from the Frye Art Museum Collection
Bringing together varied depictions of women from the Frye Art Museum’s collection, Unsettling Femininity examines historical conventions of representation during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and the deeply entrenched beliefs and power structures they reflect.
September 21, 2019–January 5, 2020
Dress Codes: Ellen Lesperance and Diane Simpson
Dress Codes brings together the work of two contemporary artists who perform acts of translation in relation to clothing’s form and ornamentation. Pressing images of historical garments—and the values encoded within them—through the interpretive interface of the grid, Ellen Lesperance and Diane Simpson connect the everyday language of dress to wide-ranging cultural and political histories.
October 12, 2019–January 26, 2020
Donald Byrd: The America That Is To Be
For four decades, choreographer Donald Byrd has created innovative and startling productions that explore the capacities of dancers’ bodies, the complexities of Africanist aesthetics, and the ways theatrical dance can open audiences to social change. Presenting selected works from across his career, the exhibition reflects Americans’ ongoing struggles to care for our complex diversity.
May 9–August 2, 2020
Black Refractions: Highlights from The Studio Museum in Harlem
With works in all media by nearly eighty artists, Black Refractions celebrates The Studio Museum in Harlem’s role as a site for the dynamic exchange of ideas about art and society. Organized by the American Federation of Arts and The Studio Museum in Harlem, this landmark exhibition proposes a plurality of narratives of black artistic production and multiple approaches to understanding the Studio Museum’s powerful collection.