Past

This survey of John Mellencamp's artwork includes large-scale oil portraits and multi-media pieces that document the heart and soul of America with a rich sense of narrative. Mellencamp's carefully composed works demonstrate harmony, rhythm, and order with the smalltown earnest voice of the heartland where he grew up and continues to call home.

Terry Winters, distinguished American artist known for his abstract paintings and works on paper, has been making prints for over forty years. This exhibition examines his printed work since 2000, a technically innovative period during which he introduced, in addition to his editioned prints, artist’s books and monoprints. Winters explores the tensions between our rational understandings of the world and its ineffable nature. He imbues his art with philosophical, scientific, and spiritual meanings that extend it beyond pure abstract form.

This focus exhibition presents four paintings by Jewish American expressionist artist Jennings Tofel (1891–1959) from the Eskenazi Museum of Art’s permanent collection. Tofel drew upon Jewish mystical and biblical themes to convey his personal spirituality and articulate his horror at the Holocaust.

Hungarian-born video artist and photographer Adam Magyar has studied the relationship between time and moving images extensively. Fixing a camera inconspicuously in public spaces throughout his worldwide travels, Magyar captured hours of human foot traffic, layering the video recordings upon each other and replacing the urban cacophony with a solemn, meditative soundtrack. The resulting images depict the ghostly traces of dense human presence in otherwise still environments, shifting the focus to the spaces that remain stable as life passes by.

Saul Steinberg (American, 1914–1999) brought a modernist aesthetic and cosmopolitan sophistication to his gallery art and commercial work—including eighty-five covers and more than twelve hundred internal drawings for The New Yorker magazine—endearing him to many artists, writers, and popular audiences of his era. As Steinberg said, “The purpose of drawing is to make people feel that there is something else beyond the perception. That is essentially what I am playing with—the voyage between perception and understanding.”

The career of painter Judith Rothschild (1921–1993) spanned the breadth of the twentieth century. 

This exhibition explores the dynamics of weaving, as it encourages viewers to consider links between the rhythms of production and cloth patterns made during the twentieth century. Featuring cloths from Ghana, Nigeria, and Ivory Coast, Rhythms also addresses resonances across cultures from the spread of loom technology in West Africa. All textiles displayed in this exhibition are loans from William M. Itter, Professor Emeritus at Indiana University, who taught in the IU School of Fine Arts for more than three decades.

Featuring approximately one hundred works, this retrospective exhibition covers Wolin’s entire career with key selections from all ten of his major series, including his earliest landscapes and portraits of stonecutters, Holocaust survivors, war veterans, and people experiencing homelessness.

This focus exhibition explores the transmission of knowledge through the textile legacies of Central and South America to show the powerful role of cloth to transfer cultural wisdom across generations. The historical legacies of these textiles testify to the contemporary vitality and resilience of the communities they originate from in Central and South America.

Drawn from the collections of the Eskenazi Museum of Art, this exhibition examines how artists have leveraged the challenges and possibilities of the watercolor medium over two centuries.