Past

How does one experience a photograph that appears “unphotographic”? Focusing on the material and tactile properties of the medium, Direct Contact: Cameraless Photography Now is the first contemporary survey to examine cameraless photography across generations, cultures, and ideologies. Referred to as photograms or contact prints, cameraless photographs are made using analogue photography’s foundational elements: light, chemistry, and light-sensitive surfaces.

In the Setswana language spoken by artist Mohau Modisakeng's family, life is thought of as a passage and is called botshelo, which means “to cross over.” Humans are called bafeti (voyagers), a word that acknowledges the transience of the human experience. To reflect on South Africa's complex histories of colonialism and 20th-century Apartheid, the South African Department of Arts and Culture commissioned Mohau Modisakeng to make Passage for the South African pavilion of the 57th Venice Biennial in 2017.

At the museum, history is kept in the present while the works of living artists are collected to look toward the future. Museums show how human history ebbs and flows like the tide, with current events washing over and echoing moments from the past. All the artists represented in Currents are people of color, women-identifying, or queer—identities that historically have been underrepresented in museum collections, including those of the Eskenazi Museum. Each of these newly acquired works supports the museum’s teaching and research mission.

Positive Fragmentation: From the Collections of the Jordan D. Schnitzer and His Family Foundation will feature more than 180 prints by contemporary women artists who employ a strategy of fragmentation in their artistic process. Derived from the Collections of Jordan D. Schnitzer and His Family Foundation—one of the largest private print collections in the world—the exhibition is presented by the National Museum of Women in the Arts (NWMA) in partnership with the American University Art Museum.

Saitō Kiyoshi's (1907-1997) keen sense of design, superb technique and engagement with an appealing variety of themes made him one of the best known and most popular Japanese print artists of the twentieth century. This exhibition will focus on prints Saitō created in the 1950s and '60s, arguably the most vibrant period of his career, and includes several rare, early designs.

Stuart Davis’s 1938 mural Swing Landscape, a work familiar to many EMA visitors, is considered one of the most important American paintings of the twentieth century.

The focus exhibition illuminates how international exchange fostered the development of modernist art in the United States in the first half of the twentieth century.

Drawing on the collections of both the Eskenazi Museum of Art and the Lilly Library, this exhibition is the first-ever to survey the university's impressive holdings by this important and perennially popular Old Master.

This student-curated focus exhibition, developed during a spring 2021 ASURE course, explores the history of ancient Roman fashion.