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 examines the intersection of public-facing art and political propaganda during the reign of Roman Emperor Septimus Severus (193–211 CE). Severus, the Libyan-born founder of the Severan dynasty, and his Syrian-born wife, Julia Domna, used their portraits to center themselves as the rightful rulers of an increasingly complex and multicultural society.

This focus exhibition explores the concept of interlacing through a display of nineteenth and twentieth-century textiles from West and Central Africa. It discusses interlacing through African woven and dyed textiles worn as clothing, as well as the use of textiles in hats, masks, and currency.

This exhibition was developed in collaboration with contemporary fiber artist Beatrice Atencah, who is an MFA candidate in the IU School of Art, Architecture, and Design.

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.

This focus exhibition explores how basketry in the Grasslands region of Cameroon intersects with wider visual culture. It considers this topic through two main directions: one, the connections between the form of baskets and that of artworks made with other materials, and second, the widespread use of basketry in a variety of settings and cultural practices. Interwoven presents a selection of twentieth-century objects used in ceremonial and domestic settings, including dance rattles, baskets for honey, woven bags, palm wine pitchers, and storage baskets.

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.