Past

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.

This focus exhibition features four art objects that offer a variety of insights the Nazis’ condemnation of German modernist art, their persecution of Jewish artists, and their looting of Jewish art collections.

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.

Through a selection from the Glenn Close Costume Collection, this exhibition will explore the art of developing a character with a focus on the creativity and skills of the designers and makers.

Advance reservations are strongly encouraged for this exhibition.