Currently On View

Whether this is your first visit or your hundredth, we hope you enjoy your visit.

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This gallery displays ancient to contemporary artworks from three collection areas associated with different world regions comprised of hundreds of cultures and languages. The regions represented in this gallery are spread across four continents and the planet’s largest ocean. This collection spans more than 3,000 years. 

Arts of Africa  represents visual art practices from across the continent, with a focus on sub-Saharan Africa. The Eskenazi Museum of Art is known internationally for this African art collection.

Arts of Oceania includes artworks from places in the South Pacific associated with the regions of Polynesia, Melanesia, and Micronesia.  

Indigenous Arts of the Americas is geographically broad in scope and includes artworks from Ancient Mesoamerica, Central and South America, and Native American arts in North America.

Historically, museums have presented these regions together because Europeans interpreted, or more accurately misinterpreted, artworks associated with these cultures and perceived few distinctions between them. Consequently, this practice, which began in the fifteenth century and was emphasized during colonial-era collecting in the nineteenth century, tells us more about Europeans than it does about the people from these cultures.  As you explore this gallery, we encourage you to think about these contrasting perspectives and histories of representation.

The historical encounters of Europeans exploring foreign lands relates to early collecting practices in Europe and the United States. The museum prioritizes provenance research to better understand ownership histories of artwork in these three collections, specifically how they traveled from their places of origin to the art market and Bloomington.  Outcomes of that ongoing research will be reflected in revisions to individual artwork labels both in the gallery and on the museum's website.

Saturday, February 10, 2024, 10:00 AM – ,

Time-based Media Gallery, Third Floor

Full HD video with sound, 9 min 40 seconds

Time is among the most fundamental conditions of human existence, yet also perhaps the most elusive. In still forms of art like painting and photography, the passage of time is often represented symbolically, as an hourglass, withering flowers, rotting fruit, or a human skull. In film, time can be represented more directly by movement and sound. Hungarian-born video artist and photographer Adam Magyar has studied the relationship between time and moving images extensively. In his work, he has developed custom cameras to capture subway cars speeding into stations at 1300 frames per second, 54 times the standard cinematic framerate of 24 frames per second. In another project, he photographed high-traffic public areas repeatedly from a fixed overhead position, overlaying the images to produce composite pictures of impossibly dense human crowds.

His newest work Matter expands on this practice, focusing on the spatial dimension of the moving image over time. 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. Matter can be read as a contemporary memento mori, a reminder of the destructive potential of our age of climate change and global conflict. Conversely, the video might be understood as a peaceful tribute to humankind’s minor role in the grand scheme of the universe, our moment being but a blink in the eye of time.

Adam Magyar (born 1972) is a Berlin-based Hungarian photographer and video artist captivated by time. His process is a symbiosis between technology and creative instinct. He is fascinated by the flow and the endless stream of life in the world’s biggest mega-cities.

Saturday, January 27, 2024, 10:00 AM – Sunday, June 02, 2024, 5:00 PM

Rhonda and Anthony Moravec Gallery, Center for Prints, Drawings, and Photographs, Third Floor

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. In 1965, noted author Vladimir Nabokov wrote to the artist, calling his collection of drawings The New World a “magic ledger” that reflected Steinberg’s skill at combining a fantastic imagination with shrewd observation. 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 works in this exhibition explore Steinberg’s travels, influences, and his diverse range of subjects and drawing techniques. Some of the drawings relate to his many magazine publications, others were included in his book compilations, but most are simply independent drawings of his favorite motifs, such as women in fancy hats, cowboys, cats, cars, soldiers, and architecture. A Romanian-born Jew who had escaped antisemitism in his homeland and Italy, Steinberg brought an outsider’s perspective to the people, places, and politics of postwar Europe and the United States. His witty—and often slightly satirical—studies manage to bring a smile to your face, while at the same time stimulating your mind.

The exhibition includes forty-three unique works, selected from the recent gift of sixty-five drawings, twenty-one prints, and an annotated catalogue from The Saul Steinberg Foundation and six works acquired by the museum in the 1970s. It is co-curated by Nan Brewer, the Eskenazi Museum of Art’s Lucienne M. Glaubinger Curator of Works on Paper, and Andrei Molotiu, senior lecturer in art history, and is based on research conducted by students in the IU course "Curating Saul Steinberg: From the Pages of the New Yorker to the Gallery Wall" (A490/580): undergraduates Meredith Cox, Kristin Davis, Hope Gerber, Morgan Hardin, Erin Hardy, Shannon Hocker, Katama Murray, Cody Rosenberg, Sasha Sears, Samantha Stroud, and Allie Tucker and graduate students Natalie Beglin, Caitlyn Clark, Kerrigan Clark, and Katama Murray. The advice and expertise of Shelia Schwartz, Research & Archives Director at the Saul Steinberg Foundation, are also deeply appreciated.

The exhibition is generously supported by John and Rita Grunwald, Susan C. Thrasher, and The Greig Family Fund.

Located on the second floor, this gallery includes ancient art as well as Asian & Islamic art.

The museum’s Asian and Islamic art collection spans 4,000 years. Asia is the longtime home of most of the human population. Guided by shared characteristics, the collection is organized into five major groups determined by geographic region and historical or cultural affinities, although each country has its distinct cultural heritage. The five areas on view include East Asia, Southeast Asia, South Asia, and the Islamic collection.

The ancient art collection is from the vast region surrounding the Mediterranean Sea and the Near East—an area that incorporates and interconnects three continents: Africa, Asia, and Europe. It invites museum visitors to look into a past world very different from our own, yet one that has continued to influence the development of ideas through modern times. This collection includes objects dating from 30,000 BCE through 1000 CE, and addresses themes like religious ritual, funerary practices, public ceremony, and daily life. Our collection of ancient art contains works from many cultures, including Sumerian, Assyrian, Egyptian, Persian, Minoan, Mycenaean, Etruscan, Greek, and Roman.

Sunday, September 18, 2022, 12:00 PM – Saturday, September 30, 2023, 5:00 PM

Located on the first floor, the Eskenazi Gallery of Modern and Contemporary European and American art features a stellar collection of work from the early 1900s to the present. Strengths include German Expressionism, modernist sculpture, Dada objects (including the only complete set of Marcel Duchamp’s iconic Readymades in the United States), and post–World War II abstract painting. Another highlight is Stuart Davis’s mural Swing Landscape, one of the most significant American paintings of the twentieth century.

More information about European paintings and sculptures in the collection can be found on our Nazi-Era Provenance Research Project.

Located on the first floor, the Jane Fortune Gallery of European and American Art, Medieval to 1900, offers an expansive survey of western art, with particular strengths in Italian Renaissance and nineteenth-century landscape and Impressionist painting. A wide range of objects, including paintings, sculptures, altarpieces, Jewish and Christian liturgical arts, and decorative arts, offer multiple perspectives on European history.

More information about European paintings and sculptures in the collection can be found on our Nazi-Era Provenance Research Project.