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Exhibitions

For 60 years, Sheldon Museum of Art has provided a venue for students, faculty and staff, alumni, and visitors to engage with art and one another. As an academic art museum, Sheldon schedules its exhibitions to coincide with the academic calendar.

Beyond Eve and Mary: Premodern Representations of Gender, Power, and Religion

January 27, 2023 through May 26, 2023 Through thematic groupings of artworks, this exhibition examines representations of two biblical figures—Eve and Mary—and asks viewers to consider how multifaceted gender could be in the premodern period.

From Here to the Horizon: Photographs in Honor of Barry Lopez

January 27, 2023 through May 26, 2023 This exhibition celebrates the unprecedented gift of more than ninety works donated by fifty American photographers to honor the writer Barry Lopez, best known for Arctic Dreams: Imagination and Desire in a Northern Landscape, which received the National Book Award for Nonfiction in 1986.

Clocking In: Visions of Labor

August 16, 2022 through December 22, 2022 Six galleries touching on themes of gender, place, resources, and politics provoke questions about what it means to work. Clocking In presents art that challenges expectations about who engages in particular types of work and what kinds of jobs are valorized.

Sheldon Treasures

August 16, 2022 through December 22, 2022 For this iteration of Sheldon Treasures, we highlight the museum’s extensive holdings of American landscape paintings. Hung chronologically from 1826 to 2004, this selection of works shows a gradual transformation in depictions of the outdoors.

Kelli Connell: Double Life

August 16, 2022 through December 22, 2022 Sheldon presents recently acquired works by Kelli Connell from her ongoing series Double Life in which an individual model portrays both partners in photographs of a couple.

Photographic Abstraction

August 16, 2022 through December 22, 2022 Since the advent of photography, artists have used cameras for more than straightforward documentation. This exhibition surveys the work of twentieth-century lens-based artists whose abstract visual vocabulary encourages the viewer to participate in the creation of meaning.

Storyville: The Intersection of Abstraction, Allusion, and Depiction

August 16, 2022 through December 22, 2022 At the intersection of abstraction, allusion, and depiction, the artist and viewer share equally in the creation of a work’s meaning. Storyville presents works from the museum’s collection that vacillate between recognizable subject matter and abstraction, providing various readings of each narrative.

Richard Diebenkorn: 41 Etchings Drypoints

January 25, 2022 through July 2, 2022 In the 1960s, Richard Diebenkorn began experimenting with printmaking at Crown Point Press, eventually publishing a series of forty-one etchings and drypoints. Displayed in its entirety, the series offers a chance to observe the evolution of a master expanding his craft.

Photography from the Collection

January 25, 2022 through July 2, 2022 Newly acquired works by Robert Adams and Robert Polidori are presented alongside collection stalwarts by Richard Avedon, Mark Ruwedel, and Alec Soth. Many of the images are large, demonstrating the roles scale and composition have played in changing the trajectory of photography as fine art.

The Road Less Traveled

January 25, 2022 through July 2, 2022 The road trip holds a beloved place in the American memory, conjuring fond recollections of childhood journeys and long, endless highways. This exhibition complicates such an ideal with the realities of infrastructure and environment.