Current & Upcoming Exhibitions

Jazz transcends the boundaries of music. Its spontaneous, vibrant form is built on decades of adaptation. Evolving from blues and ragtime in the African American community, jazz was born of Creole and African traditions in New Orleans, Louisiana in the late 19th century. A uniquely American genre, jazz maintains the core elements of improvisation, rhythm, harmony, and form.

Abstract art, alongside jazz, rose to prominence in the United States during the 20th century. Transplanted from Europe by artists fleeing the political unrest of World War II, abstract art began to emerge in New York City in the 1930s – 40s. By the mid-century, it took the American art world by storm, and Abstract Expressionism was born as a distinctly American style. Abstract art is a formal exploration that uses shape, color, form, and gestural marks to produce visual compositions free from the constraints of realism. By subverting the value of representation, abstract artists created their own visual languages independent of conventional constraints. African American musicians and artists, at the vanguard of both jazz and abstract art, took control of societal perceptions through their work.

Countless visual artists were inspired by jazz music—listening in the artists’ studios, befriending musicians, playing music, and painting and drawing in jazz clubs. A dialogue developed between the expressive visual language of the abstract artist and the complex rhythmic compositions of the jazz musician. Jazz incited artists to translate sound to color, note to line, and silence to void. 

This exhibition surveys 61 works by 34 modern and contemporary artists in the Petrucci Family Foundation Collection of African American Art who were influenced by jazz or used its core elements within their work.

For more information, visit the Bellagio website.

Image: PFF259 – Herbert Gentry, Carnival, 1984

Acts of Art in Greenwich Village is the first comprehensive account of the six-year history of Acts of Art, a gallery dedicated to showcasing the work of Black artists in downtown Manhattan. 

Founded by artists Nigel Jackson and Patricia Grey in 1969, Acts of Art was first located at 31 Bedford Street and later moved to 15 Charles Street in the West Village. In 1971, the gallery mounted  Rebuttal to the Whitney Museum Exhibition, the Black Emergency Cultural Coalition’s strategic response to the Whitney’s concurrent Contemporary Black Artists in America. That same year, the gallery hosted the inaugural exhibition of the Black women artists collective Where We At. Before Acts of Art closed in 1975, it presented one- and two-person exhibitions by twenty-six different artists, and numerous group exhibitions. Acts of Art in Greenwich Village centers Acts of Art and its director’s curatorial vision, tracing the gallery’s exhibition history as it intersects with other histories of Black art and artists in New York—and with formations like the BECC, Where We At, and the Weusi Artists. Installed in Hunter College’s Leubsdorf Gallery, the exhibition features artworks from the late 1960s and 1970s by fourteen artists with close ties to the gallery, a number of which were first shown at Acts of Art.  

Curated by Howard Singerman, Phyllis and Joseph Caroff, Professor of Art History, with Katie Hood Morgan, Chief Curator and Deputy Director, and with MA and MFA students enrolled in the Advanced Curatorial Certificate Seminar. This exhibition features two works from the PFF collection by artist Hale Woodruff. 

For more information, visit the Hunter College website.

Image: PFF251 – Hale Woodruff, Cow Woman, 1970

Featuring over 30 paintings, sculptures, photographs, prints, and fiber works from ca. 1900 to the present, Queens, Gods, and Devotees foregrounds earthly and divine greatness, and their associated devotional objects and ritual practices. Spanning continents, cultures, and eras, many of these images of exalted figures and concepts related to spirituality and worship are specific to the Black American experience, or are re-imagined in a Black cultural context. References to Greek mythology, the Judeo-Christian tradition, ancient cultures, and traditional African spiritual practices appear alongside one another, offering viewers the opportunity to find parallels and distinctions in how greatness, power, and majesty have been represented in African American art, as well as how reverence and veneration have been envisioned.

Celebrated figures from the Bible as well as powerful religious and mythological figures derived from African and ancient traditions appear throughout the galleries. Contemporary Black men and women are often elevated as sacred in their daily lives, or are engaged in spiritual practices derived from a range of African and ancient traditions. In several of the works on view, the visual language of abstraction addresses ancient African spiritual systems, the cosmos, and the afterlife, or communicates perspectives on culture and history, which are often intertwined with notions of prayer and worship. The wide variety of cultures, histories, and traditions that these artists collectively draw upon in their work calls attention to the universality of devotional human experience across time and place.

Curated by Susanna Gold, PhD, this exhibition includes 20th-c work by celebrated artists including Romare Bearden, Henry Ossawa Tanner, Richmond Barthé, Betye Saar, John Biggers, and others. Among the artists of the 21st-century selections are Willie Cole, Shinique Smith, Tawny Chatmon, Imo Nse Imeh, and Sharif Bey, as well as local area artists Barbara Bullock, Curlee Holton, Lavett Ballard, Sterling Shaw, and Claes Gabriel. 

For more information, visit the Maguire Art Museum website.

Image: PFF564 – Tawny Chatmon, Iconography/A Hopeful Truth, 2022-2023

Quilts have existed as domestic textiles for many years and across many cultures. Made for warmth, comfort, or ceremony, these objects have also conveyed important ideas and emotional connections—memorializing people and events, celebrating marriages and births, and sometimes even providing shrouds for burial. Today, contemporary artists recognize the rich potential for meaning embedded in the materials and techniques of traditional quilt making, and rework them in unique and often unexpected ways.

While they can be functional, for the most part, contemporary art quilts place an emphasis on the content, reflecting the experiences and ideas of their makers; it is the artist, rather than the blocked pattern, that determines the design. Unblocked: Improvisation and Identity in Contemporary Quilts brings together a diverse group of artists whose quilts tell stories, express identity, celebrate community, further social justice, and engage in formal design and color investigations. Comfortable with improvisation, these artists use materials that are readily available—often discarded or donated clothing and domestic textiles—and work intuitively, without a structured plan.

“Unblocking” is the process of removing an obstruction, freeing or releasing emotional energy. In social media, “Unblocking” is restoring access to a user’s voice—granting permission to express ideas freely. For this exhibition, “unblocked” is also a play on words, suggesting that contemporary artists achieve deeper engagement with their work when they move beyond the traditional use of repetitive blocks and patterns to compose quilts. Freed from the limitations of the block, their designs are often irregular and may extend beyond the rectangular edges of a traditional quilt.

Unblocked is co-curated by Mary Birmingham and Jennifer Wroblewski. Participating artists include:

Sherri Lynn Wood, Elizabeth Brandt, Zak Foster, Coulter Fussell, Chawne Kimber, Basil Kincaid, Kwesi O. Kwarteng, Krystle Lemonias, Sarah Nishiura, Melanie Tuazon

For more information, visit the Hunterdon Art Museum website.

Image: PFF458 – Chawne Kimber, First Freedom (Snuggleshott), 2013