Exhibitions

Generated Petals Interpolation

August 1, 2019 - September 30, 2019

Using the former Bell Labs complex in New Jersey as her setting, Sarah Meyohas executed her latest performance, Cloud of Petals. Sixteen workers photographed 100,000 individual rose petals, compiling a digital database of their findings. Using the information gathered, the artist developed an artificial intelligence algorithm that generated new, unique petals. Generated Petals Interpolation is the result of this project. The installation features unique and continuously morphing digital flower petals that undulate on the screen.

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Philip Haas: The Four Seasons

July 6, 2019 - November 18, 2019

The Four Seasons is a large-scale homage to the Italian Renaissance painter Giuseppe Arcimboldo (1526–1593), who painted a series of the same name for Habsburg Emperor Maximilian II. Contemporary artist and filmmaker Philip Haas conceptualized the transformation of the portraits from two-dimensional paintings to three-dimensional, 15-foot-tall sculptures. 

As in Arcimboldo’s paintings, the physical features of the four sculpted figures are rendered in botanical forms appropriate to each season. Each sculpture is made up of hundreds of sections. Welders created supporting steel infrastructures for the monumental figures. The museum and Haas’s staff assembled the figures on site over the span of nearly a week.

Exhibition Sponsors

Susie's Hope Fund

From the Flame: Juried Flamework Exhibition

June 29, 2019 - October 6, 2019

From the Flame is a juried exhibition that showcases the tremendous range and vitality of flamework as an art form. The artists included in this exhibition come from across the country, as near as southeast Michigan and as far as southern California. Some have been in the field for years—working, writing, and teaching— while others are breaking through with innovative concepts and laying the foundation for the next generation. Flamework (also known as lampworking and torchworking) is a traditional technique where a torch or lamp is used directly to melt glass. Once in a molten state, the glass is formed by blowing and shaping with tools and hand movements.  

Between now and October 6th visit the exhibition and vote for your favorite artwork. You can cast your ballot one time per visit, so stop in often! The winner of the People’s Choice will receive an award as will the juror-selected winners of 1st, 2nd, and 3rd place.

Mark your calendar for the Exhibition Reception on Friday, September 27th from 5:30-8:30pm. The evening will include an awards ceremony, a reception with a cash bar, open museum galleries, and exciting demos in the Hot Shop. This event is FREE and open to the public.  

The Butcher's Shop

June 2, 2019 - June 30, 2019

The Butcher’s Shop was commissioned by the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth, Texas as an homage to their 16th-century Annibale Carracci painting of the same name. Through a series of vivid images presented on a split screen, Philip Haas conjures up the world of the butchers, the world of the artist, and the encounter that led to the painting. The images on one screen show the scene in the Carracci painting: two butchers working amid wooden trellises with iron spikes and hooks from which hang animal carcasses. On the other screen, we see the opposite side of the shop, a view not shown in the painting, where Carracci has set up an easel to paint the butchers at work. The film is a meditation on Carracci’s painting, the painter’s character, and artistic preoccupations.

Still Modern

April 20, 2019 - July 14, 2019

Artists of the 20th and 21st centuries have embraced the genre of still life, manipulating its traditional significance for their own creative purposes. Of contemporary still lifes, artist Roy Lichtenstein said, “It’s not meant to have the usual still life meaning.” 

Still lifes are often characterized by commonplace, inanimate objects like fruit and bowls. These compositions initially appear simple and uninspiring in their ordinary domesticity. However, hidden in the objects are complex systems of symbolism and semantic codes. A flower, for instance, could represent the ephemeral nature of beauty or the shortness of life. Closing soon, Still Modern displays the enduring relevance of the still life genre in present day.

Hybrid: Glass + Metal

February 16, 2019 - June 16, 2019

Glass and metal may seem like an unexpected pairing but they are not as different as you may think. Both are fundamental elements in our everyday life. While once considered precious, in the industrial era, glass and metal are mass-produced. Although artists still use these materials to create intriguing artwork, industrially made objects have lost some of their exquisiteness. Nevertheless, things began to change among artists who strongly believed in the value of the handmade object. Disenchanted with the impersonal, mechanized direction of manufacturing, they sought a new path through materials like glass, metal, ceramic, and wood.

Closing soon, the artworks in this exhibition illustrate the vast possibilities of these two materials, from cast to blown glass and from forged to electroformed metal. Each object embodies a dynamic synergy that could not be achieved if the materials were used independently.

Breaking with Tradition: Contemporary Ceramics

April 21, 2018 - January 27, 2019

Breaking with Tradition features work by artists who have bent the rules and subverted ideas about traditional ceramics with unconventional subjects, experimental techniques, and manipulations of historical and traditional forms. 

Like the other artists in this exhibition, Kathryn Kennedy Sharbaugh took an unconventional approach to a traditional subject: the teapot. In 1999, Sharbaugh created Night Jump, imbedding her own symbolic language based on geometric forms. The emblematic language of Night Jump comes from Sharbaugh’s personal experience with looking at the night sky through a spotting scope she had purchased for bird watching. She became fascinated with the rings of Saturn, which prompted her to think about the type of night jumps soldiers took with parachutes. Saturn’s rings and the shape of the parachute make up the body of the design.

The Scale 2

January 1, 2018 - January 31, 2018

Kawita Vatanajyankur’s art offers a powerful examination of the psychological, social, and cultural ways of viewing and valuing the continuing challenges of women’s everyday labor. In her videos, the artist undertakes physical experiments that playfully, often painfully, test her body’s limits—a challenge that is both unavoidably compelling and perplexing to watch. 

The repetitive and arduous tasks that Vatanajyankur performs parody a pervasive slippage between human and machine, and spotlight the forgotten body within a technologically accelerating world. Beyond this literal translation, these gestures also make visible the invisible mechanisms that govern women’s everyday labor in her birthplace of Thailand. It is a place where, for many, daily chores aren’t always assisted by machines but are time-consuming, physically exhausting, and often the task of women.

It is telling that she describes her performances as “meditation postures,” when such grueling tests of resilience are the opposite of what might be considered Zen. But, for Vatanajyankur, extreme physical endurance offers a way to free herself from her mind: a mechanism to lose her sense of being. This deliberate objectification, she says, turns her body into sculpture. The Scale 2 and Squeezers explores the limitations of our bodies, the continuing challenges of mundane labor, and the ongoing tasks for feminism in a globalized and digitally networked world. 

Head Full of Doubt/Road Full of Promise

November 1, 2017 - November 30, 2017

Head Full of Doubt/Road Full of Promise, described as a moving painting, explores notions of temporality, evolution, and modernity. Artist Jason Mitcham made 2,600 alterations to a single canvas to produce this stop-motion video. Creating in this way becomes less about the final painting and more about the evolution of the narrative. According to Mitcham, the purpose of each brushstroke “is to bridge the one before it and the one that will follow it. More than likely it will be overlayed later on, by other marks needed to tell another part of the story. The painting must be allowed to destroy itself in order to become itself. This correlates to the concepts within the work, and the video excavates the painting, allowing its history and narrative to be revealed.”

View the making of Head Full of Doubt/Road Full of Promise.

Madame Perfetti & the Tree

April 1, 2017 - April 30, 2017

Laetitia Hohenberg, American, b. 1962, 4:04 minutes

“Madame Perfetti is a person I visit. She has dementia. My piece is a replica of the space we both share. It is a suspended moment; an exquisite present lived at a glance, with no past or future.”    

    — Laetitia Hohenberg