Through compelling and cryptic works of art, Mystery and Benevolence brings to light the histories, symbolism, and beliefs of the Freemasons and the Independent Order of the Odd Fellows (IOOF)—two fraternal organizations with deep roots in American history. For decades, members across the country have come together to socialize, help others, and improve themselves and their communities. The exhibition features more than eighty works of art, including items once owned by the Daughters of Rebekah—the first lodge to include women—and the Grand United Order of Odd Fellows, founded as the African American counterpart to the IOOF. Sculptures, textiles, regalia, prints, and works of decorative art explore the main principles of the organizations: fellowship, charity, labor, passage, and wisdom. Elaborately stitched costumes, gilded regalia and jewelry, and richly embellished ceremonial objects provide a glimpse into the enigmatic world of these secret societies.

Mystery and Benevolence is organized by the American Folk Art Museum, New York, NY, from the Kendra and Allan Daniel Collection and toured by International Arts & Artists, Washington, DC.

Posing Beauty in African American Culture traces the relationship between African American beauty and visual culture from the 1890s to the present through documentary, commercial, and fine art photography. Documentary photographs and portraits of portraits of Black Americans—some famous, some just ordinary citizens—present the public face of African American beauty, while commercial photographs demonstrate how fashion and advertising have constructed beauty standards. Finally, contemporary photographers—some of whom use themselves as a subject—encourage consideration of how images of beauty impact mass culture and individuals.

Posing Beauty includes more than 100 works by photographers including Charles “Teenie” Harris, Leonard Freed, Anthony Barboza, Carrie Mae Weems, Hank Willis Thomas, Sheila Pree Bright, Renee Cox, Mickalene Thomas, and others. Organized by Curatorial Assistance Traveling Exhibitions and curated by Deborah Willis, PhD, one of the nation’s leading historians of African American photography and culture, the exhibition will challenge existing notions of beauty while encouraging consideration of race, class, and gender within art and popular culture.

The first photographs ever made astonished the public with their apparent ability to freeze time. Even today, in an age in which we are witnesses to an endless flow of images, we continue to be fascinated by the power of photography. Moment in Time features more than 100 photographs dating from the invention of the medium in the 1830s through the mid-20th century. The exhibition includes compelling masterworks by William Henry Fox Talbot, Julia Margaret Cameron, Timothy O’Sullivan, Alfred Stieglitz, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Ansel Adams, Dorothea Lange, and Walker Evans, among others. Their interests ranged from perfecting photography’s technical capabilities to documenting the formal beauty of nature to exposing the social realities of America. All, however, explored the breadth and depth of the camera’s ability to capture a moment in time.

While the Taft Museum of Art’s portrait of Michiel de Wael travels to the National Gallery, London and Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam for the first major comprehensive exhibition devoted to Frans Hals in 30 years, the Taft welcomes a rare work by another Dutch master, Jan Steen, on loan from the Rijksmuseum.

One of just eight portraits known to have been completed by Steen, Adolf and Catharina Croeser portrays a wealthy father and daughter on the front steps of their home in Delft. The Croesers’ relationship to the woman and young boy who appear to be asking for charity remains a mystery. This juxtaposition of economic classes— unusual for a 17th-century portrait—illustrates the timeless necessity of helping others, sparking conversation about wealth distribution in our own time.

Taft guests can see Steen’s Adolf and Catharina Croeser in the Taft’s Gallery 14: Music Room alongside other Dutch portraits by Rembrandt van Rijn and Frans Hals from the Taft’s collection. Steen is known for his satirical scenes from daily life that include The Doctor’s Visit, on view in Gallery 6: Virtue & Vice. The Rijksmuseum painting, however, reveals Steen’s inventive contribution to portraiture.

The Rijksmuseum is lending the work in exchange for the Taft’s loan of Hals’s Michiel de Wael, which joins 50 of the artist’s finest paintings, including a recently discovered portrait of De Wael’s wife, Cunera van Baersdorp, and a group portrait that features De Wael at its center. This exhibition at two of the world’s great museums and a new catalog by leading Hals experts places the Taft’s masterpiece on the international stage and introduces a new generation to Hals’s  ively work. Frans Hals will be on view at The National Gallery, London, September 30, 2023–January 21, 2024, and the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, February 16–June 9, 2024.

African Modernism in America features nearly 80 dynamic and vivid works of art created in Africa during the 1950s and ’60s. Co-organized by the American Federation of Arts and Fisk University Galleries, the exhibition explores the relationships formed between African artists and American patrons, artists, and cultural organizations amid the interlocking histories of civil rights, decolonization, and the Cold War. Many of the paintings, sculptures, and works on paper in the show were drawn from Fisk’s remarkable collection of gifts from the Harmon Foundation. Following World War II, this foundation, along with other institutions such as the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Fisk University, and other historically Black colleges and universities, supported and exhibited the work of Black artists, including the important modern African artists Ben Enwonwu (Nigeria), Ibrahim El-Salahi (Sudan), and Skunder Boghossian (Ethiopia). Showing African art in the United States rooted it in the present and encouraged American audiences to engage with African artists as contemporaries. The inventive nature of the works in this exhibition challenges the assumptions of the time about African art being isolated to a “primitive past.” Some pieces took inspiration from early Christian art, West African sculpture, and Nigerian literature, while others reflect the influences of American jazz and modern European art.

With their colorful petals, rippling water, and cloudy skies, the artworks in this exhibition invite contemplation of the natural world. Immerse yourself in crisp seaside sunshine or among ancient ruins at twilight. Swim along with ducks in a leafy pond or stroll through a pocket-sized garden. Charles and Anna Taft acquired hundreds of exquisite yet modestly sized artworks to display in their home, now the Taft Museum of Art. The six paintings and five works of decorative art in A Breath of Fresh Air come from the museum’s collection, but due to limited space in the museum’s room-sized galleries, they rarely go on public view.

Each year the ARC program immerses high school art students in Cincinnati’s visual arts community and exposes them to careers in the arts through studio visits and other field trips. Celebrate this special program and the students’ future careers with their own curated gallery show, Wonder, on view at The Annex Gallery. 

Sporting Fashion: Outdoor Girls 1800 to 1960 explores women’s ongoing negotiation of the demands of fashion, function, and feminine decorum. It is the first exhibition to consider the evolution of women’s sporting and leisure attire, revealing how clothing was designed to accommodate a variety of activities ranging from horseback riding to golfing to motorcycling. As both athletes and spectators, the innovative and stylish attire women wore helped break down the barriers that had isolated them from the then-male-dominated sporting world.

Clothing for cycling, motoring, and flying—often adapted from men’s athletic gear—reveal how women navigated open roads and skies. Women's winter sports outfits show how apparel for pastimes such as skiing and skating protected female participants from the elements. Garments for swimming and tanning illustrate how designers and manufacturers responded to the increasing acceptance of exposed skin at beaches and pools.

Sporting Fashion is co-organized by the American Federation of Arts and the FIDM Museum at the Fashion Institute of Design & Merchandising, Los Angeles. Drawn from FIDM’s extensive collection, the exhibition features over 60 fully accessorized ensembles.

In 1857, French landscape painter Charles François Daubigny (1817–1878) purchased a 27-foot ferryboat and converted it into a floating studio from which he could observe and paint at all times of day. Rivers often take center stage in Daubigny’s paintings—three of which are in the Taft collection—with innovative, water-level perspectives that influenced younger generations of artists, including the Impressionist Claude Monet, who built a studio boat of his own.

The Boat Trip documents Daubigny’s first studio boat voyages on the river Seine north of Paris. During these trips, Daubigny created a visual diary of 47 ink drawings, from which he selected 15 as the basis for the etching series Voyage en Bateau (The Boat Trip). The artist’s sense of humor and whimsy—as well as his endearing relationship with his 12-year-old son and “cabin boy” Charlot—emerge throughout scenes of eating, sleeping, fishing, and painting aboard the rustic boat nicknamed the Botin (little box).

Ever since photography’s inception in the mid-19th century, women have forged pioneering paths for the medium. Come trace the influential role of women photographers over the past century through the work of artists such as pictorialist Gertrude Käsebier; modernists Margaret Bourke-White and Imogen Cunningham; Depression-era documentary photographers Dorothea Lange and Esther Bubley; post-World War II innovators Diane Arbus, Cindy Sherman, and Barbara Kruger; and contemporary photographers Carrie Mae Weems and Rineke Dijkstra. The approximately 100 photographic prints in Modern Women/Modern Vision honor women’s accomplishments in creating radically inventive images at each phase of modern history. This exhibition at the Taft Museum of Art has been loaned through the Bank of America Art in our Communities® program.

During the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s, African Americans redoubled their long fight for equality. Their struggles and determination have inspired artist Terence Hammonds. His works in Universal Magnetic feature collages that combine historical images with decorative motifs that adorn and memorialize representations of racial identity in the United States.

For his paper collages, Hammonds incorporates illustrations of celestial bodies with images of Black and Brown figures cut from vintage magazines, such as Life, Jet, and Ebony, to create scenes that are simultaneously nostalgic and futuristic. He also recontextualizes the figures by removing them from scenes of pain and suffering and inserting them into spaces that celebrate joy and hope. While Hammonds takes the same approach to his ceramics in terms of subject matter, he uses a silkscreen process to transfer the collaged compositions onto the clay surfaces. The shape of several vessels in the exhibition, as well as his use of blue and white, is a nod to the Chinese porcelains in the Taft Museum of Art collection.

Hammonds’s work is included in the collections of the Cincinnati Art Museum, 21c Museum Hotel, the Newark Museum of Art, and the Ifö Center in Bromölla, Sweden, where his pieces form an outdoor public installation.

Memories & Inspiration features selections from the private collection of Kerry and C. Betty Davis. For over 35 years, Mr. Davis, a retired postal worker, and Mrs. Davis, a former television news producer, have collected with a focus on diverse 20th- and 21st-century approaches to the Black image. According to Mr. Davis, “Our goal is to preserve cultural memories and provide the community with a source of inspiration.” The exhibition features approximately 60 works of art, including paintings, prints, drawings, photographs, sculptures, and mixed media by well-known African American artists Romare Bearden, Elizabeth Catlett, Sam Gilliam, Loïs Mailou Jones, Jacob Lawrence, Gordon Parks, Alma Thomas, and others.

Organized and toured by International Art & Artists, Washington, DC, Memories & Inspiration provides an example of a private collection formed by a singular vision. The Davis residence has been called “a museum in a home,” offering an enlightening comparison to Charles and Anna Taft’s own collection. The Davises’ collection reveals their hopes and passions, infusing Memories & Inspiration with tremendous personal power.

Fakes and forgeries provide some of the most compelling stories in the art world. Did you know that the Taft collection contains some of its own attribution mysteries, some solved and others still in question? This small exhibition will reveal the fascinating histories of selected paintings and works of decorative art normally kept in storage. Among them, portraits originally thought to be by Rembrandt van Rijn demonstrate how authenticating the great Dutch master’s paintings has evolved in the century since Charles and Anna Taft built their collection. Paintings previously believed to have been created by Spanish artist Francisco de Goya and English landscapist John Constable were later discovered to be works by their followers. Nineteenth-century carved stone plaques once masqueraded as Renaissance portraits of royalty. A pair of porcelain vases was made in France in the late 1800s rather than, as the Tafts believed, in China a century earlier. Follow along as we trace the detective work that uncovered the true identities of these works of art, many of which have not been seen by the public in more than 30 years.

On a small riverside farm in Loveland, Ohio, Nancy Ford Cones created photographs that earned her a national reputation during a time when female artists continued to struggle for recognition. Despite the praise they received during her lifetime, Cones’s imaginative and exquisitely crafted works were largely forgotten after her death. This exhibition resurrects the gifted artist’s career and contributions to the field of photography.

Between about 1900 and 1939, Cones made thousands of photographs that featured country life, fantastical visions, and literary characters. To create her images, she employed the help of neighbors, friends, and family who posed in costume around the farm and its environs. Working in partnership with her husband James, who printed her work using a variety of techniques and papers, Cones conceived evocative subjects that emulated 19th-century European paintings.

Nancy Ford Cones's photographs were published in prestigious journals such as Camera Craft, as well as in popular outlets that included National Geographic magazine and Kodak advertisements. The first major presentation of her work, this exhibition and its accompanying catalog will demonstrate that she was an exceptional artist who rivaled the top photographers of her time.

This year, the Taft Museum of Art invited three local artists— Gabriela Falconi-Piedra, Pedro Moreno, and Fabiola Rodríguez Ornelas—to decorate a six-foot holiday tree in the museum’s Duncanson Foyer. The artists were born in Ecuador, Bolivia, and Mexico, respectively. Their installation features a fantastic array of paper and fabric birds, butterflies, and flowers, and a paper nest to explore the concepts of migration, belonging, and diversity.

The Taft collaborated on this project with Wave Pool Art Center’s Welcome Project, which seeks to empower Cincinnati’s refugee and immigrant population while connecting, assisting, and inspiring all through art and food.

Measuring 7 by 13 feet, this map was made in the mid-1700s, about fifty years before Jane Austen began writing her celebrated novels. While Austen’s stories take place mostly in the English countryside, this exhibition will illustrate London locations from both her fiction and her life. Journey past the Houses of Parliament, Westminster Abbey, and St. Paul’s Cathedral—as well as through cow pastures, timber yards, and waterworks—as you trace your way through the metropolis and its environs. This massive work on paper represents a monumental achievement in cartography, or mapmaking. It also offers a rare opportunity to experience the history of one of the world’s great cities and its connections to one of the world’s great authors. Lent by the Estate of Sallie Robinson Wadsworth.  

Jane Austen’s novels have been cherished by millions of readers for two hundred years. Her classic stories have reached many others as adaptations for the screen. Jane Austen: Fashion & Sensibility features approximately forty costumes and accessories worn in popular film and television productions. Drawn from the collection of award-winning British costume house Cosprop Ltd., these meticulously tailored ensembles will transport you to the Regency era through ball gowns, wedding dresses, day dresses, hats, jackets, waistcoats, riding habits, and other middle- and upper-class clothing. 

Fashion & Sensibility provides an unforgettable opportunity to see, up close, costumes worn by Hollywood celebrities including Kate Winslet, Emma Thompson, Gwyneth Paltrow, Judi Dench, Colin Firth, and Hugh Grant. The exhibition brings to life beloved characters from Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, Emma, and Mansfield Park, while revealing powerful themes of class, gender, and social dynamics in Austen’s world.  

Presented by Exhibits Development Group, USA, in cooperation with Cosprop Ltd., London, England

In 2021 and 2022, the Taft Museum of Art partnered with GBBN Architects and HGC Construction to preserve the exterior of the Baum-Longworth-Sinton-Taft house, a National Historic Landmark. The house was built around 1820, making it downtown Cincinnati’s oldest wooden residence in its original location. Investigation prior to the project revealed significant water damage to the wooden siding and the structure beneath. In this small display, learn more about how the house has been preserved for future generations, and how the project will also help protect the art collection within.

In 1927, Charles Phelps Taft and Anna Sinton Taft bequeathed their art collection and home to the people of Cincinnati “in such a manner that they may be readily available to all.” The Taft Museum of Art opened to the public in 1932. Ever since, the collection has been displayed throughout the Tafts’ former home, an architectural gem built in 1820. While the historic house undergoes a major rehabilitation project, making it temporarily inaccessible to the public, the museum has moved more than 80 highlights from the collection to the Fifth Third Gallery for this special exhibition. See your old favorites as the Taft presents them in a new light.

In a New Light explores a broad range of eras, cultures, and art forms through their historical context, subject matter, materials, and makers. European decorative arts and Chinese porcelains dazzle the eye with their intricate designs and brilliant colors. Nineteenth-century American furniture impresses us with its stately elegance. European and American portraits and landscape paintings show off the mastery of some of the greatest artists of the past. Through select works, the exhibition will reveal centuries-old social concerns such as the distribution of wealth, environmental destruction, and gender and racial inequality.

In 1903, Charles wrote to his brother, William Howard Taft, “Annie and I have about made up our minds that it would be just as well to invest money in pictures as to pile it up in bonds and real estate.” The selections in this exhibition prove their investment paid off. Through their vision as art collectors, Charles and Anna Taft left a legacy to the people of Cincinnati that continues to inspire and offer new insights for each generation.

In 1927, Charles Phelps Taft and Anna Sinton Taft bequeathed their art collection and home to the people of Cincinnati “in such a manner that they may be readily available to all.” The Taft Museum of Art opened to the public in 1932. Ever since, the collection the Tafts lovingly assembled has been displayed throughout their former home, an architectural gem built around 1820. While the historic house undergoes a major renovation, making part of it inaccessible to the public, the Taft Museum of Art shares more than 40 works of art with audiences at the Cincinnati Museum Center. Borrowed Gems tells the story of the Tafts’ collection and its impact on the Cincinnati community. Portraits and landscape paintings show off the mastery of some of the greatest artists of the past, while exquisite works of decorative art reveal how the collection inspired Cincinnati artisans to create beautiful objects of their own. Through their vision as art collectors and philanthropists, Charles and Anna Taft left a legacy that continues to inspire each generation anew.

Explore the history of downtown Cincinnati’s oldest surviving wooden residence still in its original location. The Baum-Longworth-Sinton-Taft historic house turns 200 this year! Constructed around 1820 by entrepreneur Martin Baum, the National Historic Landmark became a public museum in 1932 to house the exceptional art collection of its final residents, Charles Phelps Taft and Anna Sinton Taft.

From silk boudoir shoes created for the 1867 Paris Exposition to leather spectator pumps signed by the 1941 New York Yankees, Walk This Way features more than 100 striking pairs of shoes. Organized by the New-York Historical Society, this exhibition presents footwear—spanning nearly 200 years—from the collection of high-fashion shoe designer Stuart Weitzman. Weitzman’s wife, businesswoman and philanthropist Jane Gershon Weitzman, formed and added to the collection as a gift to her husband over their 50 years of marriage.

An integral part of our everyday lives, shoes not only protect our feet, but tell stories centered around women’s labor activism, the fight for suffrage, and the sexual revolution. They also serve as pathways toward discovering the vital role women and diverse historical narratives played in both the production and consumption of footwear. In this exhibition, women take center stage as we explore a variety of shoes, including those worn by suffragists as they marched through the streets, Jazz Age flappers as they danced the Charleston, and starlets who graced the silver screen in the postwar era. Walk This Way features the footwear designs of Christian Dior, Yves Saint Laurent, Salvatore Ferragamo, and Beth Levine—the “First Lady of Shoe Design”—as well as shoes by Stuart Weitzman himself.

Two hundred years ago, a grand white mansion was built on the eastern edge of Cincinnati. Over the first half of its life, the building housed some of the city’s most prominent families, finally becoming an art museum in 1932. A Splendid Century celebrates the bicentennial of the house that is now the Taft Museum of Art. The exhibition features Cincinnati art and artists spanning the first 100 years of the house’s existence.

The Baum, Longworth, Sinton, and Taft families, who inhabited the house during this period, witnessed Cincinnati’s growth from a frontier outpost with few artistic opportunities into a hub of creative activity. This exhibition tells the story of Cincinnati art during their lifetimes through rarely seen works from local private collections and regional museums. Nicholas Longworth and Charles and Anna Taft were particularly active in fueling the city’s cultural development by supporting promising artists and arts institutions. With the recognition that no century is “splendid” for all people, the exhibition also highlights individual works of art that reveal the stories of historically underrepresented groups, including women and Black and Indigenous people.

Paintings and sculptures by beloved Cincinnati artists Hiram Powers, Robert S. Duncanson, Elizabeth Nourse, Frank Duveneck, Henry Farny, Dixie Selden and others, as well as ceramics from Rookwood Pottery, create a picture of the city’s visual culture from the 1820s through the 1920s—the Golden Age of art in the Queen City.

Every year audiences look forward to creatively inspired holiday decorations at the Taft with ties to heritage and traditions. This year, award-winning fiber artist Cynthia Lockhart is helping ensure this tradition lives on while embracing the creation of new ways to spark holiday joy in a difficult year. Bringing this message center stage in the Taft’s Music Room, Lockhart’s site-specific Joyful Expressions holiday tree offers a renewed sense of hope this holiday season. Lockhart hopes that her work “encourages us to seek joy despite the challenges we have faced in 2020,” and “believes this holiday season will have a deeper meaning, perhaps more so than ever before,” including “a greater love and understanding for families across our nation and the world.” 

Lockhart’s work has previously been on display at the YWCA Greater Cincinnati Women’s Art Gallery (2020), the Taft Museum of Art (2019–20), and the Weston Gallery (2011). Her work is included in several local collections and has been featured in numerous publications, including the Encyclopedia of African American Artists and Women’s Wear Daily. Now Professor Emerita, Lockhart taught students in the University of Cincinnati’s College of Design, Art, Architecture, and Planning (DAAP) for 25 years.

The Taft Museum of Art was home to a unique fantasy experience brought to life by world-renowned sculptor Patrick Dougherty. Dougherty took six tons of willow tree saplings and twisted and turned them—with the amazing help of more than 150 community volunteers—into whimsical, whirling shapes.

Learn more about its next home at the Imago Earth Center!

This exhibition showcases the work of N. C. Wyeth (1882–1945), the patriarch of one of America’s most prominent artistic families. Co-organized by the Brandywine River Museum of Art in Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania and the Portland Museum of Art in Maine, this exhibition brings together approximately 50 large-scale paintings spanning several decades. Many of Wyeth’s grand images bring to life stories in Treasure Island, The Last of the Mohicans, The Boy’s King Arthur, and Rip Van Winkle. However, Wyeth deserves much greater appreciation for his little-known fine art paintings. New Perspectives revises his reputation by also highlighting his private work.

Cynthia Lockhart’s textile creations invite viewers to embark on a journey of discovery. Composed of colorful fabrics arranged in dynamic patterns, her fiber art tells a story—one that encourages people to more deeply understand the diversity of people, cultures, and beauty in the world around them. Lockhart’s exhibition, Journey to Freedom, tells heroic and joyful stories of her ancestors, celebrating a strong people who endured many injustices. The works in the show also pose questions about the perceptions of freedom in America. Lockhart hopes that her art serves as a catalyst for individuals to continue to be inspired to dream, dance, sing, and shout their way forward to unbounded possibilities of freedom.

The paintings in The Poetry of Nature reveal the natural wonders that sparked the first artistic movement in the United States. Sketching outdoors and composing their ideal visions of the landscape in their studios, these artists filled their canvases with majestic mountains, tranquil valleys, enchanting forests, shimmering lakes, and luminous skies. Works by well-known artists including Thomas Cole, Asher B. Durand, Jasper Francis Cropsey, and Sanford Robinson Gifford join lesser-known gems by Louisa Davis Minot and William Louis Sonntag—who began his career in Cincinnati—to paint a picture of America’s promise embodied in landscape.

Enjoy a glimpse of Christmas past at the Taft Museum of Art’s annual exhibition of holiday treasures. Visitors will find beautiful decorations throughout the historic house, thanks to generous collectors from Cincinnati and beyond. This year, guests can expect a number of new and exciting displays, including several feather trees with decorations ranging from vintage Disney ornaments to characters from German fairy tales. Figures of the jolly old elf will also be on view under a large tree adorned with antique paper, chenille, and glass ornaments.

Meant to stop people in their tracks with bold colors and seductive imagery, French advertising posters of the turn of the 20th century ultimately became highly collectible works of art. L’Affichomania: The Passion for French Posters presents the work of five innovative artists: Jules Chéret, Eugène Grasset, Théophile-Alexandre Steinlen, Alphonse Mucha, and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec.

At the turn of the 20th century, traveling actors, illusionists, and theatrical producers promoted live performances with brilliantly colored printed outdoor advertisements. This exhibition features seven theater posters from the collection of the Public Library of Cincinnati and Hamilton County.

Winslow Homer to Georgia O’Keeffe traces a century of the modern creative spirit in the United States, ranging from realistic landscapes to bold abstract forms. Fifty-five works by American masters—including Thomas Eakins, Winslow Homer, Edward Hopper, Georgia O’Keeffe, and Helen Frankenthaler—span the 1860s through the 1960s.

Follow nineteenth-century British painter J. M. W. Turner on his travels throughout the United Kingdom and Europe—through his watercolors and an interactive digital map. This exhibition of the Taft Museum of Art’s ten watercolors by Turner focuses on the places he painted, including dramatic landscapes from Switzerland, Germany, France, England, Scotland, and Italy.

In Paris in the 1920s, the young American photographer Berenice Abbott (1898–1991) encountered the elderly French photographer Eugène Atget (1857–1927). Their contact would have profound and lasting effects on the careers and legacies of both artists. Through a sequence of riveting and often iconic images, the exhibition elaborates the relationship between Abbott’s and Atget’s photography.

Vanessa German empowers people through visual art and performance. German’s mixed-media sculptures and reliefs will be featured as part of the Duncanson Artist-in-Residence Program. Constructed from found objects including doll parts, antique tins, beads, household items, and other cast-off relics, her “power figures” evoke folk art traditions, religious icons, and African nkisi nkondi—ritual figures carved from wood to embody mystical forces.