Current Exhibitions

GLOW: Neon and Light

September 21, 2024 - February 9, 2025 | Karl and Bertl Arnstein Galleries

GLOW: Neon & Light opens in the Akron Art Museum’s Arnstein Galleries on September 21. Showcasing artists who use analog materials like glass, mirrors, light bulbs, and neon tubes, the galleries will be filled with spectacular and immersive works. Rather than the text-based artworks typically associated with neon, this exhibition will instead feature sculptural installations, brightening the walls, floor, and ceiling with three dimensional explorations of light.

Zeerak Ahmed: Mother, I Am Compelled To Leave / اماّں میں تو پاہونی

August 10 - December 29, 2024 | The Judith Bear Isroff Gallery

In creating her sound and video installation titled Amma Mein Tou Paahonee / Mother, I Am Compelled To Leave, Zeerak Ahmed (born 1990, Lahore, Pakistan; lives New York, New York) drew from the folk music traditions of her family’s native region of Uttar Pradesh, in northern India. The songs included in the installation are fleeting for many reasons. They come from a culture that was severely disrupted by the partitioning of the Indian subcontinent in 1947—a time of bloodshed and migration, during which Ahmed’s Muslim family relocated to the newly formed nation of Pakistan. They are in the dialect of Purbi, which is no longer spoken by the migrants who settled in Pakistan. They are part of an oral tradition and were never written down.

Christian Patterson. The Wishing Well, 2013. Archival inkjet print. Courtesy of Fred and Laura Ruth Bidwell

Where We Live: Photographs of Human Spaces

July 26 - December 29, 2024 | Fred and Laura Ruth Bidwell Gallery

What meaning can be found in a house, a skyscraper, or a storefront? What do we feel when we look into a room, out a window, or down a street? Are the spaces we construct ever just brick, wood, and metal, or do we necessarily make them something more?