Exhibition Category: Upcoming

Idea Machine:CHIAOZZA

Meet CHIAOZZA, who will kick off a new era at the Museum with the first interactive installation in the new J. M. Smucker Co. Idea Machine space, opening this fall. Art museums have traditionally been places where visitors look at carefully arranged works on walls and objects on pedestals and in glass cases. But the Akron Art Museum is reimagining that experience with the Idea Machine by inviting direct physical interaction with artwork, signaling a shift in how audiences might encounter contemporary art in Akron. CHIAOZZA, the collaborative practice of Adam Frezza and Terri Chiao, approaches Idea Machine as a space where making and thinking happen simultaneously, dissolving the boundary between viewer and creator.  

Alice Pixley Young: Half Life

Cincinnati-based artist Alice Pixley Young draws inspiration from many sources, including formal gardens, geology, deep time, resource extraction, the nuclear age, and the ecological history of Ohio. Young’s installation at the Akron Art Museum forms an immersive environment featuring new works in video, glass, paper, and light. Her layered landscapes dramatize the entanglements of time, land, geology, and biodiversity. Visitors are invited to use this space to step outside their normal routines and think about time on a variety of scales. Young engages with several different time spans. The Ordovician fossil beds in southern Ohio contain numerous fossils of invertebrates that lived in a shallow tropical ocean 450 million years ago. Today, visitors to the region can easily find these fossils in riverbeds.

The Surrealist Impulse

The Surrealist Impulse will be the inaugural exhibition in the newly created Susie and Tony Paparella Galleries, on the second floor of the Akron Art Museum’s historic 1899 building. This exhibition brings together two different artistic movements from the early 1900s, Dada and Surrealism, along with closely related works by “Art Brut” (untrained or “raw”) creators working in the same time period. Dada was an international movement formed in the aftermath of World War I by artists and writers who turned their disgust at the carnage of the war into a broader, absurdist critique of the status quo in culture and society. Surrealism, another international movement that was rooted in Dada, continues to be a relevant form of expression about the very nature of reality and how it is represented, influencing the visual arts, literature, theater, film, and music for more than a hundred years.

Naudline Pierre: May the Light Reach You

Naudline Pierre conjures fantastical worlds full of movement, transformation, and emotion. Her artwork features airy figures among delicate, jewel-toned washes of color, swirling lines, and skillful application of paint or ink, as well as adventurous experimentation with metal. The content of Pierre’s work is deeply intimate, with a pantheon of female spirits conveying an impressive range of expression—from anger to resilience, tenderness, and more. She calls on viewers to imagine their way into her unfamiliar realities, and thereby to imagine how their own reality might also change and grow.

Kent Monkman: History is Painted by the Victors

Immerse yourself in the captivating world of Kent Monkman through iconic and monumental paintings by this major artist and member of ocêkwi sîpiy (Fisher River Cree Nation). Through his subversive lens, he revisits history painting to challenge colonial narratives and offer new perspectives on the past and present.

Transfiguration: Rachel Libeskind and the Tiffany Window

Transfiguration: Rachel Libeskind and the Tiffany Window is an exhibition offering audiences a rare opportunity to experience a restored historic Tiffany stained glass window depicting the Transfiguration of Christ, alongside new work by contemporary artist Rachel Libeskind, created specifically for the occasion. Together, the window and Libeskind’s response to it explore how the unimaginable and unseen are depicted across religious iconography, early cinema, and natural transformation.

Jess T. Dugan: I want you to know my story

Jess T. Dugan (born 1986, Biloxi, Mississippi; lives St. Louis, Missouri) creates photographic portraiture and self-portraiture with technical skill and forthright personal engagement, exploring kinship, community, and identity. Dugan embraces natural light, slow working methods, and collaboration with their subjects to create images that capture both individual personality and universal humanity. Drawing from their own experiences as a queer and nonbinary person, Dugan also works to advance the visual representation of queer people. The artist summarizes their entire creative approach this way: “For me, it’s all about energy and love.”

Myrlande Constant: DRAPO

Myrlande Constant: DRAPO brings ten large flags together in a single space, providing a stunning abundance of intricate craft, as well as a broader sense of Vodou and its dense mixture of West African, Central African, and Catholic religions. Through these sources and their understanding of many spirits, Vodou practitioners bring together love, inspiration, nature, and Haitian history and pride. Constant skillfully and impressively weaves all of this into her art.

Ordinary Miracles: Robert Glenn Ketchum’s Photographs of Cuyahoga Valley National Park

A fan favorite of the Akron Art Museum collection, Robert Glenn Ketchum’s photographs have been displayed frequently over the years in smaller groupings, but Ordinary Miracles: Robert Glenn Ketchum’s Photographs of Cuyahoga Valley National Park will be the first solo exhibition of the artist’s work at AAM since the late 1980s. From 1986–1988, Ketchum documented what was then known as Cuyahoga Valley National Recreation Area (CVNRA) and is now Cuyahoga Valley National Park (CVNP). Ketchum aimed to make each of his CVNRA images a metaphor for larger themes behind the park’s existence, stating “To draw my readers into these pictures, and prevent the images from seeming specifically regional, I have attempted to create a new, more generic kind of photograph: an icon of the landscape, not a specific and documentary description. It is my intent that these pictures also sustain the idea of the Cuyahoga as a national metaphor, so the photographs have been made with the hope they will have a ‘universal’ sense about them.” 

Alfred McMoore: All This Luck in My Head

In September, the Akron Art Museum will open the first solo museum exhibition for artist Alfred McMoore. McMoore (1950–2009) lived and worked his entire life in Akron, creating enormous drawings that depict many of the people he encountered. Diagnosed with schizophrenia, McMoore turned to art as a daily practice of expression and connection. He drew in pencil on scrolls of paper that were five feet high and up to fifty feet long. Because of their monumental size, these works have rarely been displayed publicly.

McMoore’s unique presence in Akron’s cultural landscape inspired the name of the renowned band. Dan Auerbach has shared that McMoore would often leave voicemails saying, “This is Alfred McMoore. Your black key is taking too long”—a phrase believed to signify that something was off-center or not quite right.