Upcoming Exhibitions

Alice Pixley Young, Fearful Symmetry, 2019, Hand cut roofing paper, cast glass, three channel video, sound, LED, Installation image at Taft Museum of Art, Cincinnati, Ohio

Alice Pixley Young: Half Life

August 1, 2026 – January 31, 2027 | The Judith Bear Isroff Gallery

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.

Barbara Kasten, Construct 32, 1986. Cibachrome. Courtesy the artist and Bortolami Gallery, New York.

Barbara Kasten: Threshold

August 1, 2026 – January 31, 2027 | Beatrice Knapp McDowell Grand Lobby and Fred and Laura Ruth Bidwell Gallery

Barbara Kasten: Threshold includes both new work and career-spanning selections by one of photography's most innovative practitioners, presented across two interconnected sites at the Akron Art Museum: a sculptural installation in the Beatrice Knapp McDowell Grand Lobby and a survey of photography and video in the Fred and Laura Bidwell Gallery.

Naudline Pierre. Teach Me How, 2023. Oil and oil stick on linen. Photo by Dan Bradica, courtesy of James Cohan Gallery. © Naudline Pierre

Naudline Pierre: May the Light Reach You

September 23, 2026 – April 18, 2027 | Karl and Bertl Arnstein Galleries

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.

Salvador Dali. Les Montres gélatines de l'espace temps (The Frozen Watches of Space Time), 1974. Mixed media etching, lithography, and embossing on Arches paper. Collection of the Akron Art Museum. Gift of Gary Kauffman in memory of Ron Albright. 2025.24

The Surrealist Impulse

September 23, 2026 – September 12, 2027 | Susie and Tony Paparella Galleries

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.

Idea Machine by CHIAOZZA

September 23 - July 4, 2028 | J.M. Smucker Co. Idea Machine

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.  

Shana Moulton: Meta/Physical Therapy

September 23, 2026 – September 26, 2027 | C. Blake McDowell Jr. Gallery

Shana Moulton’s Meta/Physical Therapy, originally commissioned by and premiered at the Museum of Modern Art, comprises eight synchronized video projections on walls, floors, and shaped theatrical flats. It is part of Moulton’s long-running video project Whispering Pines, which began in 2002 as a collaboration with composer Nick Hallett. At the center of both the broader project and this specific work is Cynthia, Moulton’s semi-autobiographical alter ego—an anxious homebody surrounded by New Age healing products and wellness paraphernalia who is suddenly transported to stranger, more transcendent realms.