Past Exhibitions
Creating Knowledge and Control
Creating Knowledge and Control features works that explore technology as a top-down, disciplinary tool that restructures space, time, and the relations among people and activities. Today, such tools are created and used not only by governments, but also by multinational corporations that leverage the potential of managed information systems and big data. As technology and information management evolves, questions arise regarding whether and how we should govern these tools of control and surveillance, and this installation explores these issues.
Judy Crook 9
Jennifer SteinkampLocation: Top floor of the Hopkins Center
Judy Crook 9 is a digital animation painstakingly created by the artist Jennifer Steinkamp in 2017. Her work introduces images of nature into architectural spaces in a manner that complicates the idea of inside and outside, and built versus natural environments. Judy Crook 9 takes the viewer through four seasons in this one tree’s life—repeated endlessly to simultaneously evoke the cyclical nature of life and the ideal of infinite existence.
Steinkamp has been making works of digital art that honor her art teachers over the years. This work is from a series named after her professor of color theory at the Art Center College of Design, Pasadena. Rather than make one animation in an edition of nine, however, Steinkamp has made nine variations on the same theme—each one significantly different.
Works from the Continent of Africa
This installation presents the ways in which the aesthetic values and worldviews of different African socities in the past are still relevant to the contemporary social imaginary of the vast majority of people in Africa. Whereas some museums continue to treat canonical African art as vectors of source cultures, this installation emphasizes the individual autonomy of the objects on view. The selection is organized around six themes: Figures, Parliament of Masks, Power Objects, Transitions, Art of Small Things, and Art of Everyday.
Contemporary Responses to Globalization
New LandscapesHumanity’s unceasing persistent consumption and development has had complex repercussions on the physical, social, and cultural landscapes around the world. Artists are actively engaging with the consequences of our impacts on the landscape and, in response, considering alternative realities—from imagining a transformed landscape or a dystopic future in the wake of ecological disaster to creating new worlds to escape the effects of industrialization. This exhibition of recent acquisitions reflects on the diversity of experiences in, responses to, and projections of our many lived and potential realities.
Entrance Gallery
We briefly survey contemporary art that is engaged with some of the signature issues addressed by artists today, including profound engagements with feminism, racism, and globalism, as well as national, ethnic, and gender identity. The artworks are rendered in diverse styles and through varying techniques, but each of the artists represented here shares a desire to use art as a tool for social justice and change.
All Dolled Up
Dolls can be playthings—items which help us explore everyday life and fantasy—and objects of nostalgia. This selection of photographs features dolls in a variety of contexts, from domestic to uncanny. It includes work by photographers Hans Bellmer, Olivia Parker, Senzeni Marasela, Destiny Deacon, and Ralph Meatyard, among others