2024 Exhibits

Follow

• 

  American Ideals in Tension: The Sublime vs. Manifest Destiny

  November 22, 2024 - June 30, 2025
  

  This exhibit illustrates how late nineteenth-century American culture romanticized the unexplored western territories while simultaneously promoting the religious conviction known as Manifest Destiny. Ultimately, Manifest Destiny became the dominant ideology, leading to the tragic and widespread genocide of American indigenous peoples. The development of American society as we know it today is inseparable from the violence and murder of thousands of indigenous peoples.

• 

  Miranda Holmes: Bright Bones

  October 28 - December 8, 2024
  Miranda Holmes (b. 1994) embraces expansive notions of identity and intimacy in her paintings, drawings, and installations. Her work speculates on how we shape one another and the places we inhabit. Using transparent films of paint, Holmes layers the shapes of everyday objects and experiences within figures, entangling them with the cups they hold, the drawers they open, and the shoulders they lean on. Bright Bones features work created by the artist over the last two years, including during her time in Berlin, Germany under a DAAD Fellowship in the Arts. Each work attends to thresholds of interaction that mark a relationship in flux. Holmes paints the edges between subject matter as active and buzzing. Subjects and objects seep into one another, destabilizing the Self/Other binary for a fluid vision of experience. Gestures of care and conflict lodge within bodies like memory calcifying into bone. The show underlines painting as a site for textures of intimacy to spark, wrestle, grow, or diminish within a single moment. Artist Talk: Monday, October 28, 2024, 4:30pm EDT in the Peeler Art Center, Auditorium

• 

  Hidden Treasures: Objects from DePauw University Art Collections

  August 28 - February 9, 2024
  As part of the “Hidden Treasures” series, objects from the art collection will be on view periodically in Peeler’s second-floor display case. Students, faculty, staff, and the general public will have a chance to see the gems which are a part of DePauw’s art collection.

• 

  Art as Propaganda

  August 26 - November 15, 2024
  

  For centuries, art has been used as propaganda, spreading political messages through vibrant colors and cultural iconography. From as early as 515 B.C.E., with the creation of Persia’s Behistun Inscription, to now, propaganda has helped nations win wars, supported dictators and democracies, and spurred political agendas. The propaganda posters in this case are from Russia, China, and the United States, and they show how art has been used to promote agendas and how different governments implement this centuries-old tool. Curated by DePauw University student Abigail Fathauer class of 2025.

• 

  Beyond: Tapestry Expanded

  August 26 - December 8, 2024
  Beyond: Tapestry Expanded is a curated and juried exhibition that features work from artists exploring the expansive properties of tapestry. Using the definition of tapestry as a nonfunctional, handwoven pictorial structure, artists combine both hand and digital processes, using non-traditional materials, creating three-dimensional forms, or incorporating multi-media components, including sound and video. The exhibition is organized by the American Tapestry Alliance, curated by Erica Warren, art consultant, scholar, and former curator at the Art Institute of Chicago, and juried by Jade Yumang, Associate Professor of Fiber & Material Studies at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and Alexa Griffith Winton, art historian and curator at the Cooper Hewitt Museum. Tapestry Workshop: Saturday, September 28, 2024, 1 - 4pm EDT at the Peeler Art Center, Lobby

• 

  From the Prosser Collection Collection Connections: Chaos, Culture, & Contours

  August 26 - December 8, 2024
  Featured in this student curated exhibition, Collection Connections: Chaos, Culture, & Contours, is a small portion of a print collection donated by David Prosser, class of '65. The curators saw the themes listed in the exhibition title as prevalent in the pieces of art, as well as having connections with Prosser's life.To view the exhibition virtually, go here

• 

  Senior Thesis Exhibition

  April 19 - May 18, 2024
  Come view the tremendous accomplishments of DePauw University’s art students in the Senior Art Exhibition. Each student will present a brief statement about what inspired their creative explorations during the opening event. Stay for refreshments and the opportunity to talk to the artists individually. Exhibition Seniors: Elise Monroe, Alondra Perez, Hayato Takeshita, Mya Wood

• 

  Cindy O'Dell: stories

  March 4 - April 7, 2024
  Not only are stories a central aspect of our shared humanity, they can dispel stereotypes, expose inequities, and illuminate unjust power systems. This exhibition, stories, chronicles several decades of Cindy O’Dell’s documentary photography. The exhibit is curated in conjunction with O’Dell’s in progress textbook, Documentary Photography: A Creative Guidebook. With each image, she attempts to undo the document even as she makes a new one, thereby continually testing the limits of the form and challenging its rules. Using methods such as re-photography, memoir, videos, photo-fabric transfer, non-narrative video, photobooks, word and image combinations, and archival research, she builds layers of content and context. As a professor of art, she hopes to inspire students to tell their own stories, especially those at risk of being lost, ignored, or silenced. All stories matter.