Upcoming Exhibitions

This exhibition explores Tonalism in the United States from the 1880s to the early 20th century, through artists from the Northeast such as George Inness, John Henry Twachtman, and John Francis Murphy. Tonalism is a transitional movement that grew out of and reacted to the Hudson River School of painting and laid the groundwork for modernism. Evocative landscapes, evoking a spiritual connection to the natural world, often painted from memory, are the primary genre of this movement. The more than fifty artworks in this exhibition are drawn from private and institutional collections.

Image: Bruce Crane, Sunset, n.d., oil on canvas. Private Collection, Connecticut

Environmental threats and climate change are urgent matters of concern at Jesuit universities, where conversations on this topic often take place in reference to two documents by Pope Francis: Laudato Si’: On Care for Our Common Home (2015) and the 2023 update Laudate Deum. Artists play an indispensable role in our collective response to climate change. To See This Place, curated by Al Miner and David Brinker, will present work by Athena LaTocha, Mary Mattingly, and Tyler Rai, three contemporary artists whose outlook resonates with the themes of Laudato Si’ and Laudate Deum. Embodying a breadth of personal, geographic, and cultural backgrounds, the three artists create works strongly associated with a sense of place, whether specific or imaginary. They employ media as diverse as photography, sculpture, video, and painting, and often incorporate materials sourced from particular locales. Yet the artists draw forth broader themes from this particularity, critiquing political and economic systems that perpetuate destructive self-interest and drawing attention to people who have been marginalized and historically excluded or harmed. The works are artistically compelling yet can inspire us to creativity and boldness in our efforts to address climate change. 

This exhibition will open at Saint Louis University's Museum of Contemporary Religious Art, Fall 2025.

Image: Mary Mattingly, Saltwater, 2022, chromogenic dye coupler print. Courtesy of the artist © Mary Mattingly

This exhibition will present some of the highlights of the collection of Ireland’s Great Hunger Museum. This remarkable collection investigates the Irish Famine of 1845-1852 and its impact through art, by some of the most eminent Irish and Irish-American artists of the past 170 years.

James Arthur O’Connor, Scene in Connemara, 1828, oil on canvas. Courtesy of the Ireland’s Great Hunger Museum

Austrian-born Trude Fleischmann (1895-1990) was one of the most accomplished female photographers of the 20th century. After great success in Vienna in the 20s photographing artists, models, and performers, she fled the Anschluss in 1938, first to Paris and then New York. She opened a studio on Fifth Avenue in 1940 and photographed many of the artists and intellectuals of the day, including Eleanor Roosevelt and Albert Einstein. This exhibition will include loans from the Wien Museum in Vienna, Austria, private collections, and the New York Public Library, as well as never-before-exhibited works from family collections.

This exhibition features 12 quilts created by men who are incarcerated in the Louisiana State Penitentiary, also known as Angola Prison. These works of art, and accompanying recorded interviews, tell the story of a unique inside-outside quilt collaboration. The exhibition focuses our attention on the quilt creators, people often forgotten by society when discussing the history of the U.S. criminal justice system. Also on view in the gallery will be a selection of works from the permanent collection of the CT Prison Arts Program. Initiated in 1978, it is one of the longest-running projects of its kind in the United States.

Image: Zulu, Etienne, Mutulu Shakur, Maureen Kelleher, James Baldwin: Quote #3, How Can I Believe What You Say When I See What You Do?, 2019, cotton fabric. Courtesy the artist

Monuments: Commemoration and Controversy explores monuments and their representations in public spaces as flashpoints of fierce debate over national identity, politics, and race that have raged for centuries. Offering a historical foundation for understanding today’s controversies, the exhibition features fragments of a statue of King George III torn down by American Revolutionaries, a souvenir replica of a bulldozed monument by Harlem Renaissance sculptor Augusta Savage, and a maquette of New York City’s first public monument to a Black woman, Harriet Tubman, among other objects from the Museum’s collection. The exhibition reveals how monument-making and monument-breaking have long shaped American life as public statues have been celebrated, attacked, protested, altered, and removed. 

Curated by Wendy Nālani E. Ikemoto, senior curator of American Art, The New York Historical

Image: Johannes Adam Simon Oertel, Pulling Down the Statue of King George III, New York City, 1852-1853. Oil on canvas. Gift of Samuel V. Hoffman. The New York Historical, 1925.6

This exhibition will focus on depictions of the American flag over the course of the last century, ranging from the straightforwardly patriotic to overtly political works that interrogate just who the American flag represents, and whether justice is available to all. It will include works ranging from Childe Hassam’s Italian Day, May 1918 (which is being lent by the Art Bridges Foundation) to a new textile work by Maria de Los Angeles commissioned for the exhibition, in media including paintings, prints, drawings, photographs, sculpture, and a work in digital animation.

For Which it Stands… joins a campus-wide series of cultural and visual and performing arts events being presented as part of the national celebrations surrounding the semiquincentennial (250th anniversary) of the founding of the United States of America on July 4, 1776. The festivities on the Fairfield University campus will embody the motto of E pluribus unum by combining our many programs and activities into one single united semester of celebrations on the theme of the anniversary.

This exhibition is curated by Museum Director Carey Mack Weber.

Image: Sara Rahbar, I don’t trust you any more, Flag #59, 2019, mixed media, collected vintage objects, on vintage US flag. Courtesy of the artist © Sara Rahbar

This exhibition will explore the enduring fascination with ancient Egyptian art and culture (dubbed “Egyptomania” by 19th-century Europeans) through a selection of ancient artifacts, paintings, prints, photographs, and decorative art ranging from the early 19th century through the present day. These objects, from the humble to the refined, from the shamelessly commercial to the Afrofuturist, represent the range of artistic responses to – and misconceptions about – ancient Egyptian visual culture. Paradoxically, this enthusiasm for Egyptian symbols and motifs contributed to the erasure of the ancient Egyptian people themselves, as their beliefs and customs became exoticized in popular memory. The exhibition will examine how these objects reflect the phenomenon of “Egyptomania” during the last two centuries, and will position their over-simplified or stereotypical narratives in conversation with current archeological understanding about ancient Egyptian culture. 

The exhibition is curated by Megan Paqua (adjunct instructor of ancient Egyptian archaeology and art history and Fairfield University Art Museum Registrar). It will be the third exhibition co-curated with Fairfield University undergraduate students participating in the upcoming Fall 2025 Museum Exhibition seminar course.

Image: Charles-Theodore Frère, Along the Nile, ca. 1870, oil on panel. Gift of Michael T. Vigario, ’08, 2023.11.01

This exhibition focuses on more than 40 recent works by contemporary photographer James Welling (American, born 1951). From the artist’s Cento and Personae series, these photographs of ancient sites in Italy and Greece, as well as antiquities found in museums around the world, were subjected to digital and painterly manipulation by the artist to achieve transformative effects. The photographs will be exhibited alongside a selection from the Museum’s extensive historic plaster cast collection of Greek and Roman sculpture.

As Welling explains, he is interested in “reanimating” the men and women of the ancient past through these works, and connecting them to our own time in a fresh way through his innovative combination of photography and painting. Visitors to the exhibition will feel their curiosity piqued by his elusive and often haunting evocations of the ancient Mediterranean world.

Image: James Welling, Portrait of Kore 679, 2021, oil on laser print. Courtesy of the artist. © James Welling