Upcoming Exhibitions

This exhibition examines depictions of the American flag through 75 works by a perse group of artists, beginning during WWI with Childe Hassam’s Italian Day, May 1918 and continuing to the present day, including a textile sculpture commissioned for the show from Maria de Los Angeles. The exhibition includes work in a variety of media by artists including Jasper Johns, Faith Ringgold, Robert Rauschenberg, Shepard Fairey, and Julie Mehretu, and challenges viewers to consider who the American flag truly represents and whether justice is available to all.

For Which it Stands… forms part of America250: The Promise and Paradox, an initiative through which Fairfield University Explores 250 Years of the American Experiment.

Curator: Carey Mack Weber, Executive Director, Fairfield University Art Museum
Faculty Liaison: Aaron Weinstein, PhD, Assistant Professor of Politics

Image: Sara Rahbar, I don’t trust you anymore, 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 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). 

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