Joiri Minaya: Unseeing the Tropics at the Museum
Emily and Joe Lowe Galleries
January 21-May 10, 2025
Joiri Minaya: Unseeing the Tropics at the Museum brings together artwork by the acclaimed New York City-based Dominican artist and objects from the collection to examine how Minaya critiques Western ideas of tropicality, which are rooted in otherness and exoticism. Through these comparisons, the exhibition explores how nature, landscape, culture, and race have been historically constructed and deployed as tropes in visual culture.
This exhibition is curated by Cristina E. Pardo Porto, assistant professor of Latinx Literatures and Cultures in the department of Languages, Literatures, and Linguistics.
Faculty Fellows Curate
Emily and Joe Lowe Galleries
January 21-May 10, 2025
In Summer 2022, the Syracuse University Art Museum launched a Faculty Fellows program to support innovative curriculum development, experiential learning, and the fuller integration of the museum’s collection into academic life at the University. The program focuses on object-based teaching and research, which is active and student-centered. This exhibition features artworks that the 2024-2025 Faculty Fellows, Lyndsay Gratch (Communication and Rhetorical Studies) and Elizabeth Wimer (Management), will teach with during the Spring 2025 semester.
“The Earth Laughs in Flowers” ~ Plants in the Syracuse University Art Museum
James F. White Gallery
January 21-May 10, 2025
Drawing upon Ralph Waldo Emerson’s famous line “the earth laughs in flowers” from his poem, “Hamatreya” (1846), this exhibition explores images of plants, as well as plant-based objects, in the collections of the Syracuse University Art Museum. This exhibition is co-curated by senior art history majors under the supervision of Professor Romita Ray (Art and Music Histories), in collaboration with Melissa Yuen, PhD and Kate Holohan, PhD. It is the outcome of the annual art history Senior Seminar taught in the College of Arts and Sciences.
Surrealism and Photography: “Where I Dream, It is Awake”
James F. White Gallery
January 21-May 10, 2025
This exhibition examines the role of Surrealism in modern photography, tracking the movement’s love of chance, fragmentation, and uncanny dream imagery from its origins in Paris to Britain, Mexico, and Japan over the course of the 20th century. Curated by graduate students in the Department of Art & Music Histories under the direction of Sam Johnson (associate professor and director of graduate studies in Art History), the exhibition features photographs from collections of the SU Art Museum alongside Surrealist books and periodicals from the Special Collections Research Center of the Syracuse University Libraries.
Fruits of Their Labor: Work and Leisure at the Syracuse University Art Museum
Permanent Collection and Luise and Morton Kaish Galleries
January 21-May 10, 2025
Fruits of Their Labor seeks to reexamine depictions of labor and leisure in the Syracuse University Art Museum’s permanent collection. The COVID-19 pandemic exposed systemic problems in the workplace, mirroring the societal shifts in the labor industry during the Great Depression. Through thematic groupings such as those that depict women’s work in and out of the home or behind the scenes views into the entertainment industry, this exhibition challenges conventional depictions of labor.
Space and the Sacred: Letterio Calapai’s Prints
Lubin House, New York City
February 10–June 5, 2025
Between the 1940s and his death in 1993, printmaker and art educator Letterio Calapai produced dozens of prints examining outer space and Catholic subjects. By focusing on these two seemingly disparate subjects, this exhibition explores how Calapai sought to understand the changing world around him by placing the Space Race in conversation with the late-20th-century cultural shifts.
This exhibition is curated by Julia Neufeld, G’24.