No Idle Hands gives museum visitors a chance to view the art and artifacts that reflect daily life in America's early history. The exhibition features highlights from WAM's newly acquired collection of more than 450 works of American folk art, including some of the best furniture, samplers, hunting decoys and lures, and corner store paraphernalia from the new collection. It tells the story of America's past while also foregrounding the beautiful materials and craftsmanship of many of these objects. Wichita Art…

Wichita Art Museum's unique collection of Pre-Columbian art and artifacts was collected by Haig Kurdian between 1954-1959 during expeditions into Mexico and Costa Rica. The collection is mostly pottery, a few pieces of metal, carved shells, and precious stones. In Mesoamerican culture, pottery was appreciated as an artistic medium--a way people could express emotions and ideas--not solely as a utilitarian material. To make ceramic art, these ancient peoples gathered clay from local sources and formed shapes using only their hands…

The term salon style derives from the exhibition of the French Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture, which began in 1667 in Paris. In order to display work by all the Academy's students, the paintings were hung as close as possible from floor to ceiling. In the nineteenth century, this salon-style hanging became increasingly popular across Europe and in the United States. The gallery has been transformed into an American salon featuring remarkable 19th-century paintings from the museum's permanent collection.…

Dr. Robert Burnstein, a Detroit psychiatrist, began collecting glass in the 1980s. He was attracted to American glass of the 19th and 20th centuries because, as he stated, "it was a time when handcrafted expertise and precision craftsmanship were the benchmarks of the American glass industry." Soon he came to find that among American companies, the glass produced by Steuben was unsurpassed in quality, color intensity, and breadth of design. Therefore, he focused his collecting first on Steuben, then on…

The technologies developed in Silicon Valley have intrigued and inspired artistic experimentation for more than three decades and pave a way toward the future. Almost Human: Digital Art from the Permanent Collection highlights artists who use digital and emergent technologies from custom computer electronics and early robotics to virtual reality and artificial intelligence. Artists in the exhibition include Andrea Ackerman, Jim Campbell, Ian Cheng, Petra Cortright, Mark Hansen and Ben Rubin, Zara Houshmand and Tamiko Thiel, Tony Oursler, Alan Rath, Jacolby Satterwhite,…

Closing date is tentative and subject to change. Place, Nations, Generations, Beings: 200 Years of Indigenous North American Art emphasizes a multiplicity of Indigenous voices and experiences through more than 75 artworks dating from the early 19th century to the present. This student-curated exhibition—the first exhibition of Indigenous art to bring together objects from the Yale University Art Gallery, the Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History, and the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library—showcases basketry, beadwork, textiles, pottery, drawings, photography,…

Closing date is tentative and subject to change. In 1952, while a student at La Esmeralda—Mexico’s national school of art—American artist John Wilson (1922–2015) painted a powerful mural that he titled The Incident. The fresco depicted a scene of a racial-terror lynching at the hands of the Ku Klux Klan, as witnessed by a young African American family. Although the mural is no longer extant, this exhibition brings together publicly for the first time nearly all of Wilson’s known preparatory sketches…

Raven and the Box of Daylight features the astounding glass art of Preston Singletary. The exhibition explores the Tlingit story of Raven and how the bird brings light to the world through the stars, moon, and sun. Singletary’s remarkable works—more than 50 glass sculptures including a monumental glass canoe, glass paddles, and glass river—are joined by audio and video elements to create a dynamic, multi-sensory environment. The exhibition takes visitors on an experiential journey following the transformation of darkness into…