Charles Russell was one of the great painters of the American West. With little formal training but much firsthand experience of his subject, he captured the western landscape in all of its wild and nostalgic moments. In 1880, when he was only 16, Russell went to Montana for the first time to work on a family friend’s ranch. Ranch life was not for Russell, but he would stay in Montana for two years working for a hunter and trapper. He…

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…

Every work of art has a story to tell. When John Steuart Curry was growing up in on his family farm near Dunavant, Kansas, he would often wander into the high fields of corn. "I remember," he wrote, "wandering through them and being over-powered by the fear of being  lost in their green confines." At 35 years of age, Curry returned to those fields to capture in his work the same sense of drama he felt, "beneath our windblown Kansas…

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,…

Fashion and portraiture have always been intertwined. Particularly in images of women, clothes are used as a shorthand to describe the sitter’s personality—is she respectable and old-fashioned, over-the-top and risqué, or no-nonsense and capable? What She Wore features nineteenth and twentieth-century portraits of women from the permanent collection, wearing everything from evening gowns to shirtdresses. Each portrait explores different ideals and conceptions of femininity, urging us to—in the words of Coco Chanel—“look for the woman in the dress. If there…