July 11, 2019–January 5, 2020, Center Gallery The hit Broadway musical Hamilton sparked renewed interest in the Founding Father and his relationship with Aaron Burr, whom he infamously dueled with on July 11, 1804. Opening on the 215th anniversary of the duel, our exhibit picks up where Lin-Manuel Miranda’s musical left off and examines how Alexander Hamilton’s and Burr’s legacies were shaped by other Founding Fathers, a wife, a daughter, historical documents, and yes, even an enormously successful, modern-day musical. The continuously…

The work of internationally renowned artist Pae White transcends nearly all traditional boundaries—between art and design, craft and fine art, architecture and installation, theory and practice. Her probing curiosity with the world manifests in her transformation of ordinary objects and phenomena—chandeliers, clocks, popcorn, tapestries, birdsongs, fog, smoke—into exhilarating experiences that defy logic yet remain oddly familiar. Always kinaesthetic—as much a bodily as visual experience that plays with the senses—her work is as alluring as it is ambiguous, suggesting that things…

Light & Shadow: Alyson Shotz and Kumi Yamashita features the work of two sculptors who create work of ethereal beauty. Alyson Shotz strings silvered glass beads on steel thread and hangs her nets and skeins in floor-to-ceiling installations. A critic remarked that her work “approaches invisibility.” In it, the solid materials of most sculptures are replaced by air and light. Kumi Yamashita presents ordinary objects that cast extraordinary shadows. Under raking light, a wall with a seemingly random scattering of…

Coffee and Cocktails brings together vintage furniture, designer clothes, and elegant decorative arts objects to explore the fashionable worlds of teatime and cocktail hour in the 19th and 20th centuries. The first part of the exhibition centers on tea and coffee—two hot beverages that went from exotic imports to everyday necessities over the course of the 1800s, inspiring specialized tableware, furniture, and clothing. The second half of the exhibition takes the viewer from day to evening, and features the barware, furniture, and clothing…

September 6, 2019–January 5, 2020 This exhibition considers the career of William Bailey (B.F.A. 1955, M.F.A. 1957), the Kingman Brewster Professor Emeritus of Art at Yale, through a focused survey of the artist’s paintings, drawings, and prints. Special emphasis is given to Bailey’s still-life paintings in oil, including the Yale University Art Gallery’s Still Life—Table with Ochre Wall (1972), an outstanding example of the artist’s signature style. Known for his meditative canvases depicting objects and figures painted from memory, Bailey…

September 6, 2019–January 5, 2020 Drawn from a recent gift to the Yale University Art Gallery, this exhibition showcases the technical knowledge, artistic skill, and visual imagination on display in the ceremonial clothing of those living in Guizhou, Sichuan, Hunan, Yunnan, and other provinces of southwestern China. While the Han people make up more than 90 percent of the inhabitants of China, the individuals who created the textiles on display identify as some of the 55 other groups, which are distinguished…

An exhibition of contemporary art about the movement of people across the globe and the welcome cracks that develop in our notions of borders and nation states. how the light gets in and its accompanying programs, while impossible to be comprehensive, are about hope at a time in which migration has become one of the most pressing issues for humanity. Artists can make the heavily mediated mass-migration crisis more tangible, representing often difficult and controversial ideas, and playing a critical…