Highlighting Top Art Exhibitions On Campus This Fall

America’s colleges and universities have welcomed back students this fall and the hundreds of art museums on campus are open as well. Art museums at the nation’s institutions of higher learning are an invaluable cultural resource, bringing together great art from local creatives and those around the world. They display–often for free–objects and exhibitions which help challenge and shape perceptions, not only of their students, but community members at-large, many located in areas where no other in-person access to fine art exists.

Here are some of the best temporary exhibitions being presented by college and university art museums across the country this fall.

“Bob Thompson: This House Is Mine,” Colby College Museum of Art

Bob Thompson presents one of the most intriguing biographies in American art history. He was born in Louisville, Kentucky in 1937. A Black man in the South during Jim Crow. He would go on to study painting at the University of Louisville, spend a summer at the famed art colony on Provincetown, Massachusetts, move to New York, immerse himself in the Greenwich Village art, poet, jazz scene and travel widely through Europe. On his second European journey in 1965, Thompson and his wife settled in Rome where he died tragically in May 1966 of complications following surgery. 

He was 28-years-old.

Thompson was best know for his deep references to art history and the bold, un-naturalistic colors he composed his paintings from.

This exhibition represents the first major survey of Thompson’s work in more than two decades and features approximately 85 paintings and works on paper brought together from more than 20 public institutions and 25 private collections. 

“This House Is Mine,” can be seen at Colby College Museum of Art in Waterville, Maine through January 9, 2022.

“There Is a Woman in Every Color: Black Women in Art,” Bowdoin College Museum of Art

This examination of the representation of Black women in the United States over the past two centuries draws on more than sixty works of art, historical objects and artist books both from the Museum’s collection and on loan. The show confronts the history of marginalization and makes visible the presence of women of color in the history of American art. 

The show features works by a number of important 20th and 21st century artists, including: Elizabeth Catlett, Alma Thomas, Carrie Mae Weems, Betye Saar, Faith Ringgold, Kara Walker, Mickalene Thomas, Ja’Tovia Gary, LaToya Ruby Frazier, and Nyeema Morgan. Supporting these works are a selection of artifacts and ephemera, as well as 19th century works of art, that highlight the continuity of experiences of Black women in America.

“There Is a Woman in Every Color” can be seen at Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine through January 30, 2022.

“Ibrahim Ahmed: It Will Always Come Back to You,” Institute for Contemporary Art at Virginia Commonwealth University

Cairo-based artist Ibrahim Ahmed’s first solo museum show presents a selection of his work from 2013 to 2020 in a variety of media, including primarily textile-based sculpture, painting and photo collage. The exhibition also features a new, large sculpture commissioned by the ICA.

Born in Kuwait, Ahmed spent his childhood between Bahrain and Egypt before moving to the U.S. at the age of 13. Works in the exhibition explore the motivations – and myths – which compel migration from the Global South like the one his own family took.

The two most expansive works in the exhibition may be seen as a pair. Only Dreamers Leave (2016) and Does Any-body Leave Heaven (2019) are made of found textiles sewn together and supported by built structures.

Especially dramatic are a series of Ahmed’s fabric artworks fashioned as sails installed outside the building. The sails are fabricated from heavy, porous textiles associated with manual and domestic labor. Embroidered on the fabrics are gold patterns that refer to baroque and arabesque iron gates, symbols of wealth and status in Egypt.

“It Will Always Come Back to You,” remains on view at the Institute for Contemporary Art at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond through November 7.

“Elevation from Within: The Study of Art at Historically Black Colleges and Universities,” Wofford College Rosalind Sallenger Richardson Center for the Arts

Spartanburg, South Carolina’s The Johnson Collection’s annual collaboration with nearby Wofford College pays homage to HBCU alumni and professors whose educational backgrounds chronicle a vital chapter of American history and whose aesthetic achievements have made an indelible mark on this nation’s art.

The Johnson Collection is a treasure, possessing more than 1,000 items spanning the centuries which chronicle the cultural evolution of the American South. The Collection’s holdings are particularly noteworthy in paintings, with a special interest in female artists, Black artists, and Modern art. 

“Elevation from Within” can be seen at Spartanburg’s Wofford College through December 15. 

"Shadow to Substance," The Harn Museum of Art at the University of Florida

“Shadow to Substance” gives visual substance to Black lives through fifty-eight photographs. These include 16 new acquisitions illustrating a renewed aim of Black portraiture to express 21st century aspects of Black lives now. Additional photographs from the Harn Museum’s collection and University of Florida Smathers Library archives examine Jim Crow Florida, the Great Migration, and the Civil Rights Movement with works by Michna Bales, Bruce Davidson and Steve Schapiro, among others. The exhibition represents a chronological arc from the past to the present, and into the future by displaying historical photographs of Black lives and new work by Black photographers. 

“The photographs in this exhibition are at once provocation and inquiry, joy and inspection, reverie and pain, expansion into infinite,” exhibition co-curator Dr. Porchia Moore, University of Florida College of the Arts Department Head and Assistant Professor of Museum Studies, said. “’Shadow to Substance’ asks audiences to commit to the wisdom that there is abundance in Blackness.”

The exhibition’s title, Shadow to Substance, comes from 19th century activist Sojourner Truth (1797-1883). Truth sold her portraits during cross-country campaigns against slavery and wrote on the border of her photographs, “I Sell the Shadow to Support the Substance.” The purpose being: to have the ‘shadow’ (photograph) give substantive complexity to Black lives.

"Shadow to Substance" at The Harn Museum of Art in Gainesville will be on view through February 27, 2022.

“Toward Common Cause,” the Smart Museum of Art at the University of Chicago

“Toward Common Cause” is an expansive, multi-venue exhibition organized by the Smart Museum of Art in collaboration with more than two dozen exhibition, programmatic and research partner organizations at UChicago and across Chicago. The show explores the extent to which certain resources—air, land, water, and even culture—can be held in common raising questions about inclusion, exclusion, ownership, and rights of access, the exhibition considers art’s vital role in society as a call to vigilance, a way to bear witness, and a potential act of resistance.

It also marks the 40th anniversary of the MacArthur Fellows Program, the so-called “genius grant” run out of Chicago headquarters which awards $625,000 to individuals who show exceptional creativity in their work with the prospect for still more in the future.

As the main gallery venue for “Toward Common Cause,” the Smart Museum presents a group show that surveys the impacts of environmental racism and segregation on rural and urban geographies. The selected works—by Mark Bradford, Mel Chin, Nicole Eisenman, LaToya Ruby Frazier, Jeffrey Gibson and Julie Mehretu among others—address questions of the natural and built environment. Together, they examine the purported neutrality of landscape in the history of art as well as call for a reckoning with the ways in which race and class impact the layout of our cities

“Toward Common Cause” at the University of Chicago will be on view through December 19.

“Packaged Black: Derrick Adams and Barbara Earl Thomas,” Henry Art Gallery at University of Washington

“Packaged Black” brings together artists Derrick Adams and Barbara Earl Thomas in a collaborative, multi-media installation developed from their shared dialogue about representation, Black identity, and practices of cultural resistance. This exhibition is the culmination of a multi-year, cross-country exchange between New York-based Adams and Seattle-based Thomas that began after the two artists exhibited work alongside each other in a group show at the Savannah College of Art and Design in 2017.

“Packaged Black” can be seen at the University of Washington in Seattle from October 2 through May 1, 2022.

“The Sculpture of William Edmondson: Tombstones, Garden Ornaments, and Stonework,” Fisk University Galleries

This exhibition of stone carver William Edmondson, the first Black artist and first self-taught artist to receive a solo show at the Museum of Modern Art in New York has been previously reviewed in detail by Forbes.com.

“The Sculpture of William Edmondson” can be seen at the Fisk University Galleries in Nashville, Tennessee through October 31.