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The Springfield Art Museum’s permanent collection contains over 10,000 objects in nearly all media. The works selected for this exhibition were chosen for their ability to reveal the ways in which artists respond to and reveal our cultural identity as Americans. There is no singular or fixed American identity. American art and history is shaped by multiple perspectives, stories, and experiences, and as such, this exhibition aims to present a multiplicity of views within the wider context of historical moments. The exhibition includes 75 works from as wide an array of artistic voices as possible within our current collection, including even more works by women, people of color, Native Americans, and LGBTQ+ communities. This exhibit includes major work by George Caleb Bingham, Asher B. Durand, Jackson Pollock, Wayne Thiebaud, and Alison Saar, among many others.

In "De Pictura" (On Painting, 1435), Italian Renaissance theorist Leon Battista Alberti instructed painters to consider the frame of the painting as an open window. This treatise served as a defining concept for theories of painting, architecture, and moving pictures going forward. The works in this exhibition either follow or challenge the metaphor of Alberti’s window, but also provide an intellectual space in which we might consider how our own views are framed and with what perspective. This exhibition is pulled from the Museum's permanent collection.

This is the 61st exhibition of "Watercolor USA," a national, annual juried exhibition recognizing the very best in contemporary American watermedia painting. This year's exhibit is selected by Kevin Umaña, co-founder of The Ekru Project, a Kansas City-based artist-run gallery focused on contemporary, emerging, and historically excluded artists. Approximately $20,000 in cash prizes, possible Museum purchase awards, and artist materials are available. Additional support for "Watercolor USA" is provided by the Watercolor USA Honor Society and the Southwest Missouri Museum Associates.

You are invited to engage with the participatory exhibition, "Yoko Ono: Mend Piece" (Andrea Rosen Gallery, New York City version), from the Rennie Collection, Vancouver. Ono proposes communal mending as an act of healing. Participants are asked to mend shattered fragments of cups and saucers together using common household items: twine, glue, scissors, and tape. The resulting works are displayed on nearby shelves, evidence of the power of collective action. "Mend Piece" embraces the metaphor of the ancient Japanese art of Kintsugi, a technique of repairing broken or cracked pottery using brushstrokes of gold and silver, a philosophy that treats the breakage and repair as part of the object’s history - an important and precious detail, rather than something to disguise. This exhibition is organized by the American Federation of Arts (AFA). The presentation of Yoko Ono's "Mend Piece" is part of Art Room, an ongoing series of contemporary art installations organized by the AFA.