Calendar

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.

The Springfield Art Museum, like any organization, is supported by a wide variety of staff roles. It takes everyone from security to custodial, curatorial to education, and development to administration to keep the Museum running smoothly. Regardless of job duties, everyone at the Museum works in some capacity alongside the permanent collection. Does this impact our relationship with the art objects on view? What connections with art have we made as we secure the building, manage contracts, coordinate facility repairs, and write grants? This exhibit seeks to answer these questions by highlighting the people who keep the Museum moving forward including staff, board, and committee members, as illustrated through a range of objects they’ve selected from the Museum’s collection. This exhibition is the first in a series ("Humanities") that seeks to connect disparate works in the Museum’s collection with a wide range of community members.

What sparks a connection between you and a work of art? Is it color? Is it form? Is it story? What moves you to look longer? This exhibition began with these questions, and more specifically, directing these questions towards the Museum’s collection of over 10,000 objects. To seek answers to these questions, our curator invited three local artists in different disciplines – musician Jin J X, poet Kate Murr, and dancer Sarah Wilcoxon - to tour the Museum’s vaults and look at art together. Each artist has selected a group of objects from the collection and their selections are exhibited alongside new work each artist has created in their own medium in response to, and inspired by, the collection objects. This exhibition is the second in a series that seeks to connect disparate works in the Museum’s collection with a wide range of community members, facilitated and organized by our Curator of Art, Sarah Buhr.