This is the Everson
A Museum
of Firsts.

Manuel Matias was born in Puerto Rico and raised on New York City’s Lower East Side in the 1980s and 1990s, a time when drug addiction and violence made daily life a struggle. For Matias, art provided solace from the chaos that swirled around him. He remembers drawing on the walls of his apartment while waiting for his parents to come home and he remembers the attention of friends and neighbors who recognized his talent. Besides filling countless sketchbooks with graffiti designs, he also designed flyers for a neighbor’s hair-braiding business....

When the Syracuse Museum of Fine Arts opened in 1897, there were no clear policies in place about what the Museum should collect. Occupying space on the top floor of the Carnegie Library in downtown Syracuse, the Museum quickly filled up with everything from antique weaponry to Old Master paintings. This changed in 1911 when the Museum announced that it would focus on collecting American art. In 1916, Adelaide Alsop Robineau’s modest selection of porcelains began the ceramics collection. The founding of the Ceramic Nationals in 1932 made the Museum’s ceramics collection among the most prestigious in the nation. From this point onward, ceramics became the sole collection with a global mandate....

On view through October 20, 2024: When he was in college in the 1970s, Syracuse artist and entrepreneur Don Seymour named a series of ceramic landscape sculptures Clayscapes. This hybrid word, with roots in both the earth and the ceramic community that is built around shaping it, felt so powerful that when he founded his ceramic supply business in 1982, he also named it Clayscapes. This exhibition pays tribute to the powerful connection between artists and the world around them. From the large-scale pastoral sculptures of Robert Arneson to the diminutive cityscapes of Lidya Buzio, the Everson’s ceramic collection is filled with work that documents the joys and sorrows of humankind’s relationship with the Earth....