This is the Everson
A Museum
of Firsts.

The Everson has a long history of working with important contemporary artists. Over the last 58 years, the Everson has produced solo exhibitions for Yoko Ono, Morris Louis, Joan Mitchell, Bill Viola, William Wegman, Carrie Mae Weems, and a host of artists who loom large on the world stage. No exhibition in the Everson's history can compare to New Works in Clay by Contemporary Painters and Sculptors, a 1976 exhibition that involved bringing well-known painters and sculptors to Syracuse to produce a body of work in ceramics. The project was the brainchild of Margie Hughto, who served as both a professor at Syracuse University and as a curator at the Everson....

"Neither Here nor Elsewhere" features works Renqian Yang made in her home studio in Oswego and during residencies in China and North Carolina, all deeply rooted in place while simultaneously reflecting porcelain’s ubiquity and universality. Yang makes porcelain a vehicle for inquiry, reflection, and self-expression. She brings together organic and constructed forms, personal experience and collective histories, her work exploring how emotions persist, transform, and connect humanity across time, place, and culture....

Consequences of being brings together large-format paintings, works on paper, and— for the first time in Deborah Roberts’ career—ceramic sculpture. The exhibition marks a significant expansion of the Austin, Texas–based artist’s practice and a deepening investigation into the histories and legacies of colonialism. Roberts, who received her MFA from Syracuse University, uses collage to approach identity as something fragmented and continually reconstructed, reclaiming found materials and images to examine how Black bodies are seen, positioned, and understood globally....

New York-based artist Amy Lincoln (b. 1981) paints dreamy, atmospheric landscapes and seascapes recalling her childhood under the overcast skies of the Pacific Northwest. At once tranquil and vibrant, otherworldly and familiar, Lincoln’s imagined scenes of radiant suns, calm seas, and vivid foliage present a stylized version of the natural world in every color of the rainbow. An exploration of the phenomena of light reflection and refraction, Fractured Light is Lincoln’s first solo museum exhibition....

For many people, personal identity flows naturally from their families, the objects they grew up with, and the physical place they are rooted in. These small puzzle pieces connect to construct one’s personality and sense of self. For others, notions of self and identity are more fluid and mysterious—a sum total that is somehow different from its constituent parts. Artist Rich Harrington has spent his career grappling with his own identity and the ways it has been shaped by popular culture....

We remember Beatrice Wood, who signed her pithy correspondence as “Beato,” for her cutting wit, outrageous stories, lustrous ceramics, and complex relationship with artist Marcel Duchamp, a leader of the Dada movement. Determined to resist the life her wealthy parents envisioned for her, Wood became a defining figure of New York City’s Dada scene, embracing the art movement that reveled in absurdity, nonsense, and humor....

The American story is a tangle of aspiration and contradiction, triumph and struggle, liberty and oppression. From the nation’s founding, rebels, radicals, and revolutionaries have shaped the course of American history, not only through acts of courage and innovation, but through challenging convention and questioning authority. This exhibition presents artists whose works reflect that journey, celebrating moments of courage and progress while also confronting inequity and inaction....

With their lustrous surfaces and evocative shapes, the ceramic works of Brooklyn-based artist Julia Kunin aim for maximum sensory overload. Kunin forges disparate influences like Art Deco, Surrealism, and queer abstraction into shimmering ceramic sculptures. For Kunin, discovery and free association reign supreme. Kunin’s mental process echoes her physical process, ping-ponging from one concept to the next....