CURRENT EXHIBITIONS

Founded in 1923, the Scholastic Art Awards are the nation’s longest-running and most prestigious educational initiative supporting student achievement in the arts. Every year, students across the country in grades 7-12 are invited to enter original works of art in regional competitions. This year, over 2,500 students representing over 100 Central New York schools submitted 5,673 works of art, which was then judged by professional artists, educators, and photographers. The judges award first place (Gold Key), second place (Silver Key), honorable mentions, and special award honorees. Gold Key winners move on to compete at the national level, while a small selection of the Silver Key winners are displayed at the Everson.

In this recent series of paintings, Cazenovia-based artist Jim Ridlon creates impressionistic portraits of gardens that are poetic meditations on the passage of time and the impermanence of nature.

Since acquiring its first works by Adelaide Alsop Robineau in 1916, the Everson Museum of Art has built one of the finest collections of art pottery in the world. Renegades and Reformers revolves around two common personality types among potters: the “renegades” who embarked on highly personal artistic quests that pushed clay and glaze to their limits, and the “reformers,” whose modern designs and social attitudes pushed back against Victorian mores.

Syracuse-based Iroquois China began as a manufacturer of Victorian fine china, but produced revolutionary dinnerware in the postwar era by designers like Russel Wright and Ben Seibel. Casual China showcases modernist designs produced by Iroquois China, Homer Laughlin, the Hall China Company and others.

In 1911, the Syracuse Museum of Fine Arts (known today as the Everson) made history as the first museum in the country to declare that it would focus on collecting works made by American artists. This decision, implemented by Museum Director Fernando Carter, was the first of many made by directors that ultimately defined the Everson’s collection as it exists today. This exhibition examines over one hundred years of the Museum’s collecting priorities, from the Museum’s earliest acquisitions in 1911 to work acquired in 2019.

For British artist Gareth Mason, porcelain is an all-consuming obsession. His lusty manipulation of clay is brought full-circle through the metamorphic power of fire. His surfaces seethe, buckle, and ooze with a tectonic force that reflects his own passion for process. This exhibition is a partnership with the Syracuse University School of Art, with additional support from Laguna Clay Company.

In celebration of the Everson’s 50th anniversary, the museum commissioned Thomas Spoerndle to create a site-specific wall drawing. Spoerndle was selected because of his interest in scale, geometric abstraction, and the ways his work creates a dialogue with artworks in the Museum’s Collection as well as architect I.M. Pei’s museum design.

In celebration of the Everson’s 50th anniversary, the Museum commissioned Elliott Katz to create site-specific installations for the spaces that architect I.M. Pei designed as planters. Katz was selected for the commission because of how his work engages with the significance of materials and questions how we form relationships to those materials, as well as his interest in contrasting the Modernist belief in controlling nature against the Wabi sabi belief in the fundamental uncontrollability of nature. Using natural and synthetic materials, photography, scale, and illusion, Katz’s serious and playful installations transform familiar objects into curious mysteries that defy simple categorization and ignite our imagination.