- Open today, 10 am to 5 pm.
- Parking & Directions
- Free Admission
August 23, 2023
Fall Arts Preview
The Chrysler Museum of Art is proud to announce its Fall Arts Preview.
Heather Beardsley: Strange Plants
Heather Beardsley (American), Strange Plants, Kyiv, 2020, Collage and embroidery on found textile, ©Heather Beardsley
On view June 30–October 29, 2023
Located in the Frank Photography Gallery
In her series Strange Plants, Heather Beardsley works across a range of media such as found photography and textiles, embroidery, image transfer, sculpture, and video to create scenes of architecture seemingly reclaimed by wild vegetal overgrowth. These eerie depictions express the sublime power of nature against the manmade, evoking current dialogues on climate change and the environment. With postcards and textiles found in local flea markets across Europe, Beardsley juxtaposes structures with encroaching flora, using embroidery to challenge the pejorative confines of “decorative art” or “craft.” In a time when cities are growing at an unprecedented rate, nuclear tensions are at a post-Cold War high, and the effects of climate change seem more pronounced every year, Beardsley’s plant “invasions” pose questions instead of providing answers, ultimately showing that even from the brink of environmental disaster nature can fight back, and new life will grow.
This exhibition is organized by the Chrysler Museum of Art.
Reckonings and Reconstructions: Southern Photography from the Do Good Fund
Peyton Fulford (American, b. 1994), Becoming One (Annie and Trevor), 2016, Archival pigment print, The Do Good Fund, Inc., 2017-138, © Peyton Fulford
On view August 11–November 5, 2023
Located in the Special Exhibition Gallery
This exhibition asks questions that identify and complicate conventional ideas of the “American South” and “southern photography” by resisting stereotypes and instead projecting the enigmatic, ever-changing qualities of the region and its people. The exhibition highlights a wide-ranging group of photographers from the Do Good Fund—diverse in gender, race, and ethnicity. Photographs by seventy-three artists, including Gordon Parks, Sheila Pree Bright, Mark Steinmetz, Michael Stipe, and William Christenberry showcase both established and emerging names in photography. Reckonings and Reconstructions navigates the connection between nature and culture in the South. The photographs’ imagery draw from historical legacies where despair and hope, terror and beauty, pain and joy, and indignity and dignity commingle.
The exhibition is organized by the Georgia Museum of Art, Athens, Georgia.
Jaime Guerrero: Dendrolatry
Jaime Guerrero, Dendrolatry, Blown, sculpted, and flame-work glass, Photo courtesy of the artist
On View September 26, 2023–January 21, 2024
Located in the Glass Projects Space
Through his large-scale glass sculptures, Jaime Guerrero has explored issues of identity and belonging, seeking to highlight the human dimension of our fraught contemporary American social and political climate. For this new and site-specific installation, Guerrero has created a glass tree using blown, sculpted, and flame-worked elements. Drawing inspiration from personal experiences, as well as from folklore, myth, ritual, and spirituality, Guerrero creates a communal environment that brings people together for reflection and healing. As visitors explore the installation, Guerrero invites them to engage with a response station located within the gallery. This space provides an opportunity for visitors to leave messages, heartfelt notes, or even prayers, whether they are directed toward ancestors, loved ones, or others who have been lost.
Charles Atlas: Selected Videos 1987–2015
Charles Atlas (American, b. 1949), DANCENOISE In A Museum?, 2015, Video, Duration: 8:45 minutes, © Charles Atlas; Courtesy of the artist and Luhring Augustine, New York.
On view September 22, 2023–March 24, 2024
Located in The Box
Charles Atlas: Selected Video, 1987-2015 features three works by pioneering video artist Charles Atlas (American, b. 1949), highlighting his fifty-year career and the diversity of his collaborations, subjects, and styles from the late 1980s to 2010s. The series is situated at nexus of performance and video in contemporary art. As Seen on TV (1987) was commissioned by PBS for the series ‘Alive from Off Center’. Bill Irwin stars as an aspiring actor who comes for a casting call and wanders into an empty studio. The Myth of Modern Dance (1990) presents dancer and choreographer Douglas Dunn, who satirizes the notion of evolution as a linear process, connecting the history of mankind to modern dance. Filmed at the Whitney Museum of American Art, the performing duo DANCE NOISE comprised of Anne Iobst and Lucy Sexton play with the idea of performance art in DANCENOISE In a Museum? (2015).
Paul McCartney Photographs 1963–64: Eyes of the Storm
Paul McCartney (English, b. 1942), Paul McCartney, self portrait, London 1963-4, Photograph, ©1963-4 Paul McCartney
On view December 8, 2023–April 7, 2024
Located in the Special Exhibition Gallery
This unprecedented exhibition offers a firsthand look into the height of Beatlemania. Traveling from the National Portrait Gallery in London to Norfolk, the Chrysler Museum of Art will be the first venue in the United States. Captured by McCartney using his own Pentax Camera, the exhibition features more than 250 photographs taken between November 1963 and February 1964, illuminating the period in which the Beatles became international superstars. The photographs were rediscovered in McCartney’s personal archive in 2020, which spanned just four months. McCartney describes this collection as “the eyes of the storm,” chronologically documenting the experiences of the band on their travels beginning in November 1963 at the height of Beatlemania and culminating with photographs taken in February 1964 during the final days of the band’s first triumphant trip to America. Most of these photographs have never been made into prints, existing as negatives and contact sheets for 60 years until now. The exhibition will burnish the Chrysler’s reputation as an institution committed to the presentation of the diverse histories of photography through exhibitions and the permanent collection.
This exhibition is supported by the Horace W. Goldsmith Special Exhibitions Endowment. Exhibition curated by Sir Paul McCartney with Sarah Brown on behalf of MPL Communications Limited and Rosie Broadley for the National Portrait Gallery, London, and presented by the Chrysler Museum of Art.
A Shared Vision: The Macon and Joan Brock Collection of American Art
Charles Sprague Pearce (American, 1851–1914),
Young Lady with Flowers, ca. 1875-80, Oil on canvas, Promised gift to the Chrysler Museum of Art from the Macon and Joan Brock Collection of American Art
On view December 8, 2023–March 10, 2024
Located in the Frank Photography Gallery
Featuring more than 45 paintings, pastels, watercolors, and prints, this exhibition showcases one of the most significant collections of American art assembled in the twenty-first century. The Brock Collection spans nearly one hundred years of American art, from just after the Civil War to the mid-twentieth century. Works by a wide range of artists from Winslow Homer, Childe Hassam, John La Farge, Thomas Wilmer Dewing and John Singer Sargent, to Marsden Hartley, Max Weber, George Bellows, Charles Sheeler, and Milton Avery chart a broad history of American art. Less well-known figures like Mary Fairchild MacMonnies, Helen Corson Hovenden, and Sally Michel bolster the rich depth of the collection and propose new contours to the shape of American art history. Together the works included in the exhibition contribute a fresh look at one of the most vital and dynamic periods of American art. At the same time, this presentation celebrates the generosity and vision of collectors Macon and Joan Brock, whose gift of the Macon and Joan Brock Collection of American Art to the Chrysler represents the most transformative addition to the institution’s collection since Walter P. Chrysler, Jr.’s foundational gift more than 50 years ago. The Brocks exercised great foresight in the construction of a collection for the public’s benefit and the gift of the collection elevates the stature of the Chrysler’s American art holdings and programs, transforming it into a national leader in the exhibition, study, and appreciation of American art.
This exhibition is organized by the Chrysler Museum of Art.