Sheldon Museum of Art has opened five new exhibitions for the University of Nebraska–Lincoln’s fall semester.
The exhibitions — “Storyville: The Intersection of Abstraction, Allusion, and Depiction,” “Clocking In: Visions of Labor,” “Photographic Abstraction,” “Kelli Connell: Double Life,” and “Sheldon Treasures” — are on view through December 22. Each draws from the museum’s collection of nearly 13,000 objects to offer a thematic presentation that fosters inquiry and discovery.
“Storyville: The Intersection of Abstraction, Allusion, and Depiction” presents works from the museum’s collection that vacillate between recognizable subject matter and abstraction, providing various readings of each narrative.
“Clocking In: Visions of Labor” questions expectations about who engages in particular types of work and what kinds of jobs are valorized. Each of the exhibition’s six galleries brings a unique focus to the subject of work through a lens such as gender, place, or material. Others look critically at the practice of labor or depict life beyond work.
“Photographic Abstraction” recognizes that from the advent of photography, artists have used cameras for more than straightforward documentation. The exhibition presents works by lens-based artists who have used abstract visual language to encourage the viewer to participate in the creation of a work’s meaning.
“Kelli Connell: Double Life” is a presentation of recently acquired works from an ongoing series in which she explores the subjects of gender, intimacy, and aging through invented documentation of a couple’s quiet, personal moments. Each work is a carefully constructed image in which both partners are played by the same model.
“Sheldon Treasures,” an ongoing exhibition that changes each semester, highlights of some of the museum’s most important and best-known objects. Its current iteration highlights the museum’s extensive holdings of American landscape paintings. Hung chronologically from 1826 to 2008, this selection of works shows a gradual transformation in depictions of the outdoors as artists moved from the studio to plein air and began to reconsider their approaches to landscape through form, color, and perspective.
Learn more about these new exhibitions and Sheldon Museum of Art.
