In the early 1950s, Ralph Eugene Meatyard and Van Deren Coke set out to photograph all the people, homes, and businesses on Georgetown Street in Lexington. Together they made 150 images and exhibited thirty of them in the Lexington Camera Club’s annual show in November 1956. The results are sometimes joyful, sometimes disturbing.
“These are the people, the places, no derision shown,” Meatyard wrote in an exhibition statement. “…
Oscar Wilde said, “Every saint has a past, and every sinner has a future,” acknowledging that we are all works in progress, and most of us struggle with both good and at least somewhat malicious impulses over the course of our lives. Sinners and Saints examines both the labels and the blurred lines as artists present mixed messages in their approach to these twinned themes. Drawn from the permanent collection, this exhibition…
On June 24, 2022, the US Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, the landmark piece of legislation that made access to an abortion a federal right in the United States. This action dismantled fifty years of legal protection for women and control over their reproductive health. This was not a surprise given the dispositions of the current justices, but it is another challenge among the issues of equality and respect, and gender and racial…
The re:museum exhibition is getting a re:fresh in 2023 with a new set of artworks and updated displays.
re:museum centers the Museum and our permanent collection by exhibiting a combination of artworks, educational prompts, and other incisive displays. The artworks on view in re:museum pull from our Digital Learning Gallery, an online resource established through a UK Arts Extension Outreach Grant to…
The title and spirit of this exhibition was inspired in many ways by a photograph made by Mark Klett with Byron Wolfe. An intrepid climber bounds from one rocky outcrop to another; caught in mid-air, his landing is uncertain. Klett started out as a straight photographer, but began marrying historic and contemporary imagery, occasionally with tongue in cheek. He has deftly inserted a vintage postcard of the daredevil jumper into his own twenty…
In 2022, the Museum received a generous gift of Barbara Rossi works from the Kohler Foundation in Wisconsin, and several of these are included in this exhibition. The artist is associated with the Chicago Imagists, along with Roger Brown, Gladys Nilsson, Jim Nutt, Ed Paschke, and Karl Wirsum, among others. They each utilize the human figure in fantastic ways, rendering it with precise line, vibrant color, and stylized distortions that…
In September 1926, American modernist Edward Fisk left New York City to join the art department at the University of Kentucky. He had been embedded in avant-garde art circles in the city, where he exhibited in the company of friends like Stuart Davis, Charles Demuth, and Marsden Hartley. He was also close to Eugene O’Neill; the artist and his friends traveled to Provincetown over several summers to visit the playwright and his literary cadre…
