Current Exhibitions
Feb 18 - Aug 2 2025
“I enter the classroom as an evangelist for the idea that photography is the most complex, important form of communication in our culture, and that it takes energy, will, humor, pathos, research, and legwork to learn to use the medium effectively.” This statement by artist, educator, and writer Tim Davis affirms his belief in active image-making, something he has done consistently since the early 1990s. Davis’s photographs revel in surfaces…
UK Art Museum
Free
Feb 18 - Aug 2 2025
This exhibition celebrates Black girls’ complex emotional lives as portrayed in a range of artworks, from portraits painted in the 1930s to twenty-first-century photographs. Resistance, hope, anger, defiance, curiosity, joy, anxiety, vulnerability, and exhaustion are some of the feelings seen on the faces of children who have been on the front lines of profound social changes such as the Great Migration, Civil Rights movement, Women’s March, and…
UK Art Museum
Free
Feb 18 - Aug 2 2025
The re:museum exhibition evolves once again, updating artworks and informational displays while continuing to promote a welcoming engagement with art and offering a peek behind-the-curtain at how our Museum operates. re:museum ∙ RE:TRACE maintains this education-forward approach while applying a new thematic umbrella. With re:museum ∙ RE:TRACE, viewers are invited to consider detailed linework and the path of the artists’ hands in the creation…
UK Art Museum
Free
Feb 18 - Aug 2 2025
The five groups of photographers in this exhibition worked collectively to capture the unique people, landscapes, and pace of life that distinguish Lexington, Kentucky. Maurice Strider collaborated with his students at Dunbar High School between 1934 and 1966 to create a rich archive of Black Lexington. Ida Nelson and Robert J. Long established Lafayette Studios in downtown Lexington to produce images for a range of commercial purposes…
UK Art Museum
Free
Future Exhibitions
![Masatoshi Naito, [a street performer swallowing a snake], in Ken, no. 2 (pp. 22-23), October 1970, magazine, 9 x 7 ½ x 1/2 inches (23 x 18.9 x 1.3 cm). Courtesy of The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, The Manfred Heiting Book Collection. Photo: Paul Hester, Hester + Hardaway Photographers.](/sites/default/files/public/styles/views_listings/public/events/2025/05/self-and-others-japanese-photography-after-1968/self-and-others-naito-ken-mfah.jpg?itok=2gycdosR)
Aug 19 - Dec 20 2025
The first issue of Provoke magazine, published in Tokyo in November 1968, declared that “we as photographers must capture with our own eyes the fragments of reality that can no longer be grasped through existing language.” With this manifesto, Provoke encapsulated the energy of a time in which established conventions were discarded, and a new generation experimented with fresh outlooks and new technologies that shattered assumptions of what a…
UK Art Museum
Free
Aug 19 - Dec 20 2025
Zhang Huan’s work across multiple media is inspired by the everyday processes of life— from breathing and eating to hopes and dreams. In 2006, Zhang began a series of paintings made from ash collected in Buddhist temples near his studio in Shanghai. The ash is created by incense sticks burned as prayers, often for good health, luck, and prosperity. This exhibition…
UK Art Museum
Free
Sep 9 2025 - Feb 7 2026
This exhibition highlights Fragmentations, a series of etchings created by conceptual artist Agnes Denes. Born in Budapest in 1931, raised in Sweden, and later educated in the United States, she began displaying her work in the early 1960s. Her artwork discussed the socio-political climate of the time and paved the way for future artists and generations to express themselves in new aesthetic forms. Rooted in geometry and patterns, the print…
UK Art Museum
free
Sep 9 2025 - Feb 7 2026
The artists in this exhibition let go of their impulse to control compositions by allowing chaotic elements of chance, circumstance, and contingency to influence their processes. Drips, scratches, pours, and bleeds move across the surfaces of their artworks seemingly at random, and yet clear forms emerge. Our imaginations might find sunsets, mountains, waterfalls, city streets, or human figures in these images, but these apparitions soon…
UK Art Museum
free
Sep 9 2025 - Feb 7 2026
In 1966, the George Eastman House of Photography in Rochester, New York, hosted a pivotal exhibition curated by Nathan Lyons called Toward a Social Landscape. The slim, accompanying catalog was shared amongst photographers who were especially encouraged by Duane Michals’s observation that “when a great photographer does infuse the snapshot with his personality and vision, it can be transformed into something truly moving and beautiful.” The UK…
UK Art Museum
Free
Sep 9 2025 - Feb 7 2026
A (Very) Brief History of Music takes as a given that any attempt to tell the history of a discipline in one exhibition is impossible. So, we've decided to present a mix of works that reference traditional ballads, jazz, rock and roll, and punk in the Museum's smallest gallery space. The installation is anchored by Catherine Irwin's trompe l'oeil sculpture of a telephone pole with band posters stapled to it, along with photographs of …
UK Art Museum
Free
Sep 9 2025 - Feb 7 2026
The re:museum exhibition area offers its eighth edition, continuing to promote a welcoming engagement with art while offering a peek behind-the-curtain at Museum operations. This latest installation applies the notion of “reform” as a thematic umbrella to exhibit artworks that delve into concepts of transformation, iteration, activism, and emulation. Works on view represent new additions to our Digital Learning Gallery, including Mine Okubo…
UK Art Museum
Free
Mar 10 - Aug 8 2026
The UK Art Museum collection includes an eclectic group of paintings, prints, textiles, and sculptures that use repeated shapes to create a sense of driving rhythms, syncopations, and melodic phrases—from a ninth-century BCE Greek vase to a painting by University of Kentucky Professor Emeritus Arturo Alonzo Sandoval. Two of the artworks on view—Ellsworth Kelley’s Dark Blue and Red and Theodoros Stamos’s Double Orange Sun-Box—were donated to the…
UK Art Museum
Free