Current Exhibitions
Aug 20 2024 - Jan 18 2025
Absence and presence in the built environment have occupied Catherine Wagner’s practice for over thirty years. This exhibition includes examples of her early black-and-white works in the Museum’s permanent collection, including stage-like images of California landscapes and architecture in the mid-to-late 1970s, and photographs of classrooms, labs, blackboards, and desks taken at educational facilities across the United States in the mid-1980s.…
UK Art Museum
Free
Aug 20 2024 - Jan 18 2025
This exhibition explores the ways that ideas become form, and it features a range of artists represented in the Museum’s permanent collection, some being presented to our audiences for the first time. Sculptures using materials including wood, plastic, metal, and rope are situated in distinct areas of the gallery, activating space on walls, floor, and pedestals, some requiring electrical outlets to illuminate bulbs and power LED circuits. …
UK Art Museum
Free
Aug 20 2024 - Jan 18 2025
This selection of paintings, sculptures, and drawings is part of a larger promised gift by John Davis, a Lexington-based collector and former art dealer with a rich history of creativity and patronage.
Davis is perhaps best known to locals as the man who created the glitz and glamour of the legendary Johnny Angel on Main Street in Lexington in the mid-1970s, a discotheque that rivaled Studio 54 in New York City. It was a sanctuary…
Davis is perhaps best known to locals as the man who created the glitz and glamour of the legendary Johnny Angel on Main Street in Lexington in the mid-1970s, a discotheque that rivaled Studio 54 in New York City. It was a sanctuary…
UK Art Museum
Free
Aug 20 2024 - Jan 18 2025
This exhibition of works from the Museum’s permanent collection coincides with the Queer Art/Queer Archives Symposium co-hosted by the University of Kentucky and the University of Louisville, taking place from September 20 – 21, 2024.
The artists include Berenice Abbott, Ross Bleckner, Louis Zoellar Bickett, Mike Goodlett, Keith Haring, Edward Melcarth, and Andy Warhol. Their paintings, sculptures, drawings, and photographs have…
The artists include Berenice Abbott, Ross Bleckner, Louis Zoellar Bickett, Mike Goodlett, Keith Haring, Edward Melcarth, and Andy Warhol. Their paintings, sculptures, drawings, and photographs have…
UK Art Museum
Free
Aug 20 2024 - Jan 18 2025
The re:museum exhibition continues to evolve with updated artworks and informational displays, promoting a welcoming engagement with art and offering a peek behind the curtain at how our Museum operates. re:museum ∙ RE:FRACT maintains this education-forward approach while applying an additional thematic umbrella. With re:museum ∙ RE:FRACT, artworks share common threads grounded in light, shape, reflection, and refraction.
Artworks…
Artworks…
UK Art Museum
Free
Future Exhibitions
Jan 17 - Jun 21 2025
This exhibition includes numerous drawings, prints, constructed sets and sculptures, and related ephemera that artist Jay Bolotin used to create The Jackleg Testament, Part 2: The Book of Only Enoch, a complex animated film that he was finalizing at the time of his death on May 14, 2024. The richness of story, mood, and precise articulation in every moment of the narrative is a testament to his labor-intensive process of transforming fantastic…
UK Art Museum
Free
Feb 18 - Aug 2 2025
Dear Jay, When we spoke about this exhibition, neither of us knew that you would not live to see it. While deeply sorrowful, I am buoyed by bringing together a handful of touchstones—artists whose printmaking and drawing you held in high regard. A few of them we never discussed, but I think they are relevant. Your audacity, inventiveness, and mastery of materials put you in their august company. Some of these individuals are referred…
UK Art Museum
Free
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