Exhibitions

Each year, nearly 2,000 objects from the Museum’s ever-growing art collection are requested by professors and students for discussion, research, writing, art making, and exhibition projects. This exhibition features works of art, from ancient to contemporary, that continually enrich the learning experience for all of our audiences across campus and community.

This exhibition is presented in celebration of the 25th anniversary of the opening of Grinnell College's Bucksbaum Center for the Arts.

Talking to Mother Clay features works of Pueblo pottery donated to the Grinnell College Museum of Art by Ann Reddan Rustebakke ’49, who collected pottery from many of the Pueblos in the Southwest while living in New Mexico for more than 40 years. The works in this exhibition feature birds, which Indigenous potters have looked to as inspiration for vessel shapes and painted designs since the beginning of Pueblo pottery traditions. 

Image: Unknown artist Acoma/Haa’ku, Water Jar, ca. 1970-1979. Ceramic, 6 ½ x 8 in. Gift of Ann Reddan Rustebakke ’49. (2002.60.032)

The Bachelor of Art Exhibition presents work in the creative arts by third- and fourth-year Grinnell College students. With support from GCMoA staff, students manage many of the exhibition details, including the selection of a juror and the creation of an exhibition catalogue and website. The exhibition includes photographs, drawings, sculpture, paintings, video, installations, and works created digitally. The 2024 juror is Luther Davis ’93, master printer and printshop director of Powerhouse Arts, Brooklyn, New York.

Image: Installation view of BAX 2023

This will be the first museum exhibition in the United States of the work of London-based Canadian artist Stephen Appleby-Barr, whose drawing, painting, and printmaking bring together influences from the history of art and literature, his European travels, and the community of friends who gather around his London studio. This exhibition will provide context for the portrait, Nimco, the Dissertation, which was acquired for the Museum of Art collection in 2022.

Grinnell College's art collection has been growing since the institution's early days, when an education grounded in the humanities was considered essential to an individual’s soundness of mind and being and also to the health, vibrance, and sustainability of society as a whole. Primary-source experience of works of art is still a vital and distinguishing feature of a Grinnell College education and continues to form the core mission of the Grinnell College Museum of Art.

The art collection continues to grow every year with purchases from endowed funds as well as substantial gifts from alumni and friends of the College. This summer we are proud to present works of art acquired for the collection since 2021.

Image: Oscar yi Hou. The siblings in my studio, aka: Gemini, Sagittarian, 2021. Oil on canvas, 54 3/8 x 35 5/8 in. (138.11 x 90.49 cm). Marie-Louise and Samuel R. Rosenthal Fund (2021.049).

Nanette Rodney Kelekian, granddaughter of famed art dealer Dikran Kelekian, began gifting portions of her grandfather’s collection to Grinnell College in 1984. Since then, individual pieces have been included in exhibitions, but Fragmentary Visions is the most comprehensive display of Grinnell’s extensive Kelekian collection. The ceramics, manuscripts, and textiles on display are some of the oldest objects in the museum’s permanent collection, hailing from the Eastern Mediterranean, West Asia, and the greater Islamic world. This exhibition showcases fragments and everyday objects alongside art made for the elite, allowing the viewer to experience the spectrum of art collected by many museums, but rarely shown together. Fragmentary Visions is curated by Exhibition Seminar students Marina Busby ’24, David Gales ’23, Melena Johnson ’23, and Verda Karaoglu ’25, taught by Professor Eiren Shea of the Art History Department.

Explore the exhibition webpage

Within the context of modern and contemporary India, works on paper offered artists a way of cultivating transnational modernist expression while continuing to explore the potential of a medium that had deeper roots in older artistic traditions native to the subcontinent. This exhibition features watercolors, drawings, etchings, sketches, and lithographs by senior Indian modernists, born primarily before the 1950s, who came of age in the decades directly following Independence in 1947. These artists span the transition from colonial to postcolonial India, and each represents a unique engagement with what Rebecca Brown has described as a fundamental paradox facing this generation of artists: that of how to be both modern and Indian. These artists are not afraid to embrace both realism and abstraction, to explore complex metaphors, and to make political statements that directly engage India’s past, present, and future.

This exhibition, drawn from the collection of Umesh and Sunanda Gaur, is curated by Dr. Tamara Sears, professor of art and architectural history of South Asia, Department of Art History at Rutgers University.

Image: Arpita Singh, I could see London through clouds, 2007. Etching on paper, 32 7/8 x 27 ¾ in. Courtesy of the Gaur Collection.

While we install our fall exhibitions, we continue to show recent acquisitions by Damon Davis, Rashaad Newsome, Shimon Okshteyn, and William Villalongo.

The art collection of Grinnell College has been growing since the institution's early days. The uncertainty of the past three years has had little impact on this expanding diversity and growth. In the visual arts, as in the human creative impulses at their heart and in the heart of every Grinnellian, the supply chain is not an issue.

When space allows, we are proud to present objects from our growing collection here in the museum. The five recent additions to the collection on view will help sustain and enrich the College’s teaching mission for generations of future Grinnellians, nimble yet steadfast astride the changing times.

BAX, the Bachelor of Art Exhibition presents work in the creative arts by third- and fourth-year Grinnell College students.

With support from GCMoA staff, students manage all the exhibition details: from the submission of proposals, to the selection of a juror, to the installation process, and the creation of an exhibition catalog and website. The exhibition includes photographs, drawings, sculpture, paintings, video, installations, and works created digitally.

This exhibition presents eight artists — Louis Fratino, Jordan King, Jeremy Laing, Doron Langberg, Catherine Opie, Christina Quarles, Paul Mpagi Sepuya, and Devan Shimoyama — whose works enable dialogue at the intersections of identity expression: race, gender, individuality, and otherness, equality within differences, with a focus on the body as expressive terrain. The artists represent distinct voices across a spectrum of media, reflecting diversity in identity expression where it intersects with contemporary political, social, and economic issues, always relevant but particularly charged at this moment.

Curated by Associate Director Daniel Strong and Guest Curator Greg Manuel.

Explore the website for Queer/Dialogue

BAX features works in the creative arts by third- and fourth-year Grinnell College students.

With support from GCMoA staff, students manage all the exhibition details: from the submission of proposals to the selection of a juror to the installation process and creation of an exhibition website. The exhibition includes photographs, drawings, sculpture, paintings, video, installations, and works created digitally. This year at least half of the work by the 30 student artists are available only on the exhibition website since many of the artists have done their creative work while working remotely around the U.S. and the world. During the pandemic, a team of students has taken the lead in organizing BAX for this year. They include: Sophie Doddimeade ’21, Clara Dingle ’22, Tess Kerkhof ’21, Tommy (Guhn) Lee ’22, Caroline Shea ’22, and Hannah Taylor ’21.

The juror this year is J.M. Culver of Minnesota, who awards Best in Show and other prizes. Additional prizes are awarded by the Office of Student Affairs, the Student Government Association, and the Studio Art Department.

Visit the BAX 2021 website

Daniel Strong, associate director and curator of exhibitions, discusses works of art featured in Face Forward.

What happens when an artist doesn’t just represent the natural world, but makes it anew, through a creative lens?

Five alumni artists work with animals, plants, and environments, crafting them into personal expression and commenting on the human impulse to alter the world around us. The exhibition, curated by Lesley Wright, director of the Museum, will include painting, printmaking, sculpture and drawing by artists Fay Stanford ’72, Pamela Crockett ’76, Aaron Rothman ’96, Regan Golden ’00, and John Martin Bell ’08.

Explore the Nature, Made virtual exhibition.