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Current Speed: Kathia St. Hilaire — Invisible Empires
October 25, 2024 – February 6, 2025
The Speed Art Museum is proud to present the first major museum exhibition of artist Kathia St. Hilaire. Informed by her experience growing up in Caribbean and African American neighborhoods in South Florida, St. Hilaire seeks to memorialize the communities that she has been a part of through innovative studio techniques.
Winslow Homer: American Storyteller Part II
December 6, 2024 – April 20, 2025
Widely regarded as one of the foremost and influential American artists of the nineteenth century, Winslow Homer began his career as a free-lance commercial illustrator designing wood engravings for popular illustrated weekly publications such as Harper’s Weekly, Appleton’s Journal of Literature, Science, and Art, and Ballou’s Pictorial Drawing-Room Companion. Thanks to advancements in printing technology, these journals—which emphasized black-and-white illustrations over text—could be published quickly and inexpensively for wide-spread distribution to the masses.
From the Speed Collection: Into a Modern World
Summer 2024 – ongoing
This new installation showcases the Museum’s celebrated 19th and 20th century collections, installed in new arrangements, with updated scholarship, freshly-conserved artworks, and exciting new acquisitions.
Crosscurrents: Contemporary Art from the Speed Art Museum Collection and Beyond
July 19, 2024 – Ongoing
Crosscurrents features an intergenerational presentation comprised of wide-ranging artworks from the permanent collection, recent acquisitions, and a selection of private loans from across the region. The installation showcases some 100 artworks created since 1960 that challenge and shape our views of the world.
Yayoi Kusama: Infinity Mirrored Room– LET’S SURVIVE FOREVER
July 12, 2024 – January 12, 2025
The Speed Art Museum is honored to present Yayoi Kusama: Infinity Mirrored Room– LET’S SURVIVE FOREVER, one of the artist’s seminal immersive artworks that explores ideas of “self-obliteration” through repetition and play with space, light, color, and time.
Homecoming: A Walking Stick by Henry Gudgell
May 10, 2024 – Ongoing
Homecoming: A Walking Stick by Henry Gudgell celebrates the Speed’s recent acquisition of a vibrant, reptile-clad walking stick created by the Kentucky-born artist Henry Gudgell (1826 or 1829-1895) around 1865 when he was in his thirties and living in rural Livingston County, Missouri. Gudgell was born into enslavement in central Kentucky’s Anderson County, the son of Rachael who was fifteen or sixteen years old at the time of his birth. When Henry was still an infant, he, his mother, and other enslaved women, children, and men were forcibly removed to Ray County, Missouri. In 1853, Henry, then in his twenties, was again forcibly separated from his community when he was sold to another Missouri family.
Kentucky Artists – Kentucky Visions, Gifts from the Anna and Allan Weiss Collection
May 10, 2024 – Ongoing
Kentucky Artists – Kentucky Visions shares, for the first time, generous gifts from the expansive, Kentucky-focused collection of Anna and Allan Weiss, both natives of Louisville. For over forty years as collectors, Anna and Allan have been passionate advocates for many Kentucky artists and their work. In Allan’s words, artists often “became my friends” with their works of art becoming “part of my life with them.”
The Speed Collects: Native American Art
April 4, 2024 – Ongoing
The updated galleries of Native American art will feature not only a reinterpreted view of the museum's existing collection, but also new acquisitions and loans, curated with input from Native artists, curators, and culture-bearers. The reinstallation will catalyze expanded programming designed to bring more Native voices into the everyday life of the Speed Art Museum.
What's New at the Speed?
March 2024 – Ongoing
With displays that rotate twice a year, What’s New at The Speed? celebrates recent acquisitions, showcases new research, and features conservation and restoration efforts completed through the Speed’s Adopt-an-Artwork program. The Museum’s permanent collection of art is cared for by Speed Art Museum curators, registrars, and preparators, alongside outside conservators, scholars, framers, scientists, artists, and historians to ensure that the Speed’s collection is preserved for future generations of visitors.
The Speed Collects: Empires to Revolutions, 1700 – 1825
August 19, 2022 — Ongoing
Art history reminds us that we have experienced deep, necessary shifts in national and global consciousness before, often resulting in new ways of thinking and living. This installation reframes the collection of 18th and early 19th century European and American artwork in the Speed’s permanent collection through the lens of social, cultural, economic, and political upheaval and change.
The Speed Collects: Art in Europe
April 15, 2022 — Ongoing
Part of a larger effort to reinstall and re-contextualize our historical collection, this new installation showcases the art of Europe from the 14th through 17th centuries.
Wolfgang Buttress: Blossom
November 2020 – Ongoing
This project uses sculpture, light, and sound to poetically reveal the life and death cycle of trees. For Blossom, the artist Wolfgang Buttress, based in Nottingham, England, documents the fading life of a 200-year-old Bramley apple tree (the mother of all Bramley apple trees), and the flourishing life of this tree’s progeny.