This exhibition presents Surface Series (1970), an important group of eighteen screen prints by Robert Rauschenberg. He made the prints at the threshold of a new decade, to “shake people awake,” to open their conscience to the world around them. For each of the prints in the series, Rauschenberg overlaid images and headlines drawn from contemporary newspapers—some shown as negatives, others as positives, all of them black and white. Many of them display large moiré dot patterns, which are usually unwanted products of commercial printing processes. In this context, however, they take on an artistic quality, much like the half-tone dots used in the Pop-inspired works of Roy Lichtenstein. Each of the prints measure forty by forty inches.

This exhibition features thesis projects by senior studio art majors Erin Clarke, Molly Darcy, Rebecca Fox, Bethany Petrunak, Cristian Tineo, and Marja van Mierlo under the direction of Anthony Cervino, with Todd Arsenault, and Andy Bale, and Rachel Eng.

Eleanor Conover works with the material conditions of painting as both tangible and metaphorical spaces to investigate surface and environment. She joined the Dickinson College faculty as Assistant Professor of Art in the Fall of 2021.

Queering the Muse features the work of contemporary photographer, Lissa Rivera, and her genderqueer romantic partner, B.J. Lillis, who serves as her collaborator and creative muse. Drawing from a vast array of sources, from ancient art to surrealism, and from classic Hollywood film to independent cinema, Rivera pictures Lillis in a variety of different settings and costumes rich with historical reference. Through her photographs, she brings visibility to an overlooked subject—the genderqueer body—in order to challenge the gender binary and to complicate how we define and understand beauty. This exhibition is curated by senior art history majors Ellery Coleman, Emma Latham, Bethany Petrunak, Peter Philips, Frances Taylor, and Ellie Werner under the direction of Elizbeth Lee.

Tracing Slavery considers issues of racism and the African American experience through the simple, yet direct medium of cut-paper profiles, or silhouettes. Moses Williams (c. 1775–c. 1825) was born enslaved into the household of Charles Willson Peale, the early-American portraitist, naturalist, and museum founder. Williams worked in Peale’s home and fledgling museum in Philadelphia, where he cut portrait silhouettes of visitors to the museum. The majority of his portraits represent members of the white elite, some of whom were slave holders. This exhibition draws together silhouette imagery by Moses Williams with prints by contemporary artist, Kara Walker as a way to trace a profile of racism in American that continues to shape the present.

Walker’s work deals extensively with the experience and identity of African Americans—past and present, which she explores in part through contemporary imagery portrayed as narratives cast in the manner of nineteenth-century cut silhouettes. At first nostalgic, perhaps charming in appearance, Walker’s silhouette imagery depicts the brutal reality of racial violence in American society. Unlike traditional silhouette artists, Walker does not create portrait likenesses, rather, she employs the medium as a way to interrogate history and expose racism. In Harper’s Pictorial History of the Civil War (Annotated), Walker “corrects” the Reconstruction-era publication by overlaying its images with silhouettes of African Americans, whose presence the publishers minimized so as to make the volumes more appealing to Southern White readers. Walker’s work and the nineteenth century artistic sources she references are paired with hollow-cut profile silhouettes made by Moses Williams (c. 1775–c. 1825), featured in Tracing Slavery I on display in conjunction with Walker's prints.

This exhibition centers on Horace Pippin’s powerful work, Mr. Prejudice, which represents the artist’s response to the discrimination of African American soldiers fighting in World War II (1939–1945). Painted in 1943, the work shows a bare-chested white man hammering a wedge into the center of a giant “V”—for victory— which cracks under the stress. Pippin, who fought in World War I as part of the 369th Regiment (an African American Infantry division nicknamed the "Harlem Hell Fighters"), knew well how badly African American soldiers were treated after they returned home. Seeing how conditions had not changed for the next generation of African American soldiers, he composed this work to show how such discrimination threatened the war effort abroad and the struggle for equality at home. Mr. Prejudice is shown in conjunction with a series of vintage World War II posters and related materials that were made with African American soldiers in mind. In particular, the exhibition features photographs of the African American "Double-V: Democracy Abroad and at Home" campaign.

We present here from the museum's collection this handcolored print from Harpers Weekly (January 1863). President Abraham Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation of 1862 declared an end to slavery. However, slavery was still legal and practiced in several states until December 6, 1865, when ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution abolished chattel slavery nationwide.