Showcasing Cuban art
The ASU Art Museum announced a collaboration with Phoenix Art Museum to co-present “Lo que es, es lo que ha sido/What It Is, Is What Has Been: Selections from ASU Art Museum’s Cuban Art Collection.” This is the first major curatorial collaboration between the two institutions in over a decade. Read more about the collaboration.
Embracing local audiences
In a New York TImes article, the ASU Art Museum’s exhibition “Making Visible,” which honors Native cultures of the Southwest, was cited as an example of how museums are broadening their exhibitions beyond just paintings by American and European artists, including adding work that embraces the regions where they’re located. The article also featured “Juan Francisco Elso: Por América,” guest curated by Olga Viso, curator-at-large at Phoenix Art Museum and senior advisor at the Herberger Institute. Read the article.
Lucha Libre
“Lucha Libre: Beyond the Arenas” at the ASU Art Museum explored the performative wrestling genre through painting, photography and mixed media artworks. The exhibition ran October 2022 through May 2023. Read more.
New Earthworks
Hyperallergic highlighted ASU Art Museum’s “New Earthworks” exhibition and the new generation of land artists embodying a call for action in the exhibition. Read more.
Arte para todos. Art for all.
What if centering social justice restored public trust in museums? What if museums, designed to honor objects, change their model to honor people? With a social justice and equity lens and the experimental, scholarly nature of the university art museum, the ASU Art Museum harnesses the university’s breadth and depth of expertise to pioneer new models for arts learning, engagement and innovation that integrates relevancy, trust and resilient communities with museum institutions. Last year the ASU Art Museum unveiled a new website and a new visual identity to reflect its vision to center art and artists in the service of community well-being and social good while honoring the museum’s unique place within ASU and its relationship to the Sonoran Desert. Designed by artist Cruz Ortiz for Burnt Nopal Studio, the visual marketer alludes to the sun and the form of the ziggurat is a reference to the Predock-designed building where the museum is located.
“Placemaking is not an easy thing to establish, and it is even more difficult to create a symbol that encapsulates how we understand what a museum is supposed to be. It was important for this symbol to not only represent a sacred space but to translate into a space for exchange.”
