Current | Venn'acular

"Venn'acular" is a portmanteau of Venn [diagram] and vernacular, which is our aesthetic approach in a nutshell. This exhibit brings together numerous voices through engagement, dialogue, some slight discordance, and balance.

A spectacular 19th-century African American pictorial textile is shown alongside a linen construction by Algerian-American Freddy Muñoz (1930-2020), a historical Japanese unglazed ceramic plate, and a reverse painting on glass by Californian Outsider John Roeder (1877-1964). Across the room, Pop-Art is presented with an impressive oversized clothespin made of fiberglass-reinforced plaster, paired with drawings by Edwin Lawson (1911-1980), who imagined himself cross-dressing in historic fashions—these lead into the flamboyant plumage of an Archaeopteryx, the earliest known bird. An 1893 pastel by Henry Dousa (1801-1903?) of five cows, painted decades before Warhol, bookends the Pop-Art vignette.

In the middle of the room, an African American green-and-black painted rocking chair with scenes of the Resurrection is triangulated with an egg and a Black goddess, along with numerous other carvings. A curious half-scale male figure, possibly by Morton Riddle (1909-1992), stands by the door; he's carved of wood with inset blue marble eyes—the remains of his bark exterior look like clothes.

Sapphic fashion drawings by Virginia Ahrens (1914-1978) are paired with a drawing by Lee Brozgol (1941-2021) illustrating a woman on a fire escape. Life hangs in the balance with a 60s spray-painted, tombstone-shaped panel with an array of hypodermic needles, a suspect 1920s breathing apparatus named the Lungmotor, an unusual Judgment Day painting, and a compelling abstract painting that looks like a Philip Guston if he painted the hemispheres of the brain.

A drawing recording Halley's comet from 1910 sits above an outstanding folk art carving from the same period: a mustachioed man sitting in a rocker, as if gazing at the comet above.

All this and more at the spectacular Venn'acular!