Three special exhibitions are open to the public on Fridays, Saturdays, and Sundays only
On Friday, September 25, the Yale University Art Gallery welcomes back visitors for the first time since March with new safety measures and reduced visitor capacity. Following Yale University protocols, the Gallery’s reactivation will happen in phases, beginning with access to its three special exhibitions on Fridays, Saturdays, and Sundays only. The permanent collection galleries will remain closed until further notice. Visitors may reserve a free, timed-entry ticket on the Gallery’s website (artgallery.yale.edu). A limited number of daily walk-up tickets will be available on a first-come, first-served basis.
To ensure everyone’s safety, the Gallery is limiting the number of visitors and requiring staff and visitors ages two and older to wear masks and practice physical distancing. Signage will guide visitors along a one-way, low-touch path through the exhibitions. The Gallery has implemented more frequent cleaning measures and adopted additional safety protocols for visitors and staff.
“Our world has transformed in ways we never could have imagined since the Gallery closed in March. Now, more than ever, cultural institutions strive to be a place for communities to listen, learn, and grow amid rapidly changing current events,” said Stephanie Wiles, the Henry J. Heinz II Director, Yale University Art Gallery. “We have collaborated closely with Yale University to create a reactivation plan that will keep our community safe while reopening the Gallery in phases.”
Exhibitions on View
For more information about the following three exhibitions, including interpretive materials and related publications, please visit artgallery.yale.edu/current-exhibitions.
Reckoning with “The Incident”: John Wilson’s Studies for a Lynching Mural
This exhibition brings together publicly for the first time nearly all of John Wilson’s known preparatory sketches and painted studies for The Incident, as well as related prints and drawings. Inspired by the political and social activism of the Mexican muralists, in particular José Clemente Orozco, and haunted by images of lynchings that he had seen in newspapers as a child, Wilson revisited the subject of The Incident over many years as a way of grappling with racial violence, both past and present. This exhibition has been extended through Sunday, February 28, 2021.
James Prosek: Art, Artifact, Artifice
Bringing together objects from the collections of the Gallery, the Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History, and the Yale Center for British Art, this exhibition places Prosek’s work in dialogue with a wide range of both man-made objects and those produced by billions of years of evolution. By challenging traditional separations of museum collections into “art” and “artifact,” or “natural” and “man-made,” the artist asks us to explore to what extent these distinctions matter. This exhibition has been extended through Sunday, February 28, 2021.
Place, Nations, Generations, Beings: 200 Years of Indigenous North American Art
This exhibition presents a wide variety of Indigenous voices and experiences through more than 75 artworks dating from the early 19th century to the present. Guided by the four themes in its title, the exhibition investigates the connections that Indigenous peoples have to their lands; the power of objects as expressions of sovereignty; the passing on of artistic practices and traditions; and the relationships that artists and nations have to animals, plants, and cosmological beings. This exhibition has been extended through Sunday, February 28, 2021.