Zuckerman Museum
| Museum Hours of Operation | |||
|---|---|---|---|
| Tuesday - Friday | 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. | ||
| Saturday | 12 p.m. to 5 p.m. | ||
Fall 2025 Exhibitions
Malinda Jolley Mortin Gallery
The Naturalist
Tricia Wright
August 25 - December 5, 2025
Curated by Cynthia Nourse Thompson
This exhibition features several distinct bodies of work exploring humanity’s intimate relationship with the natural world. More specifically, Wright’s works are a personal celebration and inquiry into her relationship with nature, the passing of time, and the value of human touch. Functioning as visual expressive elements, poetic texts play a central role and allow reflection on issues surrounding beauty, self, and belonging. Moving from the UK to the US in 1999, the artist states that she inhabits a space where identity and relationship to place are shaped by the push and pull of belonging and not belonging.
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About Tricia Wright
Originally from England and educated in London, Tricia Wright moved permanently to the US in 1999. She operates a full-time art studio in North Stamford, CT, and lives part of the year in Ireland. Her works are held in museum, corporate, government, and private collections in the US, UK, and Europe. Recent achievements include her solo exhibition, Tricia Wright:The Naturalist, Arkansas Museum of Fine Arts, and her MTA Arts & Design Public Art Commission, permanent installations in glass and metal, Crestwood Railway Station, New York, completed in 2020. In 2019, she was a Workspace Artist in Residence at Dieu Donne, Brooklyn.
Image credit: Blue, cyanotype, insects and botanical foliage, Universiti Putra Malaysia, Kuala Lumpur, 2024.
Don Russell Clayton Gallery
Lady Bug
An Installation by Jennifer Angus
August 26 - December 5, 2025
Curated by Cynthia Nourse Thompson
Created explicitly for the Don Russell Clayton Gallery, the large-scale installation Lady Bug celebrates pioneering women in entomology— the Madame Dragonfly, Moth Queen, and Termite Lady sound like superheroes of the DC comic book universe, but they are the pseudonyms of women entomologists Cynthia Longfield (1896-1991), Alice Balfour (1850-1936) and Margaret Collins (1922–1996). Other than clean air and water, insects which are the primary material of Angus’ installations, are ground zero for human survival on our planet. Her works often explore issues related to the environment and the vital role insects play within it, encouraging individuals to raise awareness, advocate on issues, and build momentum toward collective change.
Drawing upon her background in textile design, the artist places insects upon walls in patterns that mimic textiles and wallpaper. This strategy lulls the viewer into complacency, for at a distance, the designs suggest an interior, perhaps even a domestic space. However, upon discovering that the ornate patterns are formed of insects, viewers’ feelings typically fluctuate between incredulity, amazement, and occasionally terror. Herein lies the power of the work as the observer is confronted with considering insects in a new light.
Statement on working with insects : We have more information at our fingertips than ever before, and yet the centuries-old tradition of ignoring or destroying knowledge continues. Climate change and colony collapse (the death of millions of honeybees) are devastating facts of contemporary life, and all are areas in which individuals, one by one, can make a difference. Thoughts and prayers are not enough. There is much to be gained by studying and appreciating insects, noting that collective transformational changes are possible for one small individual at a time.
None of the insects I use are endangered and they are reused from exhibition to exhibition, some more than 20 years old. Collecting insects is ecologically sound if done in a thoughtful manner. Many insects are now being farmed with the express purpose of marketing to collectors. When I am able to, I use these types.
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About Jennifer Angus
Jennifer Angus is a professor in the Design Studies Department at the University of Wisconsin -Madison where she teaches textile design, specifically, everything to do with the dyeing and printing of cloth, including natural dyes. She is an artist described by Art Daily as “one of the top contemporary installation artists in the country.” Jennifer creates some of the most provocative work most people have ever seen in an art museum setting. She composes patterns using hundreds of insects, placing them in arrangements that suggest wallpaper and textiles. Angus was one of nine leading contemporary artists selected for the landmark exhibition Wonder at the Smithsonian’s Renwick Gallery in 2015.
Jennifer has been the recipient of numerous awards including Canada Council, Ontario Arts Council and Wisconsin Arts Board grants. More recently she received the inaugural Forward Art Prize, an unrestricted award for outstanding women artists of Wisconsin. At the University of Wisconsin-Madison she has received annual grants from the Graduate School, as well as the Vilas Associate Award, the Emily Mead Baldwin-Bascom Professorship in the Creative Arts, the Romnes Fellowship, the UW Arts Institute Creative Arts Award, Rothermel Bascom Professorship, the Kellett Mid-Career Faculty Researcher Award and most recently the Edna Wiechers Arts in Wisconsin Award. In 2013, Albert Whitman and Company, Chicago, published her first novel, In Search of Goliathus Hercules.
At the University of Wisconsin – Madison she is the faculty leader of the Global Artisans Initiative which launched an interdisciplinary outreach program that connects students with artisans who have requested assistance with microenterprise development. The program leverages the relationships that University of Wisconsin has built over many years at global health field course sites in Ecuador, India, Kenya Mexico, Nepal and Vietnam to create a product design and marketplace system to support the economic wellbeing of local artisans.
Ruth V. Zuckerman Collection: Inside Out
Long-term display located in the Ruth Zuckerman Pavilion
Curated by Teresa Bramlette Reeves
For the preservation of artwork, museums must often hold their permanent collections in storage rather than in public view. "Visible storage," maintains the necessary safe-keeping of the objects while allowing museum visitors to see and study work that would otherwise be unavailable. This installation employs visible storage to showcase a substantial number of Ruth Zuckerman's sculptures and drawings from the KSU Permanent Collection, while making aspects of a collection's care transparent for the public.
Project Walls
Image credit: Learning by Osmosis II, 2024. Monoprint (woodcut, linocut, screenprint, cut paper).
Project Wall North: Stephanie Smith
August 26, 2025 - July 24, 2026
The ZMA is pleased to present the work of printmaker Stephanie Smith. Smith is an Atlanta-based artist, printmaker, and educator who makes expressive hand-pulled prints and artist books. Her works, composed of both narrative and symbolic images, explore themes of memory, loss, time, chance, and change. Smith earned a BFA from the Atlanta College of Art and an MFA from the University of Georgia. She is a Senior Lecturer at the University of West Georgia where she teaches printmaking in the School of Visual and Performing Arts and is the current manager of the UWG Vault Gallery in Newnan.
Project Wall West: Vadis Turner
August 26, 2025 - July 24, 2026
The ZMA is pleased to present a newly commissioned artwork by artist Vadis Turner. Turner has had solo exhibitions at the Frist Art Museum, the Huntsville Museum of Art, and the Abroms-Engel Institute for Visual Arts at the University of Alabama in Birmingham. In 2016, she
was awarded the Joan Mitchell Painters and Sculptors Grant. Her work is included in
numerous permanent collections such as the Brooklyn Museum, 21C Museum, and the Tennessee
State Museum among others. She teaches at Vanderbilt University and is represented
by Geary in Millerton, New York.
Image credit: Ghost Megalith, 2019. Bedsheets, leather, buckwheat, pillow stuffing and mixed media.
Image credit: For Maude, 2019. Pigmented acaba fiber.
Project Wall East: Melissa Harshman
August 26, 2025 - July 24, 2026
The ZMA is pleased to present the work of Athens, Georgia based artist Melissa Harshman. For Maude, composed of numerous components of handmade paper floral forms, will be on view through July 24, 2026. She has taught at the Lamar Dodd School of Art at the University of Georgia since 1993. Harshman has exhibited widely throughout the United States and abroad. She was awarded a University of Georgia Senior Faculty Research Grant in 2019 titled Explorations in Papermaking. She was one of the inaugural Arts Lab Fellowship recipients from the University of Georgia for 2022/23, focusing on papermaking wall installations.