Current Exhibitions
Aug 20 2024 - Jan 18 2025
Absence and presence in the built environment have occupied Catherine Wagner’s practice for over thirty years. This exhibition includes examples of her early black-and-white works in the Museum’s permanent collection, including stage-like images of California landscapes and architecture in the mid-to-late 1970s, and photographs of classrooms, labs, blackboards, and desks taken at educational facilities across the United States in the mid-1980s.…
UK Art Museum
Free
Aug 20 2024 - Jan 18 2025
This exhibition explores the ways that ideas become form, and it features a range of artists represented in the Museum’s permanent collection, some being presented to our audiences for the first time. Sculptures using materials including wood, plastic, metal, and rope are situated in distinct areas of the gallery, activating space on walls, floor, and pedestals, some requiring electrical outlets to illuminate bulbs and power LED circuits. …
UK Art Museum
Free
Aug 20 2024 - Jan 18 2025
This selection of paintings, sculptures, and drawings is part of a larger promised gift by John Davis, a Lexington-based collector and former art dealer with a rich history of creativity and patronage.
Davis is perhaps best known to locals as the man who created the glitz and glamour of the legendary Johnny Angel on Main Street in Lexington in the mid-1970s, a discotheque that rivaled Studio 54 in New York City. It was a sanctuary…
Davis is perhaps best known to locals as the man who created the glitz and glamour of the legendary Johnny Angel on Main Street in Lexington in the mid-1970s, a discotheque that rivaled Studio 54 in New York City. It was a sanctuary…
UK Art Museum
Free
Aug 20 2024 - Jan 18 2025
This exhibition of works from the Museum’s permanent collection coincides with the Queer Art/Queer Archives Symposium co-hosted by the University of Kentucky and the University of Louisville, taking place from September 20 – 21, 2024.
The artists include Berenice Abbott, Ross Bleckner, Louis Zoellar Bickett, Mike Goodlett, Keith Haring, Edward Melcarth, and Andy Warhol. Their paintings, sculptures, drawings, and photographs have…
The artists include Berenice Abbott, Ross Bleckner, Louis Zoellar Bickett, Mike Goodlett, Keith Haring, Edward Melcarth, and Andy Warhol. Their paintings, sculptures, drawings, and photographs have…
UK Art Museum
Free
Aug 20 2024 - Jan 18 2025
The re:museum exhibition continues to evolve with updated artworks and informational displays, promoting a welcoming engagement with art and offering a peek behind the curtain at how our Museum operates. re:museum ∙ RE:FRACT maintains this education-forward approach while applying an additional thematic umbrella. With re:museum ∙ RE:FRACT, artworks share common threads grounded in light, shape, reflection, and refraction.
Artworks…
Artworks…
UK Art Museum
Free
Future Exhibitions
Jan 17 - Jun 21 2025
Jay Bolotin was an ambitious and exacting artist who regularly crossed disciplines including visual art, literature, theatre, music, and film. Weaving together personal musings and universal myths, he formed epic narratives requiring years of labor-intensive studio activity and the mastering of both traditional and state-of-the-art techniques. A gifted storyteller, he was informed by children’s bedtime reading, Biblical tales (and their…
UK Art Museum
Free
Feb 18 - Aug 2 2025
This exhibition celebrates Black girls’ complex emotional lives as portrayed in a range of artworks, from portraits painted in the 1930s to twenty-first-century photographs. Resistance, hope, anger, defiance, curiosity, joy, anxiety, vulnerability, and exhaustion are some of the feelings seen on the faces of children who have been on the front lines of profound social changes such as the Great Migration, Civil Rights movement, Women’s March, and…
UK Art Museum
Free
Feb 18 - Aug 2 2025
The five groups of photographers in this exhibition worked collectively to capture the unique people, landscapes, and pace of life that distinguish Lexington, Kentucky. Maurice Strider collaborated with his students at Dunbar High School between 1934 and 1966 to create a rich archive of Black Lexington. Ida Nelson and Robert J. Long established Lafayette Studios in downtown Lexington to produce images for a range of commercial purposes…
UK Art Museum
Free
Feb 18 - Aug 2 2025
The re:museum exhibition evolves once again, updating artworks and informational displays while continuing to promote a welcoming engagement with art and offering a peek behind-the-curtain at how our Museum operates. re:museum ∙ RE:TRACE maintains this education-forward approach while applying a new thematic umbrella. With re:museum ∙ RE:TRACE, viewers are invited to consider detailed linework and the path of the artists’ hands in the creation…
UK Art Museum
Free
Feb 18 - Aug 2 2025
“I enter the classroom as an evangelist for the idea that photography is the most complex, important form of communication in our culture, and that it takes energy, will, humor, pathos, research, and legwork to learn to use the medium effectively.” This statement by artist, educator, and writer Tim Davis affirms his belief in active image-making, something he has done consistently since the early 1990s. Davis’s photographs revel in surfaces…
UK Art Museum
Free
Feb 18 - Aug 2 2025
Dear Jay, When we spoke about this exhibition, neither of us knew that you would not live to see it. While deeply sorrowful, I am buoyed by bringing together a handful of touchstones—artists whose printmaking and drawing you held in high regard. A few of them we never discussed, but I think they are relevant. Your audacity, inventiveness, and mastery of materials put you in their august company. Some of these individuals are referred…
UK Art Museum
Free