Grinnell College Names New Director of the Grinnell College Museum of Art.
Susan Baley has been named as the new director of the Grinnell College Museum of Art. Chosen after a nationwide search, Baley will assume the duties of director on Jan. 4, 2021.
GCMoA is open and welcoming to all.
In our commitment to keep our community safe, masks are required. If you arrive without a mask, the museum attendants will provide one for you.
Regular Hours Through Dec. 12:
Tuesday–Friday, 11 a.m.–5:30 p.m.
Saturday, noon–5 p.m.
Closed Thanksgiving Day
Current Exhibition
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Sept. 7 – Dec. 12, 2021
Queer/Dialogue
This exhibition presents eight artists — Louis Fratino, Jordan King, Jeremy Laing, Doron Langberg, Catherine Opie, Christina Quarles, Paul Mpagi Sepuya, and Devan Shimoyama — whose works enable dialogue at the intersections of identity expression: race, gender, individuality and otherness, equity within differences, with a focus on the body as expressive terrain. The artists represent distinct voices across a spectrum of media — drawing, painting, sculpture, textile, and film — and we present them solo and in concert in the hope of creating a multidimensional dialogue using the term queer as a catalyst.
Curated by Associate Director Daniel Strong and Guest Curator Greg Manuel.
Explore our social media for new perspectives on our collection and daily opportunities to interact with works of art.
Upcoming Exhibitions
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Opening January 28, 2022
Digital Vision
In Digital Vision, six artists draw inspiration from electronics: the images on the screen and the screen itself; digital animations and the code behind them; even the inner guts of our machines to create works of art. These artists are adept as digital creators, but they are equally entranced by computers, projectors, and peripherals as things, as subjects, and as materials for their art. Nam June Paik might be the best ancestor for these 21st century creators.
Digital Vision builds on the work of Matthew Kluber, associate professor of art at Grinnell College, who brings together printing, painting, digital art, and sculpture to make wholly new art. In a studio practice that combines paint, 3D printers, and computer programming, Matthew finds a new interface between physical and virtual.
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Opening April 22, 2022
BAX
The Bachelor of Art Exhibition presents work in the creative arts by third- and fourth-year Grinnell College students.
With support from GCMoA staff, students manage all the exhibition details: from the submission of proposals, to the selection of a juror, to the installation process, and the creation of an exhibition catalogue and website. The exhibition includes photographs, drawings, sculpture, paintings, video, installations, and works created digitally.
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Opening June 28, 2022
Jewel Box Quilt Guild
This exhibition features quilts of all sizes, techniques, colors and patterns, designed and quilted by local Guild members. This will be their first exhibition at the Museum since a pattern has been set for all of us by the pandemic: isolation, stasis, discovery, emergence, renewal.
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Opening Sept. 23, 2022
Reverent Ornament: Art from the Islamic World
Comprising works of fine glassware, ceramics, metalwork, painting, weaponry, weaving, and much more, Reverent Ornament shares 45 timeless treasures from a region whose everyday life, history, and culture offer many parallels to our own. If it is true that peace begins through understanding, then this ambitious collection offers us a rare opportunity for artistic exchange — a living bridge between cultures.
Reverent Ornament: Art from the Islamic World was organized by the Huntington Museum of Art, and is toured by International Arts & Artists, Washington, D.C.
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Opening January 27, 2023
William Villalongo: Myths and Migrations
Over the past 20 years, William Villalongo has expressed in his work the absurdity, beauty and vulnerability of black presence against the backdrop of race. The works become portals or navigational devices for thinking about the mystery within human experience through the poetics of history, myth and satire. This exhibition will present more than fifty paintings, collages, and signature velour paper cut-outs by Villalongo, who is a 2021 recipient of the Rome Prize in the visual arts, awarded by the American Academy in Rome, where he is in residence, creating new work for this exhibition, through August 2022.
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Opening June 29, 2023
To the Modern Eye: Stephen Appleby-Barr
A table; an assortment of objects; a face caught on the street; and a mind steeping in literature and a history of art. This exhibition traces a quirky path — Grinnell, Parry Sound, Toronto, London — to discover the fruits of labor and invention on the canvases of a sumptuous imagination.
Stephen Appleby-Barr was born in Toronto in 1981 and is now based in London. This exhibition is a partnership with Canada House, the High Commission of Canada in the United Kingdom, Trafalgar Square.
New Acquisition
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New Art at GCMoA
“The Mothership Connection” by William Villalongo
The Museum has acquired The Mothership Connection, a monumental diptych by New York-based artist William Villalongo. It is the third piece by Villalongo to enter Grinnell College's art collection and will be one of the centerpieces of an exhibition in development at GCMoA for 2023. Villalongo is a professor of art at Cooper Union and a 2021 recipient of the Rome Prize, awarded annually in the visual arts by the American Academy in Rome.
Recent Acquisitions
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Catherine Opie’s “Bo,” 1994
Catherine Opie first achieved acclaim for her visionary series of portraits taken in the 1990s of herself and her cohort in the Queer communities of San Francisco and Los Angeles at a dire time in the AIDS pandemic. As friends and acquaintances died and mourned around her in tragic circumstances and numbers, and as those same people were shunned by the public, she captured the marginalized yet proudly defiant in bust and full-length portraits inspired by the great portraits and portraitists of the European Renaissance, notably Hans Holbein.
But if this is a self-portrait, why is it called Bo? And if portraiture is about identity, what’s with the fake mustache that appears here and throughout the series? Portraiture is not solely about appearance or identity, but one’s power over appearance and identity, and how that power is deployed. The fake mustache is a talisman of identity, performance, gender, gender stereotype, and one's choice of a presence — or absence — incognito; it is an accessory to the bearer’s — and the artist’s — power to beguile.
See more of Catherine Opie's work in our fall 2021 exhibition, Queer/Dialogue
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Jacob Lawrence: The Toussaint L’Ouverture Series
In 2020, the Grinnell College Museum of Art acquired 13 prints by Jacob Lawrence based on his painted series, completed in 1938, of scenes from the life of Toussaint L’Ouverture. A leader of the Haitian Revolution, which resulted in the founding of the Republic of Haiti in 1804, L’Ouverture was one of the historical Black figures that Lawrence found lacking in the history books of his time.
In this video, Professor of Art History Fredo Rivera discusses Jacob Lawrence's series on the life of Toussaint L’Ouverture.
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GCMoA Happy Hour
Jacob Lawrence’s “Life of Toussaint L’Ouverture”
Assistant Professor of Art History Fredo Rivera and Mellon Post-Doctoral Fellow Petrouchka Moïse talk about Grinnell College Museum of Art’s recently acquired portfolio, The Life of Toussaint L'Ouverture, by Jacob Lawrence.
Campus Sculpture Tour
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A collection of outdoor sculpture can be explored on the Grinnell College campus and beyond.
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Sheltering with Art
Yoga@GCMoA with Jackie Hutchison
Yoga in the Museum with Jackie Hutchison has gone virtual. Jackie narrates regenerative yoga sessions as an alternative to our long-standing program in the museum, featuring images of works from the Grinnell College Museum of Art Collection.
