In this first exhibition cycle, AMERICANA includes art produced in South America, North America, and the Caribbean presented in the form of six short visual essays, each offering a critical perspective on a set of related issues in modern culture and society of particular interest to progressive artists.

For the presentation of the museum’s permanent collection during our 35th anniversary year, this understanding of art was conflated conceptually with the celebration of donations of art that have been made to the museum during the last several decades. The artworks represented outstanding examples of the works that have been gifted to the museum since it first…

Informed by these interests in art history, the current presentation of the permanent collection— which was installed thematically within two rooms on the first floor and four rooms on the second—is organized around the historical criteria of genres within Western painting and the traditional hierarchy of genres that developed out of the Renaissance period and was promoted…