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Ann Clarke: Under the Canopy

Textile artist Ann Clarke frequently describes herself as “the kid who took a walk alone.” Solitary labor and contemplation are essential building blocks for her work, which ranges from intricately woven landscapes to impossibly detailed anatomical tufted wall hangings. For Clarke, the importance of solitude is held in tension with her role as an educator and community builder. The techniques underpinning her work have been passed from one maker to another in workshops, sewing circles, and from parent to child, weaving a literal social net.

Clarke’s body of work presented in Under the Canopy was shaped by her mother’s physical and mental decline in the years before her passing. A ghostly knit of her mother’s hand evokes the intimacy that comes with sharing skill and labor. Images of nature exist alongside others that draw on the material culture of domestic environments like flower arrangements, vases, and empty chairs. Grouped together, the works in Under the Canopy create space for both artist and viewer to contemplate human relationships, mortality, and shared labor.

About the Artist: 

Ann Clarke, originally from Rochester, NY, is a celebrated fiber artist who received an MFA from Rhode Island School of Design. She holds a BFA in painting and printmaking from the University of Michigan. Clarke has exhibited throughout her academic career having taught at East Tennessee State University in Johnson City, TN from 1994 to 1998. In 1998, she joined SU as a faculty member in Fiber Arts/Material Studies. In 2008, she was named the Dean of Syracuse University’s College of Visual and Performing Arts, and returned to faculty in 2016, retiring in 2024 to be a full-time artist. Clarke’s newest series, Interior Landscapes, includes large-scale rugs installed on walls for museum visitors to contemplate. Dreamlike images of trees challenge us to consider the vulnerability of our wooded landscapes. Oversized, empty chairs remind us of the consequences of loss—of both people and the environment in which we make our homes.

A Long Look: Documentary Photography, 1888-2016

A Long Look: Documentary Photography, 1888-2016 traces more than a century of photographers turning their lenses toward the world as witnesses, advocates, and storytellers. From the late nineteenth century, when advances in camera technology first allowed photographers to record spontaneous moments, to the bold and colorful images of today, documentary photography has shaped how people see the world, both its past and its present.

Documentary photographers traditionally immerse themselves in their subjects. Bruce Davidson spent ten days living in the mining communities of South Wales producing his Welsh Miners portfolio. Aaron Siskind’s Harlem Document project plays out over nine years, showing the vibrant life of Black Americans in Harlem in the 1930s. Donna Ferrato has spent decades documenting survivors of domestic violence and advocating for their welfare. Documentary photographers reveal how sustained engagement with their subjects, over ten days or several decades, produces images that challenge stereotypes, humanize the unfamiliar, and deepen public understanding.

Spanning from 1888 to 2016, A Long Look invites viewers to consider the significance of documentary photography as a medium, asking how photographs shape collective memory and inspire social awareness. Documentary photographers must often navigate the tension between art and journalism, frequently occupying a grey area between the two. A Long Look is presented in conjunction with LIFE: Six Women Photographers to foster discussions on the relationship between documentary photography and photojournalism.

Laurent Craste: Iconoclasts

Iconoclasts marks the American museum debut for French-born Canadian ceramist Laurent Craste. Over the past decade, Craste has committed a wide range of indignities and abuse against his ornate vases and urns, including pummeling them with baseball bats and crowbars and piercing them with arrows. Despite the violence that runs through his work, Craste has a great passion for historical porcelain. Working with porcelain allows Craste to explore the prestige and power of upper-class society, but also inequality and the strain that is placed on working people. The anthropomorphic nature of Craste’s vases echoes the human body, making it no surprise that people feel strong emotions when seeing a helpless vase struck by a baseball bat. Triggering these strong emotions in his audience allows Craste to connect on a deeper level as he asks questions about class, money, and power.

About the Artist:

French-born artist Laurent Craste lives and works in the village of Saint-Gabriel in Quebec. Craste has received numerous awards and honors throughout his career (Winifred Shantz Award, grants from the Canada Council for the Arts and the Quebec Arts Council, Jean-Marie Gauvreau Award, etc.). His works are on display in many private and public collections (Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Public Collection of the Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade Canada, Claridge Collection, Majudia Collection, etc.). On the occasion of their entry into the permanent collection of the Musée des Métiers d’Art du Québec in 2018, 15 of his works have been recognized as of exceptional interest and of national importance by the Canadian Cultural Property Export Review Board.

​During his more than 20-year career, Laurent Craste has participated in more than 60 group exhibitions in Canada, the United States, Europe and Asia. Among others, his work has been exhibited in New York (Museum of Moving Image), in Ottawa (Carleton University Art Gallery), as well as in Paris (Cité de la mode et du design). He has also had more than a dozen solo exhibitions, including at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, the Tom Thomson Art Gallery and the Art Gallery of Burlington in Ontario, as well as the Hohmann Fine Arts Gallery in Palm Springs California.

LIFE: Six Women Photographers

LIFE founder and editor-in-chief, Henry R. Luce, was convinced that American political, economic, and cultural power would, and should, dominate the era he defined as the “American Century.” Photojournalism, or “photo essays” as he coined them, could effectively shape an authentically American vision of the United States as an international power, inspiring its people, in Luce’s words, “to live and work and fight with vigor and enthusiasm.” By giving readers vivid images of industrial strength, women and the family, race relations, World War II, labor, and the Cold War, the photographers in this exhibition contributed to this view of the United States as a global player seeking its identity on the world stage.Six pioneering female photographers were among those who contributed to LIFE’s pursuit of this American character: Margaret Bourke-White, Marie Hansen, Martha Holmes, Lisa Larsen, Nina Leen, and Hansel Mieth. These photographers were among the few women who were retained as full-time staff or on a semi-permanent basis rather than as freelancers. Their cameras captured events both international and domestic, wide-ranging and intimate, serious and playful. Central to LIFE’s reportage was the sometimes contentious relationship between photographers and editors, with each holding a stake in the ideology and content of the final essay. Ultimately, the editorial staff, not the photographers, chose which images would be published, and thus how each story was presented.In his prospectus for LIFE, Luce stressed the importance for one “to see life; to see the world; to eyewitness great events…” It was not about reading but rather about allowing the images to tell the stories. These six photographers played a vital role in Luce’s quest to achieve that end.

A Beautiful Noise: The Neil Diamond Musical

Recommended for all ages.

THE UNTOLD TRUE STORY OF A BROOKLYN KID WHO BECAME A CHART-BUSTING, SHOW-STOPPING, AWARD-WINNING AMERICAN ICON

Created in collaboration with Neil Diamond himself, A BEAUTIFUL NOISE is the uplifting true story of how a kid from Brooklyn became a chart-busting, show-stopping American rock icon. With 120 million albums sold, a catalogue of classics like “America,” “Forever in Blue Jeans,” and “Sweet Caroline,” an induction into the Songwriters and Rock and Roll Halls of Fame, a Grammy® Lifetime Achievement Award, and sold-out concerts around the world that made him bigger than Elvis, Neil Diamond’s story was made to shine on Broadway-and head out on the road across America.

Like Jersey Boys and Beautiful: The Carole King Musical before it, A BEAUTIFUL NOISE: THE NEIL DIAMOND MUSICAL is an inspiring, exhilarating, energy-filled musical memoir, that tells the untold true story of how America’s greatest hitmaker became a star, set to the songs that defined his career. Presented in association with and endorsed by Neil Diamond.

*Interpreters will be available at this performance

**Anyone, regardless of age, must have their own ticket.