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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.

Federico Solmi: Adrift

Visually sumptuous and incisively satirical, Federico Solmi’s multimedia works expose the excesses and contradictions of power across history and contemporary culture. Adrift presents new and recent “video paintings” alongside the monumental canvas The Ship of Fools, which reimagines Théodore Géricault’s Raft of the Medusa (1818–19) through Solmi’s irreverent visual language. The painting assembles historical and present-day figures, from Christopher Columbus to Elon Musk, into a chaotic allegory of a society unmoored. Evoking a contemporary America adrift amid spectacle, instability, and competing claims to power, the exhibition also includes a Virtual Reality experience that immerses visitors in Solmi’s destabilizing world.

About the Exhibition:

Born in 1973 in Bologna, Italy, Federico Solmi now lives in New York. His groundbreaking work in video and audio was recognized with the award of a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship in 2009. Solo museum surveys include American Circus at the Haifa Museum of Art in Haifa, Israel, in 2016; The Grand Masquerade at the Tarble Art Center in Charleston, Illinois, in 2019; and Joie de Vivre at the Morris Museum in Morristown, New Jersey, in 2022–23. In September 2024, his solo show The Great Farce opened at the Block Museum of Art Northwestern University in Chicago, Illinois. Solmi: Ship of Fools was also the subject of a major exhibition in Venice, Italy at Palazzo Donà Dalle Rose, during the Venice Biennale in 2024.

In 2018, Solmi participated in the citywide project Open Spaces: A Kansas City Arts Experience in Kansas. In 2019, his work was included in the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery’s traveling exhibition The Outwin 2019: American Portraiture Today. In 2021, he was featured in the Phillips Collection’s centennial exhibition Seeing Differently as well as the inaugural exhibition of the Ocean Flower Museum Island in Danzhou, China. He has participated in several international biennial exhibitions, including the SITE Santa Fe Biennial in New Mexico in 2010; Venice Biennale in 2011; Shenzhen Animation Biennial in China in 2013; and Beijing Media Art Biennale in 2016.

Solmi’s work is in numerous public and private collections, including the Phillips Collection (Washington DC), The Phoenix Art Museum (Phoenix AZ), The Block Museum (Evanston, IL), The Thoma Foundation (Chicago, Santa Fe), Pinacoteca di Brera (Milano IT), Table Art Center (Charleston, IL), 21 C Museum Hotel (Louisville KY), Fundacion Mer (Madrid ES), Ocat Oct Contemporary Art Terminal (Shanghai CN), Collezione Farnesina Experimenta (Rome IT), Collezione Bologna Fiere SPA (Bologna IT).

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.

Nanni Valentini: Interspaces

Over the half-century span of its Ceramic National exhibitions, the Everson launched the career of countless American ceramists. In 1942 and 1958, the scope of the Ceramic Nationals became international, showcasing talents from both the Western hemisphere and Europe. On the advice of Italian artist Lucio Fontana, a brilliant ceramist in his own right, the 1958 Ceramic International introduced Nanni Valentini to the world. Valentini received a coveted purchase prize, and his work was exhibited on that year’s circuit, which included the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, the Cleveland Museum of Art, and the Detroit Institute of Arts.

By the time he exhibited at the Ceramic International, Valentini’s work had begun to move away from strict functionality. Although his studies were rooted in pottery traditions at the Istituto d’Arte per la Ceramica in Faenza, Valentini saw himself as a fine artist rather than craftsman. In the 1960s, he began creating conceptual wall-based ceramics that drew from exciting developments in Italian painting. By the 1970s, he produced a groundbreaking series of works called Trasparenza (Transparency), which further broke down the barriers between painting and sculptural object. Before his untimely death in 1985, Valentini established that ceramics were an inextricable part of the fine art canon.

In collaboration with the Nanni Valentini Archive, Fondazione Museo della Ceramica di Savona, and ABC-ARTE, Interspaces re-introduces Valentini’s groundbreaking work to American audiences.