Here We Have Idaho: Belonging showcases artwork by Sofía Jaramillo and Ceci Richardson-Salvador, two Idaho-based artists who engage with the state’s natural landscape through photography.

Curated from the collections of Jordan D. Schnitzer and His Family Foundation, Jeffrey Gibson: They Teach Love presents a survey of 53 artworks by Jeffrey Gibson, one of today’s foremost contemporary American artists. Spanning sixteen years, this major exhibition bursts with Gibson’s bold patterns and brilliant colors. Gibson, who is of Mississippi Choctaw and Cherokee heritage, blends aspects of Indigenous art and culture with modernist art traditions, navigating and disrupting expectations placed upon Indigenous artists, and bringing messages of hope.

James Castle (1899-1977), born in Garden Valley, Idaho, is internationally celebrated for his prolific, lifelong artistic practice and contributions as a Deaf artist. His art provides a unique visual record of seven decades of life in rural Idaho. Castle’s artistry has fascinated a networked community of scholars who have largely depended upon dated accounts from family and friends to help tell his story. The chronicle and impact of Castle’s life experiences continue to be shaped by the research of educators, Deaf culture scholars, filmmakers, archivists, and art historians.

Boise Art Museum is thrilled to announce that we have been invited, among only ten art museums nationwide, to participate in the National Gallery of Art’s “Across the Nation” program, to share the nation’s collection with museums across the country. We welcome you to take advantage of this rare opportunity to experience four noteworthy and beloved artworks presented at the Boise Art Museum.

Thomas Eakins | Berthe Morisot | Mark Rothko

This exhibition presents site-specific sculptures, each constructed with the artist’s established technique of easing and entwining together thousands of thin, ceramic forms she calls curves. In her California studio, Finneran handmakes hundreds-of-thousands of curves by rolling clay coils, then shaping, smoothing, firing, glazing, and firing them again. When gently positioned and layered directly on the floor, they create large, nest-like structures the artist terms floor cones and floral rings.

Here We Have Idaho: Material Matters is the first exhibition within a new Boise Art Museum program that showcases Idaho-based artists whose artworks broaden the boundaries of contemporary art. This program reimagines how the Boise Art Museum engages with artists and artists engage with our community, while highlighting the role of art and artists in reflecting important ideas of our times.

Tea is the second-most highly consumed daily drink in the world, after water. While enjoying tea is a social custom — a pot almost always holds enough for at least two cups — it can be experienced in solitude to delight in the ordinary moments. It is a source of hospitality and a gesture of friendship. Sipped across the globe, tea has played an important role in shaping cultures, economies, and customs throughout history.

Hector Dionicio Mendoza was born in Uruapan, Michoacan, Mexico, and grew up with an appreciation for faith, ritual, and the environment. The artist’s multimedia artworks blend ideals of geography, memory, and labor and use cardboard boxes, cinder blocks, and other recycled materials, along with plants and natural imagery, to draw out these associations. Mendoza’s grandfather, a fifth-generation curandero (shaman) of Afro-Caribeño lineage, who practiced alternative healing traditions, was a pivotal influence on his artistic concepts, materials, and imagery.

The Last Supper features nearly 1,000 hand-painted ceramic plates, illustrating the final-meal choices of people on death row in the U.S.  Artist Julie Green (1961-2021) spent twenty-two years creating this large-scale art installation by painting images of the final meals on found ceramic plates with cobalt blue mineral paint and then re-firing them in a kiln.  Boise Art Museum is the first to showcase all available plates created by the artist.

This exhibition brings to light the otherwise invisible facets of migrants’ experiences crossing the border between Mexico and the United States. These contemporary still-life photographs feature the personal possessions of migrants and asylum seekers that U.S. Border Patrol agents confiscated and discarded from 2003 through 2014.

For thousands of years, the rainbow has been a cross-cultural symbol of hope, positivity, and a bit of magic. Dedicated to the celebration of rainbows, Spectrum showcases interactives inspired by the rich and numerous colors of our world. Participatory stations throughout the ARTexperience Gallery encourage visitors of all ages to create a rainbow block print, match colored fiber to emotions, build a colorful town, and more.

Visual Language: The Art of Abstraction presents a selection of abstract, non-representational artworks from Boise Art Museum’s Permanent Collection. A cross-section of abstract artwork, created by the most significant American abstract artists working from the 1980s through the early 2000s, features Color Field paintings, lyrical abstraction, and minimalism.

Ever-present, the sky hugs earth and serves as the backdrop to our world. Early morning mist; stark-blue skies; electric-pink sunsets; black, silent, star-filled nights – in all its shifting forms – the sky is reassuringly there while simultaneously reflecting the temporary realities of our lives back upon us. Portraits of Sky investigates our fascination with the world above, through artist illuminations of clouds, stars, and the sky in its transitory splendor.

Myths, Fables, and Fortunes is a journey of discovery focused on the natural environment of the Northwest. Drawn from the Museum’s Permanent Collection and spanning over six decades, the exhibition highlights our shifting perspectives and connection with the land during a period of dramatic change and development.

Silver Linings celebrates the legacy of artists of African descent spanning the twentieth century through the contemporary moment. It includes Henry Ossawa Tanner’s Christ and His Disciples Before the Last Supper (1908-1909) and the Spelman College Museum of Fine Art’s most recent acquisition of Carrie Mae Weems’s Color Real and Imagined (2014). Silver Linings includes an array of media spanning sculptural works by Elizabeth Catlett and Selma Burke, and photographic works by Lorna Simpson and Renée Cox.

RYAN! Feddersen creates installations and public artworks that invite people to consider their relationships to the environment, technology, society, and culture through participation. The Coyote Now exhibition will include two large-scale, interactive artworks— a site-specific, 55-foot mural that visitors will be invited to color on, and a large, interactive, kinetic sculpture. Feddersen’s mural illustrates an original story of Coyote.

Katazome (rice-paste resist dyeing using stencils) is one of the most important textile processes in Japan, used for centuries to dye kimono. Katazome Today: Migrations of a Japanese Art examines the contemporary evolution of katazome and the metamorphosis of the process through globalization. Diving into the practices of a select group of contemporary artists, the exhibition also shares the many ways these artists honor and carry on the traditions of the technique through their varying interpretations.

Jean LaMarr is an internationally recognized artist, educator, and Native American advocate with ancestral ties to Pyramid Lake, Nevada, and Susanville, California. For decades, her work has sparked powerful and important conversations about cultural stereotypes, representations of Native women, legacies of colonization, and environmental justice.

The Fractured Giant is a site-specific installation by Jacob Hashimoto in BAM’s Sculpture Court and marks his first solo museum exhibition in Idaho.  Combining traditional kite- and pattern-making techniques, printmaking, and collage into a sculptural environment, the artist has created an immersive installation with thousands of thin, hand-made papers.

Using sculpture, painting, and installation, Jacob Hashimoto creates complex worlds from a range of modular components—bamboo-and-paper kites, model boats, and even Astro-turf-covered blocks. His layered compositions reference video games, virtual environments, and cosmology, while also being deeply rooted in art-historical traditions….

Montana-based artist Willem Volkersz (b. 1939) is a significant contemporary artist known for his neon and paint-by-number installations. He was a pioneer in the use of neon in art and developed early and sustaining loves for photography, travel, American roadside culture, Pop Art, and Folk and Visionary Art.

Often considered the art of imitation, the depiction of the still life has been practiced by artists for centuries. From the ancient Greeks to 17th century Dutch painters, from Cubists to today’s contemporary artists, still life endures as a significant form of artistic expression—one that is contemplative and transformative—yet frequently overlooked.

Stephen Towns is a painter and fiber artist whose artwork explores the ways American history influences contemporary society. His work draws visual inspiration from medieval altarpieces, nineteenth-century photography, Dutch wax print fabrics, and from African American story quilt. Guest curated by art historian, cultural producer, and writer Kilolo Luckett, the exhibition features artwork created between 2014 and 2021 that explores the American dream through the lives of Black Americans from the late eighteenth century to present.

Felix Gonzalez-Torres was known for his minimalist, often conceptual, installations and sculptures that assembled quantities of a common object, such as a string of lights, stack of paper, or individually wrapped candy, to convey complex meaning and encourage audience participation. Through the manner of displaying the artwork, along with the process of the viewer’s participation, each work became a metaphor for loss and healing, as seen in light bulbs that expire and are replaced, or as papers or candies are taken by visitors and replenished by the art museum. This cycle of depletion and renewal over time is key to the visitor’s experience with, and understanding of, Gonzalez-Torres’s creative practice.

Cuba has a diverse culture and complex history that is both fascinating and often misunderstood. Paradox, dark humor, beauty, sadness, and vulnerability connect the works on view in the exhibition Contemporary Cuban Art. Guest Curator Jill Hartz has conceptualized this exhibition through the lenses of history, identity, and materiality as a structure to draw visitors into their own paths of discovery of contemporary Cuban art. Most of the Cuban artists, whose artworks are featured in the exhibition, have benefited from a free education and meticulous training from a young age. Their extensive knowledge of Western art history and their honing of practice and technique have provided strong foundations for their individual visions and expression.

Using materials often associated with the domestic sphere, such as embroidery, weaving, and fiber elements, Suchitra Mattai creates large-scale installations, sculptures and two-dimensional artworks that navigate her family heritage while also unraveling historical narratives. She reclaims vintage and found materials, such as hand-made saris and other historically rich objects as a way of making sense of the world around her and the multiple cultures she inhabits as an Indo-Caribbean American.

Ideas about the American West, both in the popular imagination and in commonly accepted historical narratives, are often based on a past that never was, and fail to take into account important events that actually occurred. At once, “The West” can conjure images of rugged colonial settlers, gun-toting-cowboys, or vacant expanses of natural beauty. Many Wests: Artists Shape an American Idea offers multiple views of “The West” through the perspectives of forty-seven modern and contemporary artists.

Re-Framed examines the notion of a shared American identity while recognizing the complexity of factors that determine each person’s cultural and social viewpoints. Featuring many never before shown artworks from the Permanent Collection, Re-Framed presents a multiplicity of artists who offer meaningful insights….

Displayed in BAM’s ARTexperience Gallery, a space designed for children and families, the exhibition highlights a selection of artworks, featuring the use of non-traditional media in surprising and creative ways. One of the most important and personal decisions an artist makes when creating an artwork is the choice of medium. The medium is crucial to….

Outside the Lines is the fourth and final exhibition inspired by Boise Art Museum’s Art Cards, a project designed to encourage engagement with artworks in BAM’s Permanent Collection. Based on the Art Card deck True Colors, this exhibition explores the ways in which artists employ the elements of art and principles of design to convey mood, provoke emotional responses, and communicate with viewers.

Organized every three years by the Boise Art Museum, the Idaho Triennial is a juried exhibition highlighting the quality and diversity of contemporary artistic practices in our state. For more than 80 years, BAM has celebrated the creativity of artists living and working in Idaho, and the Museum’s series of biennial and triennial exhibitions has become a respected and treasured tradition.
The juror for The 2020 Idaho Triennial is Grace Kook-Anderson, the Arlene and Harold Schnitzer Curator of Northwest Art at the Portland Art Museum.