Vasari Art Codex

museum exhibitions schedule Mar 30, 2026 visibility 6 link 4 artists, 1 gallery

bampfa quilts routed west 2692097

The Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA) has launched "Routed West: Twentieth-Century African American Quilts in California," the first major thematic exploration of the 3,000-piece Eli Leon bequest. Curated by Elaine Yau, the exhibition features over 100 quilts by approximately 80 artists, tracing the migration of improvisational textile traditions from the American South to the Bay Area. The show highlights how these portable objects served as both functional necessities and vital forms of self-expression for Black women during the mid-20th century Great Migration.

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museum exhibitions schedule Dec 18, 2025 visibility 4 link 7 artists, 1 gallery

On View: 'Jacob Lawrence: African American Modernist' at Kunsthal KAdE is First Retrospective of Celebrated Artist in Europe

Kunsthal KAdE in Amersfoort, Netherlands, is hosting 'Jacob Lawrence: African American Modernist,' the first European retrospective of the American artist Jacob Lawrence (1917-2000). The exhibition spans his six-decade career from the 1930s, featuring 70 paintings, 25 drawings, and 75 prints, along with photographs and archival materials. It includes works from his celebrated series on the Great Migration, Builders, World War II, and historical figures like Harriet Tubman and Toussaint L'Ouverture, as well as new works by contemporary artists Barbara Earl Thomas and Nina Chanel Abney inspired by Lawrence.

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museum exhibitions schedule Jan 15, 2026 visibility 6 link 4 artists, 2 galleries

‘Taking Flight’: Joe Overstreet’s Art Exhibits Encapsulate Geometry and Immersion

The Mississippi Museum of Art in Jackson is presenting 'Joe Overstreet: Taking Flight,' a major exhibition featuring three collections of the late artist's work, including his 'Flight Patterns' series. The show, organized by The Menil Collection in Houston and running through Jan. 25, 2026, highlights Overstreet's abstract phase with works from the 1960s, 1970s, and 1990s that use ropes and metal grommets to create multi-dimensional pieces exploring themes of flight and movement. The exhibition includes loans from private collections, other museums, and the Eric Firestone Gallery, which represents Overstreet's estate.

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museum exhibitions schedule Dec 29, 2025 visibility 4 link 7 artists, 1 gallery

Intuit Art Museum Showcases Self-Taught Artists, Work About Migration in ‘Catalyst: Im/migration’

The Intuit Art Museum in Chicago has extended its exhibition “Catalyst: Im/migration and Self-Taught Art in Chicago” through March 22, 2026. Featuring nearly two dozen artists, the show highlights the creative contributions of migrants and immigrants alongside the rise of self-taught art in 20th-century Chicago. Among the works is Pooja Pittie’s interactive piece “What We Build to Belong,” a hand-knotted net-like structure where visitors can add notes, drawings, or string. The museum is hosting a free community day on Feb. 7, 2026. The exhibition includes artists from diverse backgrounds, such as the late Tae Kwon “Thomas” Kong, who made collages from packing materials at his convenience store, and Charles Warner, a carpenter who created wood-carved cathedral models. Three artists came to Chicago from the South as part of the Great Migration.

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museum exhibitions schedule Jun 5, 2025 visibility 2 link 3 artists, 1 gallery

Major show of African American quilts opening at BAMPFA — despite federal funding cuts

The Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA) is opening "Routed West: Twentieth-Century African American Quilts in California" on June 8, the first major museum survey of its vast African American quilt collection. The collection, bequeathed by Oakland collector Eli Leon in 2018, includes over 3,000 quilts, with 100 featured in the exhibition. The show focuses on migration during the Second Great Migration (1940–1970) and highlights artists like National Heritage Fellow Laverne Brackens, Rosie Lee Tompkins, and Arbie Williams, alongside multi-generational quilting families. The exhibition opens despite recent federal funding cuts for conservation work on the quilts.

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article local schedule Jul 16, 2025 visibility 2 link 3 artists

a cleveland artist is transforming a trashed greyhound bus into a museum of migration 1234747377

Cleveland-based artist, historian, and preservationist Robert Louis Brandon Edwards is transforming a 1947 Greyhound bus he rescued from a Pennsylvania junkyard into a traveling Museum of the Great Migration. The bus, designed by Raymond Loewy and originally operating in the Great Lakes region, will feature virtual reality exhibitions highlighting the experiences of African Americans who moved from the rural South to the North, Midwest, and West between 1910 and 1970. Edwards, who is pursuing doctoral studies in historic preservation at Columbia University, is partnering with Cleveland nonprofit Playhouse Square and hopes to have the bus on the road within a year.

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museum exhibitions schedule Jan 19, 2026 visibility 4

Routed West: Twentieth-Century African American Quilts in California

The exhibition 'Routed West: Twentieth-Century African American Quilts in California' will run from September 18, 2026, to January 17, 2027, at BAMPFA. It traces the flow and flourishing of quilts during the Second Great Migration (1940–1970), when approximately five million African Americans moved from the rural South to the North and West, with hundreds of thousands arriving in California carrying quilts as containers of ancestral memory and cultural survival. The show features more than 80 artworks organized across several themes, highlighting repurposed work clothes, improvisational piecing, and pattern-based quilting by migrants from Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Oklahoma, and Texas. Works by contemporary artists show how these traditions remain alive today.

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