Guest curator Elizabeth S. Hawley considers the history of American art through the collection at Auburn University. Pairing paintings from the museum’s iconic Advancing American Art Collection with other contemporary collection objects, this exhibition encourages visitors to ask what being and belonging in American art might mean in the past, the present and the future.

Acclaimed poet Nicole Sealey will engage faculty, students and the Auburn community as a poet-in-residence at The Jule. Working with Auburn’s collection by the 19th-century naturalist John James Audubon, Sealey will marry language and art by pairing works from Audubon’s monumental “The Birds of America” with both contemporary and historical poetic responses, inviting visitors to question the symbolic and cultural meanings we ascribe to the natural world.

Featuring objects on loan from the Whitney Museum of American Art alongside the university art collection, Women Artists in Ascendance pulls back the curtain on the story of modern American art by displaying works from a dozen women artists who were goliaths in their own right, including Helen Frankenthaler, Grace Hartigan and Lee Krasner.Organized in partnership with Art Bridges