Yale University Art Gallery Exhibitions

Address: 1111 Chapel St., New Haven, CT
203-432-0600
https://artgallery.yale.edu/

Tuesday, Wednesday, and Friday: 10:00 am–5:00 pm
Thursday: 10:00 am–8:00 pm
Saturday–Sunday: 11:00 am–5:00 pm

Free and open to the public.
The Yale University Art Gallery collects, preserves, studies, and presents art in all media, from all regions of the globe and across time. The museum’s exceptional collection—numbering nearly 300,000 objects—is the core of its identity. It sustains and catalyzes all we do.
Founded in 1832, the Gallery is the oldest university art museum in America. Today, it is a center for teaching, learning, and scholarship and is a preeminent cultural asset for Yale University, the wider academic community, and the public. The museum is open to all, free of charge, and is committed to engaging audiences through thoughtful, creative, and relevant exhibitions, programs, and publications.
Crafting Worldviews: Art and Science in Europe, 1500–1800

March 24, 2023–December 3, 2023
From March 24 through December 3, 2023, the Yale University Art Gallery presents In a New Light: Paintings from the Yale Center for British Art, a selection of more than 60 paintings from the YCBA’s collection.

September 8, 2023 – January 7, 2024
Mickalene Thomas / Portrait of an Unlikely Space
Mickalene Thomas (b. 1971, M.F.A. 2002) has gained an international reputation for her dazzling paintings and photographs of Black women posed in lushly decorated interiors, as well as for her similarly styled, immersive installations. In Mickalene Thomas / Portrait of an Unlikely Space, the artist designs an entirely new multigallery installation, imagining domestic surroundings reminiscent of a moment in U.S. history that has never before been so explicitly represented in her work: the pre-Emancipation era. Coorganized by Thomas, the exhibition features a selection of early American portraits of Black women, men, and children—from miniatures and daguerreotypes to silhouettes on paper and engravings in books—hanging on walls, standing within cases, and resting atop furniture. Alongside these small-scale objects, a group of artworks by Thomas and other contemporary artists in a wide array of media are also situated within her signature homelike environment, which is adorned with period-specific textile patterns and other decorative elements. The exhibition’s living-room design elicits reflection on not only the settings in which such 18th- and 19th-century portraits would originally have been encountered but also the intimate subject matter explored in the contemporary works on view. With her unique, multifaceted approach, Thomas constructs an evocative space that is meant to engender a sense of community—for the individuals depicted in the historical objects, the artists whose work is represented in the show, and the visitors engaging with both the past and the present.