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Capturing the West: Timothy O'Sullivan, Pioneer Photographer
Opening May 5, 2024
This exhibition highlights photographs from Timothy O’Sullivan’s landmark series, U.S. Geographical Survey West of the 100th Meridian. Hailed by Ansel Adams as one of the most important photographers of the nineteenth century and touted as a precursor to Modernist photographers, O’Sullivan was one of the first to document the western landscape.
Kentucky Artists – Kentucky Visions, Gifts from the Anna and Allan Weiss Collection
Opening May 10, 2024
Kentucky Artists – Kentucky Visions shares, for the first time, generous gifts from the expansive, Kentucky-focused collection of Anna and Allan Weiss, both natives of Louisville. For over forty years as collectors, Anna and Allan have been passionate advocates for many Kentucky artists and their work. In Allan’s words, artists often “became my friends” with their works of art becoming “part of my life with them.”
Homecoming: A Walking Stick by Henry Gudgell
Opening May 10, 2024
Homecoming: A Walking Stick by Henry Gudgell celebrates the Speed’s recent acquisition of a vibrant, reptile-clad walking stick created by the Kentucky-born artist Henry Gudgell (1826 or 1829-1895) around 1865 when he was in his thirties and living in rural Livingston County, Missouri. Gudgell was born into enslavement in central Kentucky’s Anderson County, the son of Rachael who was fifteen or sixteen years old at the time of his birth. When Henry was still an infant, he, his mother, and other enslaved women, children, and men were forcibly removed to Ray County, Missouri. In 1853, Henry, then in his twenties, was again forcibly separated from his community when he was sold to another Missouri family.
From the Speed Collection: Into a Modern World
Spring 2024 – ongoing
This new installation showcases the Museum’s celebrated 19th and 20th century collections, installed in new arrangements, with updated scholarship, freshly-conserved artworks, and exciting new acquisitions.
The Kentucky Gallery Reimagined
Spring 2024 – ongoing
When the Speed’s 5,600-square-foot Kentucky Gallery first opened in 2016, it became Kentucky’s only art museum space dedicated to presenting and interpreting the state’s many artistic traditions. In the years since, the gallery has welcomed thousands of visitors, including many students, teachers, visiting scholars, and groups from other museums across the United States.
Louisville's Black Avant-Garde: William M. Duffy
Opening June 28, 2024
William M. Duffy’s upcoming solo exhibition is the second installment of the Louisville Black Avant-Garde series, highlighting local, historically significant Black visual artists active from 1950–1980. This retrospective exhibition spans over 4 decades of creativity and presents not only the sculpture that Duffy is known for, but also his drawings, paintings, and digital art.
Yayoi Kusama: Infinity Mirrored Room– LET’S SURVIVE FOREVER
Opening July 12, 2024
The Speed Art Museum is honored to present Yayoi Kusama: Infinity Mirrored Room– LET’S SURVIVE FOREVER, one of the artist’s seminal immersive artworks that explores ideas of “self-obliteration” through repetition and play with space, light, color, and time.
Winslow Homer: American Storyteller
August 2024 – February 2025
Widely regarded as one of the foremost and influential American artists of the nineteenth century, Winslow Homer began his career as a free-lance commercial illustrator designing wood engravings for popular illustrated weekly publications such as Harper’s Weekly, Appleton’s Journal of Literature, Science, and Art, and Ballou’s Pictorial Drawing-Room Companion. Thanks to advancements in printing technology, these journals—which emphasized black-and-white illustrations over text—could be published quickly and inexpensively for wide-spread distribution to the masses.
Current Speed: Kathia St. Hilaire
Opening October 25, 2024
The Speed Art Museum is proud to present the first major museum exhibition of artist Kathia St. Hilaire. Informed by her experience growing up in Caribbean and African American neighborhoods in South Florida, St. Hilaire seeks to memorialize the communities that she has been a part of through innovative studio techniques.