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Promise, Witness, Remembrance
April 7 – June 6, 2021
This exhibition will reflect on the life of Breonna Taylor, her killing in 2020, and the year of protests that followed, in Louisville and around the world, exploring the dualities between a personal, local story and the nation’s reflection on the promise, witness, and remembrance of too many Black lives lost to gun violence.
Isabelle de Borchgrave: Fashioning Art from Paper
February 19 – August 22, 2021
This show-stopping exhibition features life-size, trompe l’œil paper costumes spanning nearly 500 years of fashion, replicating historical garments found in European masterworks and in collections from around the world.
Collecting – A Love Story: Glass from the Adele and Leonard Leight Collection
February 6 – June 20, 2021
The exhibition draws together over 60 works by over 50 artists to illustrate both the Leights’ shared lives as collectors and the stories of international contemporary glass embedded within their collection.
Wolfgang Buttress: Blossom
November 20, 2020
Artist Wolfgang Buttress, based in Nottingham, England, documents the fading life of a 200-year-old Bramley apple tree (the mother of all Bramley apple trees), and the flourishing life of this tree’s progeny using sculpture, light, and sound to poetically reveal the life and death cycle of trees.
Auguste Rodin's The Three Shades
Installed October 2020
This sculpture is an enlarged version of a figural group that stood atop The Gates of Hell, a project conceived by the artist as a commission for the Decorative Arts Museum in Paris, France.
The World Turned Upside Down: A Contemporary Response
Opened July 5, 2020
Featuring artwork from the twentieth and twenty-first century, this re-installation features pieces from the Speed’s permanent collection that focus on the tole of artists in marking societal and political change.
Kentucky Women: Enid Yandell
Opened July 17, 2019
To celebrate her 150th birthday, the Speed is presenting a fresh look at Enid Yandell’s career, contextualizing the world in which she lived, as a young woman living and working in turn-of-the-century Louisville, Paris, and New York City.
A Celebration of the Speed Collection
Opened March 12, 2016
Extending the legacy of its founder Mrs. Hattie Bishop Speed, the museum’s grand reopening turned a new light on the Speed’s wide-ranging collections. With freshly renovated galleries and new, expansive spaces devoted to contemporary art and the art of Kentucky, visitors have the opportunity to see familiar favorites in novel ways and new acquisitions in new spaces. Supplemented by important loans, the extensive collection highlights more than 6,000 years of human creativity.