Upcoming Exhibitions

Fall 2020

The Lee Brown Coye collection at Picker Art Gallery (working title)

This exhibition will feature the best examples of paintings, drawings, sculptures, and jewelry from the Picker Art Gallery’s collection of works by native central New York artist Lee Brown Coye (1907–1981). The Picker Art Gallery holds a large collection of artworks by Coye, most of which have never been exhibited or published. Although most well-known for his illustrations for pulp horror publications, Coye was a versatile artist who produced numerous landscape paintings and drawings in an American regionalist style, as well as small sculptures and jewelry. The exhibition will feature key works from Coye’s career as an illustrator selected from the Picker Art Gallery collection and other regional collections. The exhibition not only offers an opportunity to reassess Coye’s position within the history of American illustration and to examine his influence on contemporary visual culture surrounding horror, science fiction, and fantasy, but by probing beyond his illustrations, reveals a fuller picture of Coye as an artist.

Fall 2021

Revolutionary Chinese Woodcuts

The Theodore Herman collection of modern Chinese woodcuts is one of only four of its kind outside of China. It includes more than 200 modern Chinese woodcut prints made between 1937 and 1948—from the beginning of the War of Resistance Against Japan (1937–1945) to the end of the Chinese Civil War between the Nationalists and Communists (1945–1949)—during the first flourishing of the modern Chinese woodcut movement.

This exhibition will feature a selection of woodcuts from the Herman Collection, many of which have not been exhibited before. The prints by prominent woodcut artists such as Li Hua, Wang Renfeng, and Yan Han, among others, range from showing the horrors of war and the plight of the peasantry to political protest imagery and genre subjects. The exhibition traces the development of diverse styles within the modern woodcut movement—from the adaptation of expressionist models Germany to the innovative use of a traditional Chinese visual vocabulary—and examines the view offered by the prints into Chinese life, society, and politics during a period of immense upheaval.