From the Deep: In the Wake of Drexciya with Ayana V. Jackson

From the Deep: In the Wake of Drexciya with Ayana V. Jackson

From the Deep: In the Wake of Drexciya with Ayana V. Jackson is the first solo exhibition by artist Ayana V. Jackson, marking her shift into immersive video, animation, and installation. Drawing inspiration from the mythic underwater world imagined by Detroit techno duo Drexciya, Jackson creates a feminist, Pan-African aquatopia inhabited by water spirits from African and Afro-Atlantic traditions.

Collaborating with designers and creatives across Africa and the diaspora, and filmed over 90 feet underwater, the exhibition blends costume, photography, sound, and film into a powerful journey through ancestral memory and myth.

Exhibition materials are available in four languages, and a forthcoming full-color catalog will include interviews between Jackson and curator Karen E. Milbourne, as well as essays by N’Goné Fall, Marta Moreno Vega, Ingrid LaFleur, and the late Greg Tate. The exhibition originated at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African Art in Washington, DC, and its tour is organized by International Arts and Artists, Washington, DC.

From the Deep: In the Wake of Drexciya with Ayana V. Jackson will begin touring in Fall 2026, and the exhibition is now available for booking.

 

Please contact David Brescia-Weiler for more information.

Goya’s Caprichos: Fantasy, Satire, and Artistic Innovation

Goya's Caprichos

Goya's Caprichos: Fantasy, Satire, and Artistic Innovation showcases the famous print series Los Caprichos (1799/1890) by Francisco José de Goya y Lucientes, frequently celebrated as the last of the Old Masters and first of the Modern artists. Through 80 images, Goya records his impressions of societal follies and prejudices, providing astute commentary through visual storytelling.

Goya’s career spanned a complex and turbulent period in both Spanish and European history. He turned increasingly to drawing and printmaking, finding the graphic arts an ideal medium for recording his unvarnished observations of the world around him and exploring his imagination. Goya’s Caprichos encompass a wide range of themes, depicting incisive social satire alongside supernatural creatures whose activities mirror humans’. Caprichos is celebrated as a defining body of work by an artist whose creativity and vision pushed the techniques of the Old Masters into the modern era.

IA&A is pleased to bring this exhibition to our partners. Goya's Caprichos: Fantasy, Satire, and Artistic Innovation will begin touring Winter 2027 and is now open for bookings.

 

Please contact Nicoleb@ArtsandArtists.org for more information.

 

Dancing With Life: Mexican Masks

Dancing With Life: Mexican Masks

Dancing with Life: Mexican Masks invites audiences to explore the rich festival culture of Mexico through historic and contemporary masks from the collection of the Northwest Museum of Arts and Culture.  The exhibition centers the work of the mask makers and dancers themselves through written and recorded interviews, including bilingual Spanish and English texts. This approach invites visitors to appreciate danzas as expressions of contemporary living culture, in which symbols and scripts from pop culture and religious narratives coalesce into explorations of spiritual matters, political issues, and community life.

International Arts & Artists is honored to be working with the Northwest Museum of Arts and Culture and curator, Dr. Pavel Shlossberg. Commonly referred to as the “MAC,” the museum preserves and cultivates the heritage of the Inland Northwest people through collections, exhibitions, and programs that bring their stories to life. Dr. Shlossberg is the associate dean in the School of Leadership Studies at Gonzaga University. As a young scholar, Pavel had the privilege to live with and learn from mask artists in Tocuaro, Michoacán, Mexico. His continuing collaboration with artists in Michoacán has shaped his work critiquing academic and museum approaches to framing and representing Mexican Indigenous masking practices in Mexico and internationally.

Please contact Nicole Byers for more information and bookings.

 

Lust, Love, and Loss in Renaissance Europe

Lust, Love, and Loss in Renaissance Europe

International Arts & Artists is extremely pleased and honored to announce the touring exhibition, Lust, Love, and Loss in Renaissance Europe. Originally curated by Nora S. Lambert at the University of Chicago’s Smart Museum of Art under the Feitler Center for Academic Inquiry, the exhibition brings together approximately 45 paintings, prints, sculptures, and ceramics from over fifteen collections and institutions throughout the United States. Passion, violence, and virtue emerge as fundamental, intertwined elements in the art of Renaissance Europe. The objects on view—created for enjoyment and edification in private homes—offer glimpses into the lives of artists and their audiences. 

Many of the works featured in Lust, Love, and Loss attest to the centuries-long popularity of certain narratives and themes throughout the European continent, while others represent more localized cultural traditions. Fifteenth-century Italy saw an explosion of artworks tied to familial rites of passage, including marriage and childbirth, yet their painted narratives were often not overtly festive. Meanwhile, the Northern European interplay between virtue and vice manifested in innumerable engravings and woodcuts showing even happy and passionate couples faced with the inexorable progression of time. Artists working and traveling north and south of the Alps produced vibrant canvases and complex print series that echoed these ideas in grander formats, purposefully highlighting the consequences of moral trespass or opportunities for redemption.

While this new version of the exhibition continues these same themes, it also offers a more explicit focus on women's experiences as makers, viewers, and owners of artworks. In addition to featuring objects created by female artists, Lust, Love, and Loss in Renaissance Europe explores the experiences of female audiences through their engagement with the kinds of artworks on display, as well as with one another, through gift-giving and patronage.

Nora S. Lambert is the 2022-2024 Kress Foundation History of Art Institutional Fellow at the Bibliotheca Hertziana in Rome and a PhD candidate in the Department of Art History at the University of Chicago, where she specializes in late medieval and early modern Italy. From 2021 - 2022, she was a Fullbright Fellow affiliated with the Center for the Art and Architectural History of Port Cities in Naples, Italy. She is also a member of the 2020 cohort of the Center for Curatorial Leadership's Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Seminar in Curatorial Practice.

IA&A is extremely pleased to bring this exhibition and its artworks to our partners. Lust, Love, and Loss in Renaissance Europe will begin touring in early 2027 and is now open for bookings.

 

Please contact Nicole Byers for more information and bookings.

 

Kimono: Garment, Canvas, and Artistic Muse

Kimono: Garment, Canvas, and Artistic Muse

The Japanese kimono is one of the world’s most admired garments—an instantly recognizable robe with a tall “T” form. Worn in Japan by women and men for well over 1,000 years, the kimono has been a canvas for spectacular woven, dyed, painted, printed, and embroidered designs by Japan’s textile artists. After the late nineteenth century, when Japan opened to foreign diplomacy and trade, kimonos also became beloved in the West, as subjects for painters and inspiration for fashion designers. In recent decades, the influence of the kimono has even reached the work of contemporary artists around the world, who are creating kimono-inspired works in such diverse media as paper, fiber, metal, glass, and ceramic. This exhibition will explore the kimono as a garment in Japanese history and culture, present it as canvas for spectacular design and messaging, and showcase the extraordinary works of ten international contemporary artists whose works of painting, sculpture, and fiber art have all been inspired in fascinating ways by this iconic garment. 

Kimono: Garment, Canvas, and Artistic Muse is organized in three sections and and contains a total of 46 art works, including 20 kimonos, woodblocks prints, a woodblock printed book, and photographs, as well as 19 works of contemporary art made of paper, fiber, metal, ceramic and glass.

International Arts & Artists is honored to be working with curator and long-time partner, Meher McArthur, to bring this exhibition to life. Meher McArthur is an Asian art historian specializing in Japanese art, with degrees from Cambridge University and London University’s School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), along with 25 years experience curating exhibitions, publishing, and teaching about Asian art. Kimono: Garment, Canvas, and Artistic Muse will tour for four years, until Winter 2029, and is now open for bookings.

 

Please contact Nicole Byers for more information and bookings.

 

Clearly Indigenous: Native Visions Reimagined in Glass

Clearly Indigenous: Native Visions Reimagined in Glass

"The glass art created by American Indian artists not only is a personal expression of each artist but also is imbued with their cultural heritage.  These artists have melded the aesthetics and properties inherent in glass art with their cultural ways of knowing.  The result is the stunning collection of artworks presented here."

– Letitia Chambers, Curator

Clearly Indigenous: Native Visions Reimagined in Glass is a first-of-its-kind, groundbreaking exhibition giving broader and overdue recognition to a wide range of contemporary Native American and indigenous, Pacific-Rim artists working in glass. This powerful, innovative, and majestic exhibition will be toured by International Arts & Artists through 2029.

Clearly Indigenous includes approximately 120 glass art objects created by twenty-nine Native American artists, four Pacific Rim artists from New Zealand and Australia, and leading glass artist Dale Chihuly, who first introduced glass art to Indian country. Dr. Letitia Chambers, former CEO of the Heard Museum in Phoenix, Arizona, curated the exhibition together with artist and museum consultant Cathy Short (Citizen Potawatomi Nation), and the Museum of Indian Arts and Culture (MIAC) in Santa Fe, New Mexico, which originated this seminal exhibition.

 

Please contact David Brescia-Weiler for more information and bookings.

Washi Transformed: New Expressions in Japanese Paper

Washi Transformed: New Expressions in Japanese Paper

“These nine contemporary Japanese artists are revisiting their nation’s traditional material and elevating it into a medium for expressive and often spectacular works of art.”
– Meher McArthur, Curator

Washi Transformed presents over thirty-five highly textured two-dimensional works, expressive sculptures, and dramatic installations that explore the astonishing potential of this traditional medium. In this exhibition, nine Japanese artists embrace the seemingly infinite possibilities of washi, underscoring the unique stature this ancient art form has earned in the realm of international contemporary art. The breathtaking creativity of these artistic visionaries deepens our understanding of how the past informs the present, and how it can build lasting cultural bridges out of something as seemingly simple and ephemeral as paper.

Washi Transformed features work by nine contemporary Japanese artists: Hina Aoyama, Eriko Horiki, Kyoko Ibe, Yoshio Ikezaki, Kakuko Ishii, Yuko Kimura, Yuko Nishimura, Takaaki Tanaka, and Ayomi Yoshida.

IA&A is proud to collaborate for a fourth time with Los Angeles-based historian of Japanese art Meher McArthur, curator of successful IA&A traveling exhibitions Folding Paper: The Infinite Possibilities of Origami (2012-2016) and Above the Fold: New Expressions in Contemporary Origami Art (2015-2020); and co-curator of Nature, Tradition and Innovation: Japanese Ceramics from the Gordon Brodfuehrer Collection (2016-2019).

For booking and general inquiries please contact Nicole Byers.