The Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery at Skidmore College announces See It Now: Contemporary Art from the Ann and Mel Schaffer Collection, a sweeping exhibition that celebrates art and artists brought together over five decades by Ann Schapps Schaffer ’62 and Mel Schaffer. Featuring over one hundred artworks, See It Now highlights bold and incisive artworks that grapple with the complexities of contemporary life.

The exhibition foregrounds artists whose works probe questions of race, migration, loss, gender, belonging—issues at the center of today’s world. Drawing from the Schaffers’ renowned private collection—formed with a spirit of curiosity and a commitment to artists at pivotal moments—See It Now offers audiences a rare, in-depth opportunity to view works by artists who have shaped the last half-century of art.

Highlights include multiple works by Vik Muniz and Cindy Sherman, large-scale paintings by Jordan Casteel, Hugo McCloud, and Kehinde Wiley, a Nick Cave’s Soundsuit, as well as works by Robert Gober, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Jim Hodges, Deana Lawson, Wangechi Mutu, Kiki Smith, Hank Willis Thomas, Kara Walker, Carrie Mae Weems, and many more.

“Ann and Mel have collected with empathy and curiosity—bringing together artists who explore identity, memory, and social justice with rigor and heart,” says Ian Berry, Dayton Director. “By placing these works in public view during our 25th-anniversary year, we’re inviting audiences to engage with art that can be messy and vulnerable, complex and contradictory, joyful and alive; works that continue to speak to the urgencies of the present.”

“We’ve always collected with curiosity,” says Ann Schapps Schaffer. “Your soul has to run through a collection. We don’t just hang art; the pieces have to speak to one another—about life and death, giving and taking, and how we live together now.”

Jordan Casteel presents Covering the holes in our walls with sunflowers, her fourth exhibition with Casey Kaplan. Borrowing its title from Alice Walker’s 1974 essay “In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens,” recent portraits, landscapes and vignettes muse on the artist’s garden in the Hudson Valley as a reservoir for acts of resilience and vulnerability. Buds are transformed into bounties and personal reflection into a communal experience.

Casteel’s hand clasps a heap of zinnias, dahlias, and amaranth in Offering (2025). In a self-referential portrait, the artist points to an abundant bouquet, hand-grown and in full bloom, revealing the acts of cultivation made in autumn that reverberate into spring. Serving as a sanctuary for Casteel, the garden–a site of growth and decay, of turning dirt into life–embodies a creative endurance in the ebb and flow of seasonal and cultural rhythms. To paraphrase Walker, the garden’s resilience of imaginative spirit endures societal, daily hardship. Growth is willed from nothingness. Inherited fertile ground cycles through generations, and gestures of strength, beauty and defiance that came before echo in tomorrow’s blooms.

Casteel’s largest work to date–a monumental portrait of a family–spans two canvases. A sun-drenched yellow underpainting of abundant greenery grounds Jazmine, Golden and LaToya within a field of textured brushwork. The subjects (whom Casteel met through Upstate Color, a discourse she formed in 2021 for people of color in the Hudson Valley) personify her longstanding commitment to community. Their gazes operate as a kindred force, resisting voyeurism in favor of encounter. Not dissimilar to the sheer beauty and delight of Walker’s mother’s garden, openings are forged for passersby to say hello. Gestures of connection resound in the familial arrangement of bodies in Jazmine, Golden and LaToya (2025). Overlapping limbs and steady sight lines call to mind signals of protection. As the family nestles into the landscape, buds sprout and flowers are caught mid-bloom, reinforcing the expansive and ever-changing realities of parenthood. With stubborn roots, unruly weeds, and ultimately independent growth, comes nurture, patience, and eventual release.

Mama (2025) depicts the artist’s mother in the lavender solace of her bedroom in Denver, CO, where the artist was born and raised. Perched on a floral-patterned blanket in a self-embrace, her expression holds both dignity and vulnerability. Marking a return to an early subject, the work’s tone shifts from youthful observation to knowing introspection, shaped by years of distance and return. Continuing a longstanding practice of artists painting their mothers, Casteel brings the interior lives of women into view. In Jordan (2025), she positions herself amid her female cast of subjects with a self-portrait set in her studio. Trays of seedlings offer an origin point to the garden’s visual arc and serve as both literal and symbolic progeny. These early stages of care–maternal and anticipatory–rhyme with the compositional structure of Mama, forming a dialogue across generations.

A billowing peony in Mothering While Black (2025) stretches like a canopy over the eponymous 2019 book, a feminist text by sociologist Dawn Marie Dow whose work explores the multifaceted complexities of Black motherhood. Distilled in an overcast light, a backdrop of blank canvases hint at a future untold. Just visible through the branches of a rhododendron tree in Present Tense (2025), a reproduction of David Hammon’s African-American Flag (1990) hangs from Casteel’s front walkway. Bridging past and present, the flag recalls that which was hung from the former Studio Museum in Harlem building on 125th Street during her 2015-16 residency, seen in the background of an early portrait, Jared (2016). The flag’s reappearance signals a continuity of purpose.

Casteel zooms in on her blossoms with a series of small-scale paintings. Settling her body into the ridges of her garden’s ground, she props the canvas on her lap and renders surrounding flowers en plein air. With a narrow field of vision, individual blooms are isolated and studied. Their unique temperaments are translated into distinguished portraits, distilling each stem within the larger crop of characters. The legacies of her cultivations are suspended in time as symbols of survival–of thriving. As Walker put it, “...whatever rocky soil she landed on, she turned into a garden.”

The exhibition challenges the fallacy that women artists were rare exceptions before the 20th century. It shows that, although often underappreciated and operating against various social restrictions, women have consistently pursued their creative mission: they have determinedly used artistic activities to confirm and perpetuate their presence and the validity of their individual experiences. In addition to presenting the diverse artistic output of women, the exhibition aims to show the power inherent in a new approach to art history – one that demands justice, restores the voices of the “erased” and leads to a revision of the so-called canon.

 Before the advent of modern feminism, there was “the woman question.” “La querelle des femmes” was the phrase used by writers such as Christine de Pizan (1364-c.1430) who authored Le Livre de la cité des dames (The Book of the City of Ladies, 1405). Her allegorical city was imagined to be a place to protect and conserve the histories of important women. Pizan’s writing was among the first to articulate challenges to systemic misogyny that was the norm in European society. Asking “the woman question” (as the querelle became known in English) radically identified a previously unrecognized social and political category: women. De Pizan and her cohort of early modern feminist philosophers articulated the link between gender and power, laying the foundation for movements that have come to be known as feminism. “The Woman Question” emerged as a coded refrain for intellectual and political interrogation of women’s subjugation and became a rallying cry for revolutionary and suffragist movements. The exhibition borrows this phrase to describe almost five hundred years of women’s creativity.

 The exhibition showcases allegorical representations of power, resistance and sexual violence; it looks at the struggle for access to artistic education; representations of women’sbodies and erotic desires; iconography of motherhood and reproductive choice; women's agency in times of war; and how the role of women in society changes dramatically in times of upheaval. The Woman Question: 1550–2025 brings together works by almost 140 women artists, divided into eight thematic sections:

Femmes Fortes: Allegories and Agency
This gallery is dedicated to the emergence in 17th-century Europe of the genre of femmes fortes – heroic images of virtuous women such as Judith, Cleopatra and Lucretia – represented by works by Artemisia Gentileschi, Angelika Kaufman and Elisabetta Sirani. Modern and contemporary artists (including Lubaina Himid, Chiara Fumai, Betty Tompkins, Miriam Cahn, Cindy Sherman and Yoko Ono) return to these historical figures and present them from a feminist perspective.

Palettes and Power: The Self Portrait as Manifesto
This gallery is dedicated to the ‘‘palette portrait” a genre ofself-portraiture invented by women artists in the sixteenth century which allowed women artists to manifest their creative identity. From Sofonisba Anguissola to Élisabeth Vigée Lebrun, Lavinia Fontana, Lisa Brice and Somaya Critchlow, the works presented here confirm the status of women artists as creators over five centuries.

Education and the Canon
This section explores the structural barriers that women have encountered or continue to encounter – lack of access to academies or life drawing classes and to artistic circles. Here, we can also look at the ways in which contemporary women artists have used their agency to write themselves into the canon of art history. The works of Marie Bashkirtseff, Claudette Johnson, Faith Ringgold, Guerilla Girls and Art Project Revolution raise questions about access to education and the role of politics in the creation of the canon.

A Muse of Her Own 
With the gradual opening of academies to women students in the 19th century, women began to seek ways to express themselves beyond the genre of the ‘palette portrait’. With their own complex identities as their muses, the artists featured in this impressive gallery of self-portraits, including Marie-Nicole Vestier, Fahrelnissa Zeid, Lotte Laserstein, Sonia Boyce, Françoise Gilot, Yvonne Wells, Anita Rée and Celia Paul, address themes of identity and cultural identity, motherhood and the evolving image of the ‘new woman’.

Surreal Selves, Mystical Me: Symbolism, Surrealism and Mysticism
In this section of the exhibition, we look at dreamscapes and mythic self-images through a diverse collection of works by artists such as Leonor Fini, Anna Güntner, Francesca Woodman, vanessa german, Małgorzata Mycek, Iiu Susiraja and Genowefa Magiera. The portraits gathered here, whether surreal, symbolic or spiritual, reveal the inner landscapes of women’s agency and creativity.

No ate, No Lock, No Bolt: Imaginaries Unleashed
Inspired by Virginia Woolf's call for intellectual freedom, this chapter celebrates the unleashing of women’s erotic imaginaries. The works presented here by Ithell Colquhoun, Tamara Łempicka, Ambery Wellman, Lisa Yuskavage, Lotte Laserstein, Barbara Falander and Jordan Casteel explore gender reversals, eroticism and liberation from the male gaze.

Of Woman Born
Drawing on Adrienne Rich's feminist treatise, this chapter examines motherhood not as an institution but as lived experiences. Through works by Elisabetta Sirani, Angélique du Coudray, Paula Modersohn-Becker, Marlene Dumas, Frida Orupabo, Monika Sjöö, Catherine Opie, Clarity Haynes, Everlyn Nicodemus, Louise Bourgeois, Tracey Emin and Frida Kahlo, among others, the exhibition confronts pregnancy, loss, birth, reproductive choice, and maternal power. 

Wartime Women
Centering on women’s roles in armed conflict, this powerful closing chapter focuses on Eastern European experiences and includes historical works from World War II and the Shoah, as well as contemporary works from Ukraine. Artists such as Ceija Stojka, Teresa Żarnower, Zuzanna Hertzberg, Kataryna Lysovenko, and Lesia Khomenko, amongst others, challenge gender scripts of war, portraying women as warriors, witnesses and survivors.

In order to make this continuity of women’s authorship legible over such a long span of art history, the exhibition privileges figurative painting and sculpture. The Woman Question asserts that images are power, focusing on visual narratives that make different forms of agency and assertions of identity legible. Featuring some of the earliest examples of women artists’ work, this iconographic journey will juxtapose artwork from different periods and disciplines dealing with common themes. 

The Woman Question: 1550–2025 is more than a historical survey—it is a call to reframe art history through the lens of feminist continuity and resistance. As art historian Mary Garrard has written, “Feminism existed before we knew what to call it.” This exhibition makes that lineage visible.

Giants: Art from the Dean Collection of Swizz Beatz and Alicia Keys is coming to the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. The exhibition from the collection of musical and cultural icons Swizz Beatz (Kassem Dean) and Alicia Keys is expansive and features over 130 works of art by 40 Black artists from Africa, Europe, the United States, and the Caribbean.

Among the artists featured are Derrick Adams, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Kwame Brathwaite, Nick Cave, Barkley Hendricks, Arthur Jafa, Titus Kaphar, Esther Mahlangu, Meleko Mokgosi, Odili Donald Odita, Toyin Ojih Odutola, Gordon Parks, Ebony G. Patterson, Deborah Roberts, Jamel Shabazz, Amy Sherald, Mickalene Thomas, and Kehinde Wiley.

These celebrated "giants" are expanding the art canon of greats in a big, bold way. They include legendary photographers, iconic contemporary artists, as well as emerging artists. And among the art on view are monumental works that tower in scale and thought. Giants is also a nod to the collectors' passion for lifting up the human spirit:

"We need to be our most giant selves: to think our most giant thoughts, express ourselves in the biggest way possible, and give ourselves permission to be giants."
—Alicia Keys

As artists who strive to support other artists and collect from the heart, Keys and Beatz are guided by an outward intention that regards their family of acquired works as “by the artist, for the artist, with the people.”

Giants: Art from the Dean Collection of Swizz Beatz and Alicia Keys is organized by Kimberli Gant, Curator, Modern and Contemporary Art, and Indira A. Abiskaroon, Curatorial Assistant, Modern and Contemporary Art, Brooklyn Museum. The coordinating curator at VMFA is Valerie Cassel Oliver, the Sydney and Frances Lewis Family Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art.

The exhibition is organized by the Brooklyn Museum.