Truths Be Told: Artists Activate Traditions
December 5, 2025 - January 27, 2027
Truths Be Told: Artists Activate Traditions highlights a dozen international artists who engage with folk traditions from their respective communities in order to critique social inequities, reverse erasure, and be a catalyst for social change. By pushing the boundaries of longstanding ceramic, basketry, and textile practices, regalia, or song, these artists propose more complex narratives of how traditions empower communities. Truths Be Told invites us to consider how traditions can function productively as agents of debate, awakening, change, cultural revitalization, and imagining a better future.
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I Am Clay: Acoma Life in Figures
June 7, 2026 - November 30, 2026
Gallery of Conscience
This exhibition is a community-curated project that focuses on figurative pottery from Acoma Pueblo. The show will examine ancestral Puebloan precursors to figuration in clay, as well as how the rise of tourism and the market for Pueblo pottery at the turn of the 20th century shaped the development of this practice. Included will be 80-100 objects with a focus on Acoma Pueblo women artists who have been at the heart of this tradition.
The exhibition is the Museum of International Folk Art’s contribution to the national Craft in America’s initiative, Handwork: Celebrating American Craft 2026, which marks the 250th anniversary of the founding of the United States. Handwork strives to tell some of the untold or undertold stories of American craft, including Indigenous art, calling for a more complex and diverse understanding of the handmade in the nation from past to present.
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The Art Underground: Fantasy Coffins of Ghana
July 26, 2026 - March 31, 2027
The Art Underground: Fantasy Coffins of Ghana features the works of five well-known fantasy coffin artists. “Fantasy” or “design” coffins are handmade figurative wooden coffins created by Ga communities of Ghana. The coffins honor the aspirations and achievements of the deceased through representations of the objects, ideals, or fantasies most important to them in life. The exhibition will feature two dozen fantasy coffins connected to the Kane Kwei Carpentry Workshop located in Teshie-Nungua, Ghana. The exhibition will trace the evolution of this art form from its inception by Kane Kwei in the 1950s through its development as a funerary tradition, and its subsequent embrace by the international art market.
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