THIS WEEK!

Fall Exhibition Opening Celebration
Thursday, August 24
5-8 p.m.
Ulrich Museum galleries

We can't wait to share this season's exhibitions with you! Good news: the wait is over! Join us from 5-8 p.m., this Thursday, August 24 for our Fall Exhibition Opening Celebration.

Join your fellow art fans and Ulrich supporters for food, drinks, fun, and a first look at our latest exhibitions: Leslie Dill, Wilderness: Light Sizzles Around Me in the Polk/Wilson Gallery; Zahy Tentehar: Karaiw a'e wà (The Civilized) in the Amsden Gallery; Where We Belong: Refugee Stories from Wichita in the Beren Gallery; and chro•ma [kroh-muh] in the Grafly Gallery. We know you'll have a great, thought-provoking time, and we look forward to seeing you there!

The Ulrich is grateful for the ongoing support of Ulrich Friends with Benefits members who make the Museum’s exhibitions and programs possible through their UFWB memberships. We also receive funding for general operational support from the City of Wichita and Wichita State University.

EXHIBITION

Lesley Dill, Wilderness:
Light Sizzles Around Me
August 5 through December 2
Polk/Wilson Gallery

Lesley Dill, Wilderness: Light Sizzles Around Me features a uniquely inspired group of sculptures and two-dimensional works more than a decade in the making. The exhibition represents artist Lesley Dill’s ongoing investigation into significant voices and personas of America’s past.

For Dill, the “American” voice grew from early America’s obsessions with divinity and deviltry, on fears of the wilderness “out there” and wilderness inside us. The extremes of both shaped history and gave pulse and heat to the words of activists like John Brown, Sojourner Truth, Mother Ann Lee, and Dred Scott. Dill writes: “These personas and their times stir something deep in my own family history and sense of self. I am compelled to this restrictive time-period of limited access to a diversity of written word, and the bravery of these figures’ response.”

See materials and upcoming programs related to this exhibition here.

This exhibition is organized by the Figge Art Museum, Davenport, Iowa and made possible by Humanities Iowa and the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Kendra Cremin, Family Photo, Congolese Family, 2023, digital print. Courtesy of the artist.

EXHIBITION

Where We Belong:
Refugee Stories from Wichita
August 24 through December 7
Beren Gallery

Where We Belong: Refugee Stories from Wichita is a collaboration between the Ulrich Museum of Art and CETARL (Center for Educational Technologies to Assist Refugee Learners), a research center led at Wichita State University by Dr. Mythili Menon. CETARL’s work focuses on assisting refugee and asylee learners with English language acquisition and other aspects of integration. To highlight CETARL’s important work and give it context, the exhibition spotlights the experiences of refugee families in Wichita, shedding light on the particular challenges these families face, narrating their experiences of resettlement and integration in a new life in the U.S., and celebrating their contributions to making Wichita a more diverse and culturally vibrant community.

See materials and upcoming programs related to this exhibition here.

To learn more about CETARL, go to https://www.wichita.edu/research/cetarl/

Funding for this project came from the Center for Educational Technologies to Assist Refugee Learners (CETARL), including grant funding from the National Science Foundation.

An in-kind donation from L’image printing services supported this project.

EXHIBITION

chroma [kroh-muh]
n. 1 the purity of a color, or
its freedom from white or gray
August 24 through December 9
Grafly Gallery

chroma [kroh-muh] challenges the viewer to stop and look, to take in the intensity of each color presented in the pieces. Research shows that visitors spend less than 30 seconds in front of an artwork. chro•ma [kroh-muh] makes one stop to ponder where the wall ends and the art piece starts, urging the observer to spend more time noticing and immersing themselves in the power of color.

See upcoming programs related to this exhibition here.

EXHIBITION

Zahy Tentehar: Karaiw a'e wà
(The Civilized)
August 15 through December 9
Amsden Gallery
 
How can artists working today help us imagine the future? What concerns will affect us as a species? What will the world and politics surrounding us look like? How will our cultures change, and how will the people of the future think of us as their past? These are the questions the Ulrich is tackling in a series of presentations of moving image works titled Some Possible Futures.

Karaiw a'e wà (The Civilized) is the third and last presentation in this series of exhibitions. Commissioned by the MAM-Rio Museum of Modern Art in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, this fifteen-minute film by Zahy Tentehar asks the fundamental question “What is it to be civilized?” The artist comes to this question as a member of the Indigenous Tentehar-Guajajara people, and her first language, the Ze’eng Eté dialect of the Tupi-Guarani family, is heard in the first part of the film. “I am the encounter of two worlds,” she says. “An ancestral world versus the ‘civilized’ world.’”

See materials and upcoming programs related to this exhibition here.

COMMUNITY EVENT

Social Justice in Our Community:
Marquetta Atkins-Woods
Tuesday, September 5
5:30 p.m. Reception
6 p.m. Program
Beren Gallery

In conjunction with the exhibition, Lesley Dill, Wilderness: Light Sizzles Around Me, we are excited to introduce you to four social justice organizations serving the Wichita area and welcome their leaders to speak about their missions and goals.

Marquetta Atkins-Woods, Founder and Executive Director of Destination Innovation Inc., is a community educator who brings her passion for working with youth and her creative energy to the table as a facilitator. In 2015, she founded Camp Destination Innovation to expose young people to a variety of career options, encouraging them to create their own future. Learn more about Camp Destination Innovation at campdestinationinnovation.com.

This free event takes place in the Beren Gallery and everyone is welcome.

Have you shared your Ulrich memories with us yet?

Our 50th anniversary is right around the corner (in 2024) and we're planning lots of great exhibitions and events to celebrate the Museum's excellence. One thing we are working on is collecting memories from folks who have been connected to the Ulrich over the years. Whether you are a present or past employee, a donor, volunteer, student, or general visitor, we'd love to hear your favorite memories of the Ulrich. We've created this webpage, which has a form on it, to help you share your stories. The memories we collect will be shared throughout our 50th anniversary celebrations and might even end up in a book we're putting together. We'd love to hear your stories.