NORFOLK, VA.- The Chrysler Museum of Art’s upcoming season of exhibitions offers visitors a compelling journey through groundbreaking movements in art, photography and design. The Museum will showcase pioneering video art and the vibrant tradition of Chinese glass with works from its own collection, explore connections between Lousie Nevelson and Esphyr Slobodkina, feature photography by Danny Lyon and Ilse Bing and more.

Current Exhibitions

Susan Watkins and Women Artists of the Progressive Era
Through Jan. 11, 2026

Centered on the artistry of Susan Watkins, whose bright career ended at the young age of 38, the exhibition examines women artists who overcame barriers and achieved creative success at the turn of the 20th century. “Susan Watkins and Women Artists of the Progressive Era” provides insight into the social and professional context of the transatlantic world that shaped Watkins and her contemporaries. The exhibition reasserts their contributions to art history through approximately 75 works, including paintings, drawings and sculptures by Watkins and artists Lilla Cabot Perry, Minerva Chapman, Elizabeth Nourse and Anna Elizabeth Klumpke, among others.


Nam June Paik (Korean, 1932–2006) and John Godfrey (American, born 1945), “Global Groove,” 1973, video, color, sound, 29 min. Courtesy of Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI), New York.

Nam June Paik: Electronic Television
Through April 26, 2026

Discover the ubiquity of the moving image that pervades contemporary culture in “Nam June Paik: Electronic Television.” The artist’s fascination with media and the electronic image evoked what he called the “electronic superhighway,” and Paik (American, b. Korea, 1932-2006) predicted television to be an essential conduit. “Global Groove” (1973), included in the exhibition, announces this theory when a speaker declares, “This is a glimpse of a new world when you will be able to switch on every TV channel in the world and TV guides will be as thick as the Manhattan telephone book.” The exhibition also includes “Hamlet Robot” (1996) and “Dogmatic” (1996), both from the Chrysler Museum’s collection. In 1963, Paik opened his first major exhibition at Galerie Parnass in Wuppertal, Germany. Titled “Exposition of Music – Electronic Television,” the works included multi-media installations and modified TV sets, demonstrating Paik’s transition from music to the electronic image. The television screen would soon become an iconic element in Paik’s work.

Upcoming Exhibitions


Danny Lyon (American, b. 1942), “Danny Lyon in Haiti,” 1986, Gelatin silver print, Chrysler Museum of Art, Gift of George Stephanopoulos.

Beyond the Mountains: Danny Lyon’s Photography in Haiti
Dec. 19, 2025-May 17, 2026

American photographer Danny Lyon (b. 1942) works in the style of New Journalism, which is characterized by immersion in a particular community. Between 1983 and 1986, he made a series of trips to Haiti with the initial goal of photographing Port-a-Prince’s club scene. Instead, he captured a country in the midst of revolution against dictatorship at the hands of the Duvalier family.

Lyon’s project records the demonstrations known as “manifestations” against state sanctioned violence and poverty that started in 1971 and ended on February 10, 1986.

The Duvalier family’s rule began when Dr. Francois “Papa Doc” Duvalier came to power in 1957, bolstered by his medical knowledge and the platform of Noirism. Soon after, he declared himself leader for life using his personal army, Tonton Macoutes, as enforcers. During his reign, it is believed that as many as 50,000 Haitians were killed. When Papa Doc died in 1971, his son Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier took over. The protests ended when Baby Doc and his family fled to Paris.

Haiti is a country that is often presented from an outside perspective, but what knowledge becomes accessible when we center the Haitian point of view? Lyon’s images of Haiti ultimately represent the perspective of a self-described outsider, prompting reflection on who tells history, whose voices are heard, and how past struggles shape the present.

Lyon began his career capturing images of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and has captured images of other communities such as bikers, Texas prison inmates, Indigenous nations and more.


Esphyr Slobodkina (American, b. Russia, 1908–2002), “Abstraction with Red Circle,” 1938, oil on canvas, New Britain Museum of American Art, Olga H. Knoepke Fund, 1994.02

Architects of Being: Louise Nevelson and Esphyr Slobodkina
Feb. 20-May 31, 2026

Louise Nevelson is quoted as once saying, “Character is the architect of the being.” “Architects of Being: Louise Nevelson and Esphyr Slobodkina” expands on this notion of artistic character and the invariable ways artists construct their personas, their practices and their legacies. The exhibition alludes to the architectural spirits of these two artists, brought together in dialogue for the first time, as well as the ways in which they constructed their identities in a male-dominated, midcentury American art world. Approximately 70 objects will be on view, including sculptures, paintings, assemblage constructions, collage, hand-sewn clothing and jewelry. The latter demonstrates the artists’ creative self-fashioning. An architectural or constructive impulse is manifested through overlapping themes of abstraction, installation, assemblage and fashion, as well as migration and identity-building.

Born just nine years apart in different regions of the former Russian Empire, Nevelson and Slobodkina were both children of Jewish families who immigrated to the United States. Both made early marriages of convenience that were short-lived and arrived in New York in the 1920s to study art. The parallels are poignant, including their fearless devotion to abstract art and the promotion of it, associating with mutual contemporaries as members of the American Abstract Artists group.


Chinese, “Vase,” eighteenth or nineteenth century, blown and cameo-carved glass, Chrysler Museum of Art, Gift of Walter P. Chrysler Jr.

Imperial Colors: Chinese Glass at the Chrysler Museum
April 3-Sept.13, 2026

Glass often reflects and responds to cultural tastes and traditions, and Chinese glassmakers were inspired by centuries of hardstone carving and ceramic production. A rainbow of boldly colored glass vessels with thick walls and deeply carved surfaces characterizes much of the glass made in China over two centuries, from 1750 to 1950.

“Imperial Colors: Chinese Glass at the Chrysler Museum” explores the design, imagery, function and allure of dozens of vessels in the Museum’s permanent collection, revealing the role glass has played within the rich visual and material culture of China and beyond.

Artists were particularly drawn to the beauty and symbolism of materials such as jade and porcelain. In an increasingly global world, Chinese decorative arts and glass would also become coveted by foreign collectors, including Walter P. Chrysler, Jr. Most of the works in this exhibition are on view for the first time in decades. Now, thanks to renewed attention and recent research, Chinese glass at the Chrysler Museum is in the spotlight for the first time.

This exhibition is organized by the Chrysler Museum of Art and curated by Carolyn Swan Needell, Ph.D., Barry curator of glass, with the assistance of Clare Yee, William & Mary’s 2025 Woody intern in museum studies.

Rafael Soldi: Soft Boy
May 8-Nov. 1, 2026

“Soft Boy” is an immersive, nonlinear, three-channel video installation following a group of uniformed, school-aged adolescents as they perform a series of rituals drawn from memories of the artist’s days at an all-boys Catholic school in Perú where he grew up. Schoolyard brawling, marching in military-style parades, arm wrestling and performative athleticism index a type of masculinity largely governed by violence. These rituals embody the subtle and overt tools used to indoctrinate young men into patriarchal ideas of masculinity in Latin America. The work, however, frames the boys’ machismo as both threatening and absurd, barely concealing an urgent need for intimacy and connection.

The three screens operate as a dynamic playground, shifting from reflective moments to rhythmic repetitions to rumbling, overwhelming bodily sequences. The immersive audiovisual experience brings the viewer closer to a confusing landscape of boyhood fraught with — as Barbara Kruger said — intricate rituals that allow them to touch the skin of other men.

“Soft Boy” is as much about the final film as it is about the process of making it. Produced in Lima, Perú, the artist conceived the studio space as a laboratory for experimentation with memory, intimacy and gender performance. Never interested in a dramatization of the artist’s experience or a scripted take on memory, the boys were asked to interpret prompts through their own bodies and lived experiences, often pushing their own limits to reveal their fragilities. The film renders vulnerable moments after playtime and struggle, like collapsing to the ground into rest, reclining on one another in a collective contrapposto that almost breathes as one. These in-between moments of softness lift the curtain on the theatre of masculinity, spotlighting the absurdity of binary gender performance when removed from its social context.

Ilse Bing Between Paris and New York
June 5-Oct. 18, 2026

Drawn from the Chrysler Museum’s substantial holdings of art by Ilse Bing (1899-1998), “Ilse Bing Between Paris and New York” will feature the German Jewish photographer’s iconic pictures from the 1930s alongside those of her friends and acquaintances, including André Kertész, Brassaï, Man Ray and Berenice Abbott.

In 1930, Bing moved to Paris, joining a cosmopolitan group of artists bent on exploring and capturing the city in all its complexity. She worked across genres, including photojournalism, fashion photography and portraiture. By 1931, photographer and critic Emmanuel Sougez had dubbed her “Queen of the Leica.” Later, she would describe Paris in the 1930s as “a time of exploration and discovery…. We wanted to show what the camera could do that no brush could do, and we broke every rule.”

In the summer of 1936, Bing visited New York and turned her camera on the city’s iconic sights, from the newly constructed Chrysler Building to the performers at Madison Square Garden. She returned to France invigorated from her trip, but Bing’s Parisian idyll only lasted a few more years. With the Nazi invasion of France in 1940, she was sent to an internment camp. Through her art world connections, Bing secured safe passage to the United States, returning to New York in 1941, this time as a refugee.

“Ilse Bing Between Paris and New York” is curated by Mia Laufer, Ph.D., Irene Leache curator of European art, and organized by the Chrysler Museum of Art.

Constellations: A Century of Jewelry from the Dallas Museum of Art, 1925-2025
July 10, 2026-Jan. 3, 2027

Experience the wonder and dynamism of contemporary jewelry connected in evolutionary and revolutionary new constellations. Creative explosions occur as the centuries-old art form—often referred to as art jewelry or wearable sculpture—intersects with modern-day ideas. Crystallized in a diversity of works are the ongoing dialogues inherent in contemporary jewelry, from explorations of new materials to playful kinetic experimentations. The range of forms exemplifies how ideals of beauty, wearability, identity and the importance of the creator and wearer have fractured and shifted in the 20th and 21st centuries.

This groundbreaking exhibition organized by the Dallas Museum of Art (DMA) spans over a century. Playing with perceptions of material, scale and form, “Constellations” takes the notion of handcrafted adornment to soaring new heights, fusing conceptual with accessible and functional with fantastical.

With over 300 pieces of wearable art and ancillary drawings and photographs, “Constellations” is a dynamic introduction to the DMA’s incredible holdings, from early modernist works of the American Studio movement and the institution's mid-century Texas Craft exhibitions to new voices from around the world. Featuring over 215 artists from 41 countries, the exhibition is presented in four thematic sections: Typologies, Archetypes, Identity and Play. Each section features a case study that takes a deep dive into an artist or form, and a concluding section showcases works by a diverse range of emerging artists offering exciting new paths and opportunities for the future.

Having been amassed with increased rapidity over the last 10 years, many of these works have rarely been seen, and for several of the artists “Constellations” is the first time their works will be featured in a major exhibition.

Fit Check: Street Style Photography by Barkley Hendricks
Nov. 6, 2026-Feb. 21, 2027

Barkley Hendricks (American, 1945-2017) is best known for his paintings that reference the tradition of historic portraiture yet are refreshingly contemporary with their cool subjects in striking street fashion. Hendricks began his career as a photographer and continued with the medium for five decades, often using photographs as a source for his paintings. “Fit Check: Street Style Photography by Barkley Hendricks” examines Hendricks’ love for fashion and photography, bringing together a selection of black and white and color images that document street style in the United States and around the globe. A departure from studio and runway fashion, the looks embody the wearer’s individual choices and unique personality. Taken between the 1970s and early 2000s, street style through Hendricks’ lens emphasizes the role of clothing in self-presentation and identity. Today, “fit checks” or outfit checks are ubiquitous on social media. Hendricks’ street styles give context to the present moment and while decades old, are familiar and timeless.