OBERLIN, OH.- “Time” will be the focus of exhibitions, lectures, and other programs at the Allen Memorial Art Museum during academic year 2016–17.

wildfire test pit
King Sculpture Court, August 30, 2016, to June 12, 2017
Questions about the politics of erasure and exclusion come to the fore in a site-specific installation by New York-based artist Fred Wilson. Using works primarily from the AMAM collection, Wilson makes juxtapositions that ask viewers to reconsider traditional social and historical narratives. His collaborations with museums and cultural institutions began in 1992 with his acclaimed exhibition Mining the Museum at the Maryland Historical Society. At the Allen, Wilson returns the museum’s central gallery to its 1917 roots as a space for displaying classical sculpture, creating an illusory setting of ruin and redemption. By showing how history may be obscured and distorted through the passage of time, Wildfire Test Pit exposes biases in our perceptions of what and who should be remembered.

Fred wilson: black to the powers of ten
Ellen Johnson Gallery, August 30, 2016, to June 12, 2017
Concepts of race, time, memory, and meaning are explored in a variety of mediums by New York-based artist Fred Wilson. When representing the United States at the Venice Biennale in 2003, Wilson began working with Murano glassmakers, reimagining their traditional forms—18th-century mirror frames and chandeliers—in the color black. In addition to works of glass, Fred Wilson: Black to the Powers of Ten features recent paintings and sculpture that challenge our assumptions about history, culture, and display practices. Born in the Bronx, Wilson received a bachelor of fine arts from SUNY Purchase in 1976. He is a 1999 recipient of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation’s “genius” grant and a trustee of the Whitney Museum since 2008, when he replaced artist Chuck Close.

time well spent: art and temporality
Ripin Gallery, through December 23
Across many centuries and cultures, time is represented as a natural and unstoppable phenomenon; a mechanized concept to be tracked, saved, and encapsulated; and a malleable, sometimes mystical force that determines the very architecture of our cosmos. Works in this exhibition range from memento mori (reminders of death) and depictions of times of day to historical commemorations and geological and astronomical chronologies.

conversations: past and present in asia and america
Stern Gallery, through May 21, 2017
This exhibition bridges wide temporal and cultural distances, linking the works of artists from China, Japan, Korea, the United States, and Canada. On view are paintings and calligraphy that reflect the legacy of the Chinese literati tradition, as well as contemporary ceramics that respond to East Asian ceramic styles. These “conversations” reference earlier traditions while infusing them with the artist’s contemporary reality.

(anti) corporeality: Reclaiming and Re-presenting the black body
Education Hallway, through December 23
Many artworks produced during the Atlantic slave trade disseminated and reinforced pro-slavery ideologies by attempting to reduce people of African ancestry to their corporeality. Contemporary artists Carrie Mae Weems, Burton Silverman, William E. Smith, and Margaret Burroughs, reclaim and re-present this dim period in history through prints and photographs of their own.