ITHACA, NY.- The Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art at Cornell University announces its exhibition schedule for Spring 2017.

Identity Crisis: Reflections on Public and Private Life in Contemporary Javanese Photography
January 21–June 11
Organized by the Johnson Museum, this exhibition is the first in the United States to focus on the recent emergence of photography as an art form in Java, Indonesia. Guest curated by photographer Brian Arnold, Identity Crisis includes ten artists who pursue investigations of personal or cultural identity, and use photography to probe, obscure, or heighten questions and curiosities about being Javanese or Indonesian today. The project was made possible by support from the Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation, the Jarett F. and Younghee Kim Wait Fund for Contemporary Islamic and Middle Eastern Arts at the Johnson Museum, the Community Arts Partnership of Tompkins County, and the American Institute for Indonesian Studies.

Empathy Academy: Social Practice and the Problem of Objects
January 21–May 28
This exhibition is a follow-up to the 2016 Cornell Council for the Arts Biennial that, focusing on art and empathy, looked at feeling as form. Instead of displaying a finished project, Empathy Academy will function more as a laboratory, in which process is privileged. Through the analysis and exhibition of objects and a team-based development of a sequence of interventions, students will conduct an investigation toward the creation of a meaningful and forward-looking interface between critical practices and institutional collecting. Intending to lead to emergent, social forms of contemporary art, the exhibition will include works by Rirkrit Tiravanija, Martha Rosler, Ernesto Neto, and Matthew “Levee” Chavez.

The War to End All Wars: Artists and World War I
January 21–June 11
This year marks the centennial anniversary of the entrance of American forces into what was hoped to be “the war to end all wars.” This exhibition brings together artwork of the period as well as vivid propaganda posters, drawn from the Johnson’s permanent collection, as well as Cornell’s Wortham Military Museum, Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, Costume and Textile Collection, and Kheel Center for Labor-Management Documentation & Archives, and private collections.

Escaping the Ordinary: Artistic Imagination in Early Modern Prints
January 21–May 28
The works in this exhibition celebrate artists who explored creative narratives and distant lands, inviting a brief suspension of reality in favor of artistic fantasy. These artists, at work during the first three centuries of printmaking in Europe, used a range of techniques to explore the unfamiliar and strange. Escaping the Ordinary offers a glimpse into the inner workings of the minds of great printmakers as they imagined exotic costumes, landscapes, and creatures.