AKRON, OH.- Artists sometimes create works of art that are meant to be viewed on their own as individual masterpieces. However, they sometimes create with Serial Intent, using multiple related artworks to address a bigger idea. With Pop Art prints, dramatic photographic series, evocative narratives, and more, the Akron Art Museum’s new exhibition Serial Intent offers visitors the rare opportunity to experience multi-part artwork within the serial contexts intended by the artists who created them.

Assistant Curator Elizabeth Carney said, “Serial Intent highlights major serial artworks in the Akron Art Museum collection that can usually only be shown with one or two examples at a time. By focusing the exhibition on the serial format as an artist’s tool, we invite viewers to delve deeper into central ideas developed over multiple different but related images. There are many types of stories to be explored in the 26 series on display.”

Serial Intent includes Andy Warhol’s Electric Chair screenprints, Robert Indiana’s bold graphic Numbers and Nam June Paik’s V-IDEA videoscreen-inspired etchings. Works by Ohio artists Michael Loderstedt and Craig Lucas are based on an existing series of symbols most of us use every day, the alphabet. Their colorful Bestiary screenprints explore text and images of animals from A to Z.

Other artworks in the exhibition combine to tell a linear story, as in Jacob Lawrence’s 22 screenprints depicting the epic life of an American abolitionist in The Legend of John Brown. Nicholas Africano’s series of eight hand-colored lithographs describes the difficult recovery of his friend after an invasive procedure in Bill’s Surgery. Documentary texts and images convey past performances of actions by Vito Acconci and Dieter Appelt.

Series of images also function as collections, such as Karl Blossfeldt’s precise photographic arrangements of botanical species, Magic Garden of Nature. Several dozen of Blossfeldt’s strikingly composed black and white photographs, each the size of an average book page, have been installed over two large gallery walls. Lorna Simpson’s Wigs (portfolio) similarly presents various hairstyles, pinned to the wall like scientific specimens along with text—inviting conversations about broader implications of hairstyles and self-presentation.

Also featured in the exhibition are serial works by Jennifer Bartlett, Bruce Checefsky, Jenny Holzer, Lori Kella, William Kentridge, Hendrik Kerstens, Barbara Kruger, Sol LeWitt, Judith K. McMillan, Duane Michals, Richard Misrach, Eadweard Muybridge, Robert Rauschenberg, Sam Richardson, Ralph Steiner and Bryn Zellers.

Serial Intent is on view from June 3 through September 10, 2017.