For the Love of Canines
October 22, 2022 - August 27, 2023
Exhibition open October 22, 2022 – August 27, 2023
Wild canines, including foxes, coyotes, and wolves, have held significant social and cultural meaning to humans worldwide throughout history. However, there are conflicted emotional opinions regarding these familiar predators. Foxes, for example, while prized for their beauty and their cunningness, are despised for preying on smaller livestock and poultry, such as chickens and ducks. Coyotes, a canine species native to North America, nearly brought to extinction during western settlement, are also part of some Native cultures’ cosmologies. Sometimes considered a creator, Coyote might also be wicked or a buffoon. Of all wild canines, wolves have perhaps caused the most dread historically. Feared by ancient farmers to present day ranchers, wolves that at times prey on sheep, cattle, and other domestic animals, have also been known to kill humans. Alternatively, the famous Etruscan sculpture of La Lupa Capitolina (The Capitoline Wolf) from the fifth century BCE depicts a she-wolf caring for twins, Romulus and Remus, who founded city of Rome. Still, the one thing that all wild canines have common is a genetic relation to our own much beloved domestic dogs.
For the Love of Canines questions humans’ relation and fascination with canines, whether love or loathing, through works of art from NMWA’s permanent collection.
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Out of the Shadows: Prints from the Permanent Collection
Through April 27, 2025Dürer, Rembrandt, Goya, Picasso, Warhol—while many of the works in this show may be small in size, they are created by some of the biggest names in the canon of art history.
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Tony Foster: Watercolour Diaries from the Green River
Through May 4, 2025Artist Tony Foster became fascinated with the 50-million-year-old Green River fossilized fish when he first saw them in 1985. It was from these small special objects that he comprised the idea to make a group of artworks about the Green River. He began his project in 2018, creating a major painting of Steamboat Rock and the horseshoe bend from his vantage point up a 400 foot cliff. In the summer of 2019 he took a rafting trip from the Gates of Lodore to Split Rock, creating five smaller paintings en route. From these initial works he created this exhibition about, in Foster’s words: “this magnificent river.”
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