Thursday, November 20, 2025

Tough Skin, Soft Ribs
Light Work Gallery

Light Work Gallery
316 Waverly Ave., Syracuse University, Syracuse

Light Work presents "Tough Skin, Soft Ribs," a selection of photographs from our collection by Marcus Xavier Chormicle, Jeremy Dennis, Amy Elkins, Tarrah Krajnak, Shelley Niro, Wendy Red Star, Pamela Shields, Hulleah Tsinhnahjinnie, Kathy Vargas, and Cristina Velásquez. This exhibition is curated by Cali M. Banks, who manages communications and outreach at Light Work.

Resistant to 19th-century staged portraits of Indigenous people and the posed photographic work of Edward S. Curtis, the chosen artists confront colonial frameworks of Northern, Central, and Southern Indigeneity. This grouping of artists points back to the Four Directions, a cultural foundation that honors a holistic view of our interconnectedness; a place where borders do not exist, and we can join together as relatives. Through spectacles of Indigenous tropes, satire, religious testaments, diasporic histories, and fantasy, these artists are unpacking stereotypes, forcing a reclamation of personal and collective identities.

   

Everything Nice: Sasha Phyars-Burgess
Light Work Gallery

Light Work Gallery
316 Waverly Ave., Syracuse University, Syracuse

Sasha Phyars-Burgess's photographic project "Everything Nice" traces her family history through Portugal, the Dominican Republic, Florida, and Louisiana, following the paths of sugarcane farmed on colonial plantations and the transatlantic slave trade in relation to her ancestors. The photographs are taken in various locations: Madeira, Portugal, the Dominican Republic, Florida, and Louisiana. The pictures provide clues and details that are layered into a larger story.

Looking back at history and locating the present, Phyars-Burgess is thinking through the idea that we are all living in a history, whether it is acknowledged or not. Once acknowledged, and if we allow ourselves to live with the past, with choices made by and for others, we can access a wider view of the present day.

   

“What If I Try This?”: Helen Frankenthaler in the 20th-Century Print Ecosystem
Syracuse University Art Museum

Price: Free
Syracuse University Art Museum, Shaffer Art Building
Syracuse University, Syracuse

"What If I Try This?" explores how Helen Frankenthaler, the noted 20th-century abstract artist, collaborated with printmakers in print studios and workshops throughout her long career. By focusing on her works on paper, this exhibition considers how printshops are key nodes within the printmaking ecosystems, or sites where artists and printers simultaneously championed technical innovations and created community.

   

Human/Environment: 4,000 Years of Art
Syracuse University Art Museum

Price: Free
Syracuse University Art Museum, Shaffer Art Building
Syracuse University, Syracuse

Drawing on the museum's extensive collection that encompasses almost 45,000 historic and contemporary artworks made around the globe, this exhibition explores how humans have interacted with and shaped the environment in which they live. Thematic sections focus on plants, home, population centers, and human figures.

   

A Sense of Arrival: Kevin Adonis Browne
Syracuse University Art Museum

Price: Free
Syracuse University Art Museum, Shaffer Art Building
Syracuse University, Syracuse

"A Sense of Arrival" brings together scholarship and artistic practice in a multimedia installation by Kevin Adonis Browne, professor of rhetoric and writing in the Department of Writing Studies in the College of Arts and Sciences. Browne's exhibition combines photographs, sculpture, and new writings that reflect a decades-long meditation on Caribbean blackness, being, and rhetorical expression.

   

Bhen Alan: Why Does My Adobo Taste Different?
Syracuse University Art Museum

Price: Free
Syracuse University Art Museum, Shaffer Art Building
Syracuse University, Syracuse

The fifth iteration of the Art Wall Project features textiles made by the Filipino-American artist Bhen Alan. Through the creation of a monumental banig, or a traditional Filipino handwoven mat made from plant fibers, Alan grapples with the traumas of immigration and explores how diasporic communities work to recover a lost idea of home.

   

Patterns of Resistance
Everson Museum of Art

Everson Museum of Art
401 Harrison St., Syracuse

In the early 1970s, the Pattern & Decoration Movement emerged as an antidote to the vice grip in which abstraction had held American art since the 1950s. Artists like Valerie Jaudon, Joyce Kozloff, and Miriam Shapiro began juxtaposing colors and patterns that critics and artists alike had previously dismissed as feminine to powerful effect. Simultaneously, other feminist artists like Lynda Benglis were consciously subverting clay's associations as a masculine and/or craft medium.

As the '70s played out, a generation of artists like Andrea Gill, Nancy Selvin, and Betty Woodman did not just embrace the decorative strategies of the Pattern & Decoration Movement, they also sought to place a feminist spin on their work. As ceramics become more common in a fine art context, hierarchies surrounding different materials faded, giving artists the ability to experiment and construct narrative and meaning through pattern. Long denigrated as "decorative" and closely associated with domesticity, patterns are now an integral part of the language of contemporary art.

   

Lessons in Geometry
Everson Museum of Art

Everson Museum of Art
401 Harrison St., Syracuse

Artists have obsessed over the relationship between mathematics and art for millennia. As artists turned toward abstraction in the early 20th century, Europeans like Piet Mondrian used geometry to create a set of rules and parameters that guided their creative process. Meanwhile, American artists began developing their own styles and movements—particularly Abstract Expressionism, which was typified by bold, quickly executed brushwork, drips, and splashes. In the mid-20th century in the United States, artists laid the groundwork for Geometric Abstraction as a more cerebral alternative to the often macho flamboyance of Abstract Expressionism. Over the ensuing decades, artists used geometry to produce abstract works that ranged from the dazzling Op Art of Victor Vasarely to the restrained Minimalism of Sol LeWitt.

"Lessons in Geometry" traces the evolution of hard-edged abstraction in the United States as artists sought to use pure geometric forms to create works with balance, harmony, and order. For these artists, shape, line, and color took precedence over representational compositions. The Everson's collection reflects the wildly varied ways that artists have used geometry to serve their personal expression, from the analytical formulations of Robert Swain to the shaped canvases of Harmony Hammond and the spatial illusions of Tony King.

   

Jake Troyli: Open Season
Everson Museum of Art

Everson Museum of Art
401 Harrison St., Syracuse

Jake Troyli's works address the commodification of Black and Brown bodies, confronting and exploring labor capitalism and sweat equity as a demonstration of value. Troyli also injects his paintings with a sense of humor and absurdity through the inclusion of his own self-portrait. His avatar populates the works in "Open Season," where Troyli is both the hunter and the hunted as he participates in a variety of physical activities. As a former Division I basketball player, Troyli has a potent understanding of how athletes in America, particularly athletes of color, are simultaneously celebrated and criticized.

   

Joyce Kozloff: Contested Territories, 1983-2023
Everson Museum of Art

Everson Museum of Art
401 Harrison St., Syracuse

For more than four decades, Joyce Kozloff has explored how the entanglements of geography, history, and power influence the visual language of maps. "Contested Territories" presents a selection of Kozloff's works that uncover how maps shape our understanding of the world—not as neutral tools, but as instruments of influence, ideology, and control.

Kozloff's wide range of sources include historical maps, classroom wall maps, atlases, globes, and even satellite imagery from Google Maps. Her dense and colorful works often layer these materials with hand-painted details, collage, and intricate ornamentation. By combining sources that span centuries—from Renaissance celestial charts to contemporary digital mapping—she exposes how maps carry the legacies of empire, conflict, and shifting territorial claims.

A founding figure in the Pattern and Decoration movement, Kozloff combines meticulous craftsmanship with political critique. Her works are labor-intensive, involving the detailed process of painting, drawing, and collaging over cartographic surfaces. The resulting richly textured visual field invites viewers to look closely—and to question the conquest, division, and erasure found beneath the official surface narrative.

Whether reimagining educational globes or deconstructing colonial-era charts, Kozloff transforms maps from static documents into contested, dynamic spaces. Her work encourages viewers to reconsider how borders are drawn as well as how art can reclaim such boundaries as sites of resistance, memory, and possibility.

   

Laurent Craste: Iconoclasts
Everson Museum of Art

Everson Museum of Art
401 Harrison St., Syracuse

"Iconoclasts" marks the American museum debut for French-born Canadian ceramist Laurent Craste. Over the past decade, Craste has committed a wide range of indignities and abuse against his ornate vases and urns, including pummeling them with baseball bats and crowbars and piercing them with arrows. Despite the violence that runs through his work, Craste has a great passion for historical porcelain. Working with porcelain allows Craste to explore the prestige and power of upper-class society, but also inequality and the strain that is placed on working people. The anthropomorphic nature of Craste's vases echoes the human body, making it no surprise that people feel strong emotions when seeing a helpless vase struck by a baseball bat. Triggering these strong emotions in his audience allows Craste to connect on a deeper level as he asks questions about class, money, and power.

   

Corpórea
La Casita Cultural Center

La Casita Cultural Center
109 Otisco St., Syracuse

Corpórea is a showcase of powerful, large-scale works in mixed media, body maps created by a collaborative of local Latino artists, community members, SU faculty and students through a series of adult workshops that integrate the principles of Art Therapy. Facilitated by Syracuse University graduate student in Creative Art Therapy, Bennie Guzmán, the workshops explored themes of healing, identity, and embodiment, and the transformative power of creativity.

   

The Portal's Keeper
Urban Video Project

Price: Free
Everson Museum of Art Plaza
401 Harrison St., Syracuse

Media artists LaJuné McMillian and Manuel Molina Martagon worked with local, community-engaged creatives Kofi Antwi, Clove Flores, Sofia Gutierrez, and Martikah Williams. Together, they discussed their practices and their visions for a liberated future. The artists asked them to embody their answers not only through words, but through movement as well. "The Portal's Keeper" realizes those visions through the technological "portal" of a popular game engine better known for first-person shooter and battle royale MMO games. Here, the artists use this technology not to realistically simulate violence, but instead as a means to represent what liberation might look like.

Screening, projected on the museum wall, begins at dusk.

   

Gallery Talk with Artist Jake Troyli
Everson Museum of Art

Everson Museum of Art
401 Harrison St., Syracuse

Join artist Jake Troyli for a special gallery talk in celebration of the featured exhibition "Jake Troyli: Open Season."

Fusing the technical rigor of Renaissance painting with the absurdity of modern spectacle, Troyli constructs surreal, narrative-driven worlds that interrogate the performance of identity and the commodification of the Black/Brown body. A former Division I basketball player, Troyli draws on personal experience navigating systems where physicality becomes currency and selfhood a staged performance. His avatars-elongated, costumed, and eerily composed-inhabit theatrical spaces that mimic battlegrounds, courtrooms, and community theater stages, blurring the line between satire and sincerity. In this newest work, Troyli expands his cast of figures to complicate binaries of hero and villain, participant and prop, inviting viewers into a charged meditation on labor, agency, and the exhaustion of endless performance.

Open discussion and light refreshments to follow.

   

The Dangerous Variety
Acme Mystery Company

Spaghetti Warehouse
689 N. Clinton St., Syracuse

Welcome to 1961 and Club Polska where tonight local radio station WSKI will be recording their popular variety show The Hunky Dory Hour! You plan to laugh it up like always but the manager of the sausage factory where you work has mysteriously died and rumors flying around Kielbasi Park say it might be the notorious Pierogi Killer! But they're just rumors, right? You're not worried. The Impressive Sausage Company is sending their best man and if you can't trust a corporate fixer, who can you trust?

   

Antigonick
Syracuse University Drama Department
Matthew Winning and Erica Murphy, director

Storch Theater, Syracuse Stage
820 E. Genesee St., Syracuse

Canadian poet Anne Carson's stunning translation revives and boldly reworks Sophokles' tragic meditation on tyranny and civil disobedience.

   

Friday, November 21, 2025

Everything Nice: Sasha Phyars-Burgess
Light Work Gallery

Light Work Gallery
316 Waverly Ave., Syracuse University, Syracuse

Sasha Phyars-Burgess's photographic project "Everything Nice" traces her family history through Portugal, the Dominican Republic, Florida, and Louisiana, following the paths of sugarcane farmed on colonial plantations and the transatlantic slave trade in relation to her ancestors. The photographs are taken in various locations: Madeira, Portugal, the Dominican Republic, Florida, and Louisiana. The pictures provide clues and details that are layered into a larger story.

Looking back at history and locating the present, Phyars-Burgess is thinking through the idea that we are all living in a history, whether it is acknowledged or not. Once acknowledged, and if we allow ourselves to live with the past, with choices made by and for others, we can access a wider view of the present day.

   

Tough Skin, Soft Ribs
Light Work Gallery

Light Work Gallery
316 Waverly Ave., Syracuse University, Syracuse

Light Work presents "Tough Skin, Soft Ribs," a selection of photographs from our collection by Marcus Xavier Chormicle, Jeremy Dennis, Amy Elkins, Tarrah Krajnak, Shelley Niro, Wendy Red Star, Pamela Shields, Hulleah Tsinhnahjinnie, Kathy Vargas, and Cristina Velásquez. This exhibition is curated by Cali M. Banks, who manages communications and outreach at Light Work.

Resistant to 19th-century staged portraits of Indigenous people and the posed photographic work of Edward S. Curtis, the chosen artists confront colonial frameworks of Northern, Central, and Southern Indigeneity. This grouping of artists points back to the Four Directions, a cultural foundation that honors a holistic view of our interconnectedness; a place where borders do not exist, and we can join together as relatives. Through spectacles of Indigenous tropes, satire, religious testaments, diasporic histories, and fantasy, these artists are unpacking stereotypes, forcing a reclamation of personal and collective identities.

   

Human/Environment: 4,000 Years of Art
Syracuse University Art Museum

Price: Free
Syracuse University Art Museum, Shaffer Art Building
Syracuse University, Syracuse

Drawing on the museum's extensive collection that encompasses almost 45,000 historic and contemporary artworks made around the globe, this exhibition explores how humans have interacted with and shaped the environment in which they live. Thematic sections focus on plants, home, population centers, and human figures.

   

“What If I Try This?”: Helen Frankenthaler in the 20th-Century Print Ecosystem
Syracuse University Art Museum

Price: Free
Syracuse University Art Museum, Shaffer Art Building
Syracuse University, Syracuse

"What If I Try This?" explores how Helen Frankenthaler, the noted 20th-century abstract artist, collaborated with printmakers in print studios and workshops throughout her long career. By focusing on her works on paper, this exhibition considers how printshops are key nodes within the printmaking ecosystems, or sites where artists and printers simultaneously championed technical innovations and created community.

   

Bhen Alan: Why Does My Adobo Taste Different?
Syracuse University Art Museum

Price: Free
Syracuse University Art Museum, Shaffer Art Building
Syracuse University, Syracuse

The fifth iteration of the Art Wall Project features textiles made by the Filipino-American artist Bhen Alan. Through the creation of a monumental banig, or a traditional Filipino handwoven mat made from plant fibers, Alan grapples with the traumas of immigration and explores how diasporic communities work to recover a lost idea of home.

   

A Sense of Arrival: Kevin Adonis Browne
Syracuse University Art Museum

Price: Free
Syracuse University Art Museum, Shaffer Art Building
Syracuse University, Syracuse

"A Sense of Arrival" brings together scholarship and artistic practice in a multimedia installation by Kevin Adonis Browne, professor of rhetoric and writing in the Department of Writing Studies in the College of Arts and Sciences. Browne's exhibition combines photographs, sculpture, and new writings that reflect a decades-long meditation on Caribbean blackness, being, and rhetorical expression.

   

Patterns of Resistance
Everson Museum of Art

Everson Museum of Art
401 Harrison St., Syracuse

In the early 1970s, the Pattern & Decoration Movement emerged as an antidote to the vice grip in which abstraction had held American art since the 1950s. Artists like Valerie Jaudon, Joyce Kozloff, and Miriam Shapiro began juxtaposing colors and patterns that critics and artists alike had previously dismissed as feminine to powerful effect. Simultaneously, other feminist artists like Lynda Benglis were consciously subverting clay's associations as a masculine and/or craft medium.

As the '70s played out, a generation of artists like Andrea Gill, Nancy Selvin, and Betty Woodman did not just embrace the decorative strategies of the Pattern & Decoration Movement, they also sought to place a feminist spin on their work. As ceramics become more common in a fine art context, hierarchies surrounding different materials faded, giving artists the ability to experiment and construct narrative and meaning through pattern. Long denigrated as "decorative" and closely associated with domesticity, patterns are now an integral part of the language of contemporary art.

   

Jake Troyli: Open Season
Everson Museum of Art

Everson Museum of Art
401 Harrison St., Syracuse

Jake Troyli's works address the commodification of Black and Brown bodies, confronting and exploring labor capitalism and sweat equity as a demonstration of value. Troyli also injects his paintings with a sense of humor and absurdity through the inclusion of his own self-portrait. His avatar populates the works in "Open Season," where Troyli is both the hunter and the hunted as he participates in a variety of physical activities. As a former Division I basketball player, Troyli has a potent understanding of how athletes in America, particularly athletes of color, are simultaneously celebrated and criticized.

   

Lessons in Geometry
Everson Museum of Art

Everson Museum of Art
401 Harrison St., Syracuse

Artists have obsessed over the relationship between mathematics and art for millennia. As artists turned toward abstraction in the early 20th century, Europeans like Piet Mondrian used geometry to create a set of rules and parameters that guided their creative process. Meanwhile, American artists began developing their own styles and movements—particularly Abstract Expressionism, which was typified by bold, quickly executed brushwork, drips, and splashes. In the mid-20th century in the United States, artists laid the groundwork for Geometric Abstraction as a more cerebral alternative to the often macho flamboyance of Abstract Expressionism. Over the ensuing decades, artists used geometry to produce abstract works that ranged from the dazzling Op Art of Victor Vasarely to the restrained Minimalism of Sol LeWitt.

"Lessons in Geometry" traces the evolution of hard-edged abstraction in the United States as artists sought to use pure geometric forms to create works with balance, harmony, and order. For these artists, shape, line, and color took precedence over representational compositions. The Everson's collection reflects the wildly varied ways that artists have used geometry to serve their personal expression, from the analytical formulations of Robert Swain to the shaped canvases of Harmony Hammond and the spatial illusions of Tony King.

   

Laurent Craste: Iconoclasts
Everson Museum of Art

Everson Museum of Art
401 Harrison St., Syracuse

"Iconoclasts" marks the American museum debut for French-born Canadian ceramist Laurent Craste. Over the past decade, Craste has committed a wide range of indignities and abuse against his ornate vases and urns, including pummeling them with baseball bats and crowbars and piercing them with arrows. Despite the violence that runs through his work, Craste has a great passion for historical porcelain. Working with porcelain allows Craste to explore the prestige and power of upper-class society, but also inequality and the strain that is placed on working people. The anthropomorphic nature of Craste's vases echoes the human body, making it no surprise that people feel strong emotions when seeing a helpless vase struck by a baseball bat. Triggering these strong emotions in his audience allows Craste to connect on a deeper level as he asks questions about class, money, and power.

   

Joyce Kozloff: Contested Territories, 1983-2023
Everson Museum of Art

Everson Museum of Art
401 Harrison St., Syracuse

For more than four decades, Joyce Kozloff has explored how the entanglements of geography, history, and power influence the visual language of maps. "Contested Territories" presents a selection of Kozloff's works that uncover how maps shape our understanding of the world—not as neutral tools, but as instruments of influence, ideology, and control.

Kozloff's wide range of sources include historical maps, classroom wall maps, atlases, globes, and even satellite imagery from Google Maps. Her dense and colorful works often layer these materials with hand-painted details, collage, and intricate ornamentation. By combining sources that span centuries—from Renaissance celestial charts to contemporary digital mapping—she exposes how maps carry the legacies of empire, conflict, and shifting territorial claims.

A founding figure in the Pattern and Decoration movement, Kozloff combines meticulous craftsmanship with political critique. Her works are labor-intensive, involving the detailed process of painting, drawing, and collaging over cartographic surfaces. The resulting richly textured visual field invites viewers to look closely—and to question the conquest, division, and erasure found beneath the official surface narrative.

Whether reimagining educational globes or deconstructing colonial-era charts, Kozloff transforms maps from static documents into contested, dynamic spaces. Her work encourages viewers to reconsider how borders are drawn as well as how art can reclaim such boundaries as sites of resistance, memory, and possibility.

   

Corpórea
La Casita Cultural Center

La Casita Cultural Center
109 Otisco St., Syracuse

Corpórea is a showcase of powerful, large-scale works in mixed media, body maps created by a collaborative of local Latino artists, community members, SU faculty and students through a series of adult workshops that integrate the principles of Art Therapy. Facilitated by Syracuse University graduate student in Creative Art Therapy, Bennie Guzmán, the workshops explored themes of healing, identity, and embodiment, and the transformative power of creativity.

   

The Portal's Keeper
Urban Video Project

Price: Free
Everson Museum of Art Plaza
401 Harrison St., Syracuse

Media artists LaJuné McMillian and Manuel Molina Martagon worked with local, community-engaged creatives Kofi Antwi, Clove Flores, Sofia Gutierrez, and Martikah Williams. Together, they discussed their practices and their visions for a liberated future. The artists asked them to embody their answers not only through words, but through movement as well. "The Portal's Keeper" realizes those visions through the technological "portal" of a popular game engine better known for first-person shooter and battle royale MMO games. Here, the artists use this technology not to realistically simulate violence, but instead as a means to represent what liberation might look like.

Screening, projected on the museum wall, begins at dusk.

   

The Rough & Tumble
Folkus Project

Price: $20 regular, $17 Folkus members
May Memorial Unitarian Society
3800 E. Genesee St., Syracuse

A unique blend of dumpster-folk and thrift store-Americana

The Rough and Tumble, a dynamic duo comprised of Mallory Graham and Scott Tyler, have been captivating audiences with their unique blend of dumpster-folk and thrift store-Americana for over a decade. The Pennsylvania-born Graham and Central California's Tyler have a knack for weaving together elements of joy, sorrow, comedy, and drama in their music, leaving audiences on the edge of their seats.

Tickets

   

Author Matthew Gavin Frank
Downtown Writer's Center

Price: Free
YMCA Downtown
340 Montgomery St., Syracuse

Matthew Gavin Frank is the author of six nonfiction books, including Flight of the Diamond Smugglers, The Mad Feast, and Preparing the Ghost, and three poetry books. His new nonfiction book, Submersed — a blend of literary prose, science writing, and true crime about the amateur submarine-building community and our obsession with the deep sea — was released June 2025 from Pantheon Books.

This event will take place in person and be streamed on Zoom.

Zoom registration

   

Lizzie Borden Took an Axe
Covey Theatre Company
Garrett Heater, director

Hosmer Auditorium, Everson Museum
401 Harrison St., Syracuse

The brutal 1892 double homicide of Fall River, MA, mill owner Andrew Borden and his second wife Abby shocked Victorian Americans. Suspicion quickly fell on Andrew's daughter Lizzie, resulting in a sensationalized trial and Lizzie's eventual acquittal. The most historically accurate play on the subject, Lizzie Borden Took an Axe, by Garrett Heater brings court transcripts and testimony of the horrific murders to dramatic life. Having inaugurated the company in 2010, Lizzie ... celebrates 15 years of Covey Theater in Syracuse with this brand new production.

Tickets

   

Antigonick
Syracuse University Drama Department
Matthew Winning and Erica Murphy, director

Storch Theater, Syracuse Stage
820 E. Genesee St., Syracuse

Canadian poet Anne Carson's stunning translation revives and boldly reworks Sophokles' tragic meditation on tyranny and civil disobedience.

   

Saturday, November 22, 2025

Joyce Kozloff: Contested Territories, 1983-2023
Everson Museum of Art

Everson Museum of Art
401 Harrison St., Syracuse

For more than four decades, Joyce Kozloff has explored how the entanglements of geography, history, and power influence the visual language of maps. "Contested Territories" presents a selection of Kozloff's works that uncover how maps shape our understanding of the world—not as neutral tools, but as instruments of influence, ideology, and control.

Kozloff's wide range of sources include historical maps, classroom wall maps, atlases, globes, and even satellite imagery from Google Maps. Her dense and colorful works often layer these materials with hand-painted details, collage, and intricate ornamentation. By combining sources that span centuries—from Renaissance celestial charts to contemporary digital mapping—she exposes how maps carry the legacies of empire, conflict, and shifting territorial claims.

A founding figure in the Pattern and Decoration movement, Kozloff combines meticulous craftsmanship with political critique. Her works are labor-intensive, involving the detailed process of painting, drawing, and collaging over cartographic surfaces. The resulting richly textured visual field invites viewers to look closely—and to question the conquest, division, and erasure found beneath the official surface narrative.

Whether reimagining educational globes or deconstructing colonial-era charts, Kozloff transforms maps from static documents into contested, dynamic spaces. Her work encourages viewers to reconsider how borders are drawn as well as how art can reclaim such boundaries as sites of resistance, memory, and possibility.

   

Laurent Craste: Iconoclasts
Everson Museum of Art

Everson Museum of Art
401 Harrison St., Syracuse

"Iconoclasts" marks the American museum debut for French-born Canadian ceramist Laurent Craste. Over the past decade, Craste has committed a wide range of indignities and abuse against his ornate vases and urns, including pummeling them with baseball bats and crowbars and piercing them with arrows. Despite the violence that runs through his work, Craste has a great passion for historical porcelain. Working with porcelain allows Craste to explore the prestige and power of upper-class society, but also inequality and the strain that is placed on working people. The anthropomorphic nature of Craste's vases echoes the human body, making it no surprise that people feel strong emotions when seeing a helpless vase struck by a baseball bat. Triggering these strong emotions in his audience allows Craste to connect on a deeper level as he asks questions about class, money, and power.

   

Lessons in Geometry
Everson Museum of Art

Everson Museum of Art
401 Harrison St., Syracuse

Artists have obsessed over the relationship between mathematics and art for millennia. As artists turned toward abstraction in the early 20th century, Europeans like Piet Mondrian used geometry to create a set of rules and parameters that guided their creative process. Meanwhile, American artists began developing their own styles and movements—particularly Abstract Expressionism, which was typified by bold, quickly executed brushwork, drips, and splashes. In the mid-20th century in the United States, artists laid the groundwork for Geometric Abstraction as a more cerebral alternative to the often macho flamboyance of Abstract Expressionism. Over the ensuing decades, artists used geometry to produce abstract works that ranged from the dazzling Op Art of Victor Vasarely to the restrained Minimalism of Sol LeWitt.

"Lessons in Geometry" traces the evolution of hard-edged abstraction in the United States as artists sought to use pure geometric forms to create works with balance, harmony, and order. For these artists, shape, line, and color took precedence over representational compositions. The Everson's collection reflects the wildly varied ways that artists have used geometry to serve their personal expression, from the analytical formulations of Robert Swain to the shaped canvases of Harmony Hammond and the spatial illusions of Tony King.

   

Jake Troyli: Open Season
Everson Museum of Art

Everson Museum of Art
401 Harrison St., Syracuse

Jake Troyli's works address the commodification of Black and Brown bodies, confronting and exploring labor capitalism and sweat equity as a demonstration of value. Troyli also injects his paintings with a sense of humor and absurdity through the inclusion of his own self-portrait. His avatar populates the works in "Open Season," where Troyli is both the hunter and the hunted as he participates in a variety of physical activities. As a former Division I basketball player, Troyli has a potent understanding of how athletes in America, particularly athletes of color, are simultaneously celebrated and criticized.

   

Patterns of Resistance
Everson Museum of Art

Everson Museum of Art
401 Harrison St., Syracuse

In the early 1970s, the Pattern & Decoration Movement emerged as an antidote to the vice grip in which abstraction had held American art since the 1950s. Artists like Valerie Jaudon, Joyce Kozloff, and Miriam Shapiro began juxtaposing colors and patterns that critics and artists alike had previously dismissed as feminine to powerful effect. Simultaneously, other feminist artists like Lynda Benglis were consciously subverting clay's associations as a masculine and/or craft medium.

As the '70s played out, a generation of artists like Andrea Gill, Nancy Selvin, and Betty Woodman did not just embrace the decorative strategies of the Pattern & Decoration Movement, they also sought to place a feminist spin on their work. As ceramics become more common in a fine art context, hierarchies surrounding different materials faded, giving artists the ability to experiment and construct narrative and meaning through pattern. Long denigrated as "decorative" and closely associated with domesticity, patterns are now an integral part of the language of contemporary art.

   

Tough Skin, Soft Ribs
Light Work Gallery

Light Work Gallery
316 Waverly Ave., Syracuse University, Syracuse

Light Work presents "Tough Skin, Soft Ribs," a selection of photographs from our collection by Marcus Xavier Chormicle, Jeremy Dennis, Amy Elkins, Tarrah Krajnak, Shelley Niro, Wendy Red Star, Pamela Shields, Hulleah Tsinhnahjinnie, Kathy Vargas, and Cristina Velásquez. This exhibition is curated by Cali M. Banks, who manages communications and outreach at Light Work.

Resistant to 19th-century staged portraits of Indigenous people and the posed photographic work of Edward S. Curtis, the chosen artists confront colonial frameworks of Northern, Central, and Southern Indigeneity. This grouping of artists points back to the Four Directions, a cultural foundation that honors a holistic view of our interconnectedness; a place where borders do not exist, and we can join together as relatives. Through spectacles of Indigenous tropes, satire, religious testaments, diasporic histories, and fantasy, these artists are unpacking stereotypes, forcing a reclamation of personal and collective identities.

   

Everything Nice: Sasha Phyars-Burgess
Light Work Gallery

Light Work Gallery
316 Waverly Ave., Syracuse University, Syracuse

Sasha Phyars-Burgess's photographic project "Everything Nice" traces her family history through Portugal, the Dominican Republic, Florida, and Louisiana, following the paths of sugarcane farmed on colonial plantations and the transatlantic slave trade in relation to her ancestors. The photographs are taken in various locations: Madeira, Portugal, the Dominican Republic, Florida, and Louisiana. The pictures provide clues and details that are layered into a larger story.

Looking back at history and locating the present, Phyars-Burgess is thinking through the idea that we are all living in a history, whether it is acknowledged or not. Once acknowledged, and if we allow ourselves to live with the past, with choices made by and for others, we can access a wider view of the present day.

   

“What If I Try This?”: Helen Frankenthaler in the 20th-Century Print Ecosystem
Syracuse University Art Museum

Price: Free
Syracuse University Art Museum, Shaffer Art Building
Syracuse University, Syracuse

"What If I Try This?" explores how Helen Frankenthaler, the noted 20th-century abstract artist, collaborated with printmakers in print studios and workshops throughout her long career. By focusing on her works on paper, this exhibition considers how printshops are key nodes within the printmaking ecosystems, or sites where artists and printers simultaneously championed technical innovations and created community.

   

Human/Environment: 4,000 Years of Art
Syracuse University Art Museum

Price: Free
Syracuse University Art Museum, Shaffer Art Building
Syracuse University, Syracuse

Drawing on the museum's extensive collection that encompasses almost 45,000 historic and contemporary artworks made around the globe, this exhibition explores how humans have interacted with and shaped the environment in which they live. Thematic sections focus on plants, home, population centers, and human figures.

   

A Sense of Arrival: Kevin Adonis Browne
Syracuse University Art Museum

Price: Free
Syracuse University Art Museum, Shaffer Art Building
Syracuse University, Syracuse

"A Sense of Arrival" brings together scholarship and artistic practice in a multimedia installation by Kevin Adonis Browne, professor of rhetoric and writing in the Department of Writing Studies in the College of Arts and Sciences. Browne's exhibition combines photographs, sculpture, and new writings that reflect a decades-long meditation on Caribbean blackness, being, and rhetorical expression.

   

Bhen Alan: Why Does My Adobo Taste Different?
Syracuse University Art Museum

Price: Free
Syracuse University Art Museum, Shaffer Art Building
Syracuse University, Syracuse

The fifth iteration of the Art Wall Project features textiles made by the Filipino-American artist Bhen Alan. Through the creation of a monumental banig, or a traditional Filipino handwoven mat made from plant fibers, Alan grapples with the traumas of immigration and explores how diasporic communities work to recover a lost idea of home.

   

The Portal's Keeper
Urban Video Project

Price: Free
Everson Museum of Art Plaza
401 Harrison St., Syracuse

Media artists LaJuné McMillian and Manuel Molina Martagon worked with local, community-engaged creatives Kofi Antwi, Clove Flores, Sofia Gutierrez, and Martikah Williams. Together, they discussed their practices and their visions for a liberated future. The artists asked them to embody their answers not only through words, but through movement as well. "The Portal's Keeper" realizes those visions through the technological "portal" of a popular game engine better known for first-person shooter and battle royale MMO games. Here, the artists use this technology not to realistically simulate violence, but instead as a means to represent what liberation might look like.

Screening, projected on the museum wall, begins at dusk.

   

Casual Series: Hansel and Gretel
Syracuse Orchestra (formerly Symphoria)
Stephen Mulligan, conductor
Featuring Peter Rovit, violin; Arvilla Wendland, viola

St. Paul's Syracuse
220 E. Fayette St., Syracuse

Mozart Sinfonia concertante in E-flat major for Viola, Violin, and Orchestra, K. 320d
Humperdinck Hansel and Gretel Suite

Tickets

   

Ashley Cox
Steeple Coffee House

Price: $15-$20 suggested donation covers entertainment, dessert, coffee/tea
United Church of Fayetteville
310 E. Genesee St., Fayetteville

   

Lizzie Borden Took an Axe
Covey Theatre Company
Garrett Heater, director

Hosmer Auditorium, Everson Museum
401 Harrison St., Syracuse

The brutal 1892 double homicide of Fall River, MA, mill owner Andrew Borden and his second wife Abby shocked Victorian Americans. Suspicion quickly fell on Andrew's daughter Lizzie, resulting in a sensationalized trial and Lizzie's eventual acquittal. The most historically accurate play on the subject, Lizzie Borden Took an Axe, by Garrett Heater brings court transcripts and testimony of the horrific murders to dramatic life. Having inaugurated the company in 2010, Lizzie ... celebrates 15 years of Covey Theater in Syracuse with this brand new production.

Tickets

   

Antigonick
Syracuse University Drama Department
Matthew Winning and Erica Murphy, director

Storch Theater, Syracuse Stage
820 E. Genesee St., Syracuse

Canadian poet Anne Carson's stunning translation revives and boldly reworks Sophokles' tragic meditation on tyranny and civil disobedience.

   

Rocky Mountain High Experience: A John Denver Christmas
The Oncenter

Carrier Theater, Mulroy Civic Center
411 Montgomery St., Syracuse

Step into the spirit of the season with Rocky Mountain High Experience: A John Denver Christmas—an intimate, nostalgic journey back to the 1970s, when John Denver's music filled the airwaves and hearts across the country.

Led by acclaimed performer Rick Schuler, this enchanting holiday concert features beloved Denver classics like "Rocky Mountain High," "Take Me Home, Country Roads," "Annie's Song," and "Sunshine On My Shoulders."

Tickets

   

Antigonick
Syracuse University Drama Department
Matthew Winning and Erica Murphy, director

Storch Theater, Syracuse Stage
820 E. Genesee St., Syracuse

Canadian poet Anne Carson's stunning translation revives and boldly reworks Sophokles' tragic meditation on tyranny and civil disobedience.

   

Sunday, November 23, 2025

Laurent Craste: Iconoclasts
Everson Museum of Art

Everson Museum of Art
401 Harrison St., Syracuse

"Iconoclasts" marks the American museum debut for French-born Canadian ceramist Laurent Craste. Over the past decade, Craste has committed a wide range of indignities and abuse against his ornate vases and urns, including pummeling them with baseball bats and crowbars and piercing them with arrows. Despite the violence that runs through his work, Craste has a great passion for historical porcelain. Working with porcelain allows Craste to explore the prestige and power of upper-class society, but also inequality and the strain that is placed on working people. The anthropomorphic nature of Craste's vases echoes the human body, making it no surprise that people feel strong emotions when seeing a helpless vase struck by a baseball bat. Triggering these strong emotions in his audience allows Craste to connect on a deeper level as he asks questions about class, money, and power.

   

Joyce Kozloff: Contested Territories, 1983-2023
Everson Museum of Art

Everson Museum of Art
401 Harrison St., Syracuse

For more than four decades, Joyce Kozloff has explored how the entanglements of geography, history, and power influence the visual language of maps. "Contested Territories" presents a selection of Kozloff's works that uncover how maps shape our understanding of the world—not as neutral tools, but as instruments of influence, ideology, and control.

Kozloff's wide range of sources include historical maps, classroom wall maps, atlases, globes, and even satellite imagery from Google Maps. Her dense and colorful works often layer these materials with hand-painted details, collage, and intricate ornamentation. By combining sources that span centuries—from Renaissance celestial charts to contemporary digital mapping—she exposes how maps carry the legacies of empire, conflict, and shifting territorial claims.

A founding figure in the Pattern and Decoration movement, Kozloff combines meticulous craftsmanship with political critique. Her works are labor-intensive, involving the detailed process of painting, drawing, and collaging over cartographic surfaces. The resulting richly textured visual field invites viewers to look closely—and to question the conquest, division, and erasure found beneath the official surface narrative.

Whether reimagining educational globes or deconstructing colonial-era charts, Kozloff transforms maps from static documents into contested, dynamic spaces. Her work encourages viewers to reconsider how borders are drawn as well as how art can reclaim such boundaries as sites of resistance, memory, and possibility.

   

Patterns of Resistance
Everson Museum of Art

Everson Museum of Art
401 Harrison St., Syracuse

In the early 1970s, the Pattern & Decoration Movement emerged as an antidote to the vice grip in which abstraction had held American art since the 1950s. Artists like Valerie Jaudon, Joyce Kozloff, and Miriam Shapiro began juxtaposing colors and patterns that critics and artists alike had previously dismissed as feminine to powerful effect. Simultaneously, other feminist artists like Lynda Benglis were consciously subverting clay's associations as a masculine and/or craft medium.

As the '70s played out, a generation of artists like Andrea Gill, Nancy Selvin, and Betty Woodman did not just embrace the decorative strategies of the Pattern & Decoration Movement, they also sought to place a feminist spin on their work. As ceramics become more common in a fine art context, hierarchies surrounding different materials faded, giving artists the ability to experiment and construct narrative and meaning through pattern. Long denigrated as "decorative" and closely associated with domesticity, patterns are now an integral part of the language of contemporary art.

   

Jake Troyli: Open Season
Everson Museum of Art

Everson Museum of Art
401 Harrison St., Syracuse

Jake Troyli's works address the commodification of Black and Brown bodies, confronting and exploring labor capitalism and sweat equity as a demonstration of value. Troyli also injects his paintings with a sense of humor and absurdity through the inclusion of his own self-portrait. His avatar populates the works in "Open Season," where Troyli is both the hunter and the hunted as he participates in a variety of physical activities. As a former Division I basketball player, Troyli has a potent understanding of how athletes in America, particularly athletes of color, are simultaneously celebrated and criticized.

   

Lessons in Geometry
Everson Museum of Art

Everson Museum of Art
401 Harrison St., Syracuse

Artists have obsessed over the relationship between mathematics and art for millennia. As artists turned toward abstraction in the early 20th century, Europeans like Piet Mondrian used geometry to create a set of rules and parameters that guided their creative process. Meanwhile, American artists began developing their own styles and movements—particularly Abstract Expressionism, which was typified by bold, quickly executed brushwork, drips, and splashes. In the mid-20th century in the United States, artists laid the groundwork for Geometric Abstraction as a more cerebral alternative to the often macho flamboyance of Abstract Expressionism. Over the ensuing decades, artists used geometry to produce abstract works that ranged from the dazzling Op Art of Victor Vasarely to the restrained Minimalism of Sol LeWitt.

"Lessons in Geometry" traces the evolution of hard-edged abstraction in the United States as artists sought to use pure geometric forms to create works with balance, harmony, and order. For these artists, shape, line, and color took precedence over representational compositions. The Everson's collection reflects the wildly varied ways that artists have used geometry to serve their personal expression, from the analytical formulations of Robert Swain to the shaped canvases of Harmony Hammond and the spatial illusions of Tony King.

   

Human/Environment: 4,000 Years of Art
Syracuse University Art Museum

Price: Free
Syracuse University Art Museum, Shaffer Art Building
Syracuse University, Syracuse

Drawing on the museum's extensive collection that encompasses almost 45,000 historic and contemporary artworks made around the globe, this exhibition explores how humans have interacted with and shaped the environment in which they live. Thematic sections focus on plants, home, population centers, and human figures.

   

“What If I Try This?”: Helen Frankenthaler in the 20th-Century Print Ecosystem
Syracuse University Art Museum

Price: Free
Syracuse University Art Museum, Shaffer Art Building
Syracuse University, Syracuse

"What If I Try This?" explores how Helen Frankenthaler, the noted 20th-century abstract artist, collaborated with printmakers in print studios and workshops throughout her long career. By focusing on her works on paper, this exhibition considers how printshops are key nodes within the printmaking ecosystems, or sites where artists and printers simultaneously championed technical innovations and created community.

   

Bhen Alan: Why Does My Adobo Taste Different?
Syracuse University Art Museum

Price: Free
Syracuse University Art Museum, Shaffer Art Building
Syracuse University, Syracuse

The fifth iteration of the Art Wall Project features textiles made by the Filipino-American artist Bhen Alan. Through the creation of a monumental banig, or a traditional Filipino handwoven mat made from plant fibers, Alan grapples with the traumas of immigration and explores how diasporic communities work to recover a lost idea of home.

   

A Sense of Arrival: Kevin Adonis Browne
Syracuse University Art Museum

Price: Free
Syracuse University Art Museum, Shaffer Art Building
Syracuse University, Syracuse

"A Sense of Arrival" brings together scholarship and artistic practice in a multimedia installation by Kevin Adonis Browne, professor of rhetoric and writing in the Department of Writing Studies in the College of Arts and Sciences. Browne's exhibition combines photographs, sculpture, and new writings that reflect a decades-long meditation on Caribbean blackness, being, and rhetorical expression.

   

Casual Series: Hansel and Gretel
Syracuse Orchestra (formerly Symphoria)
Stephen Mulligan, conductor
Featuring Peter Rovit, violin; Arvilla Wendland, viola

St. Paul's Syracuse
220 E. Fayette St., Syracuse

Mozart Sinfonia concertante in E-flat major for Viola, Violin, and Orchestra, K. 320d
Humperdinck Hansel and Gretel Suite

Tickets

   

Tuesday, November 25, 2025

“What If I Try This?”: Helen Frankenthaler in the 20th-Century Print Ecosystem
Syracuse University Art Museum

Price: Free
Syracuse University Art Museum, Shaffer Art Building
Syracuse University, Syracuse

"What If I Try This?" explores how Helen Frankenthaler, the noted 20th-century abstract artist, collaborated with printmakers in print studios and workshops throughout her long career. By focusing on her works on paper, this exhibition considers how printshops are key nodes within the printmaking ecosystems, or sites where artists and printers simultaneously championed technical innovations and created community.

   

Human/Environment: 4,000 Years of Art
Syracuse University Art Museum

Price: Free
Syracuse University Art Museum, Shaffer Art Building
Syracuse University, Syracuse

Drawing on the museum's extensive collection that encompasses almost 45,000 historic and contemporary artworks made around the globe, this exhibition explores how humans have interacted with and shaped the environment in which they live. Thematic sections focus on plants, home, population centers, and human figures.

   

A Sense of Arrival: Kevin Adonis Browne
Syracuse University Art Museum

Price: Free
Syracuse University Art Museum, Shaffer Art Building
Syracuse University, Syracuse

"A Sense of Arrival" brings together scholarship and artistic practice in a multimedia installation by Kevin Adonis Browne, professor of rhetoric and writing in the Department of Writing Studies in the College of Arts and Sciences. Browne's exhibition combines photographs, sculpture, and new writings that reflect a decades-long meditation on Caribbean blackness, being, and rhetorical expression.

   

Bhen Alan: Why Does My Adobo Taste Different?
Syracuse University Art Museum

Price: Free
Syracuse University Art Museum, Shaffer Art Building
Syracuse University, Syracuse

The fifth iteration of the Art Wall Project features textiles made by the Filipino-American artist Bhen Alan. Through the creation of a monumental banig, or a traditional Filipino handwoven mat made from plant fibers, Alan grapples with the traumas of immigration and explores how diasporic communities work to recover a lost idea of home.

   

Liz Moore
Friends of the Central Library Author Series

Crouse Hinds Concert Theater, Mulroy Civic Center
411 Montgomery St., Syracuse

Liz Moore is a writer of fiction and creative nonfiction. After a brief time as a musician in NYC, Moore shifted her focus to writing. Her first novel was The Words of Every Song, followed by Heft which landed on NPR's Best of 2012 list. Moore's fourth novel, Long Bright River, was published in 2020 and has become both a New York Times and international best seller. The God of the Woods was published in 2024, debuted and has remained on the best seller list for over 29 weeks. Moore is Director of the Creative Writing MFA at Temple University.

Tickets

   

Preview: A Christmas Story
Syracuse Stage
Robert Hupp, director

Archbold Theater, Syracuse Stage
820 E. Genesee St., Syracuse

The beloved holiday film, live onstage!

9-year-old Ralphie Parker has his sights set on a coveted Christmas gift, but he'll have to play his cards right if he's going to convince the "Old Man" to leave it under the tree. Meanwhile, he'll have to deal with the neighborhood bully, an annoying kid brother, nagging teachers, and the constant cold of a frigid Indiana winter. Filled with the most memorable moments from the beloved 1983 film — a glorious leg lamp, grandma's bunny pajamas, Orphan Annie's decoder ring, and one serious triple-dog-dare — this nostalgic adaptation faithfully captures author Jean Shepherd's small-town wit while inviting new audiences to discover this timeless family comedy for the first time.

   

Wednesday, November 26, 2025

Human/Environment: 4,000 Years of Art
Syracuse University Art Museum

Price: Free
Syracuse University Art Museum, Shaffer Art Building
Syracuse University, Syracuse

Drawing on the museum's extensive collection that encompasses almost 45,000 historic and contemporary artworks made around the globe, this exhibition explores how humans have interacted with and shaped the environment in which they live. Thematic sections focus on plants, home, population centers, and human figures.

   

“What If I Try This?”: Helen Frankenthaler in the 20th-Century Print Ecosystem
Syracuse University Art Museum

Price: Free
Syracuse University Art Museum, Shaffer Art Building
Syracuse University, Syracuse

"What If I Try This?" explores how Helen Frankenthaler, the noted 20th-century abstract artist, collaborated with printmakers in print studios and workshops throughout her long career. By focusing on her works on paper, this exhibition considers how printshops are key nodes within the printmaking ecosystems, or sites where artists and printers simultaneously championed technical innovations and created community.

   

Bhen Alan: Why Does My Adobo Taste Different?
Syracuse University Art Museum

Price: Free
Syracuse University Art Museum, Shaffer Art Building
Syracuse University, Syracuse

The fifth iteration of the Art Wall Project features textiles made by the Filipino-American artist Bhen Alan. Through the creation of a monumental banig, or a traditional Filipino handwoven mat made from plant fibers, Alan grapples with the traumas of immigration and explores how diasporic communities work to recover a lost idea of home.

   

A Sense of Arrival: Kevin Adonis Browne
Syracuse University Art Museum

Price: Free
Syracuse University Art Museum, Shaffer Art Building
Syracuse University, Syracuse

"A Sense of Arrival" brings together scholarship and artistic practice in a multimedia installation by Kevin Adonis Browne, professor of rhetoric and writing in the Department of Writing Studies in the College of Arts and Sciences. Browne's exhibition combines photographs, sculpture, and new writings that reflect a decades-long meditation on Caribbean blackness, being, and rhetorical expression.

   

Lessons in Geometry
Everson Museum of Art

Everson Museum of Art
401 Harrison St., Syracuse

Artists have obsessed over the relationship between mathematics and art for millennia. As artists turned toward abstraction in the early 20th century, Europeans like Piet Mondrian used geometry to create a set of rules and parameters that guided their creative process. Meanwhile, American artists began developing their own styles and movements—particularly Abstract Expressionism, which was typified by bold, quickly executed brushwork, drips, and splashes. In the mid-20th century in the United States, artists laid the groundwork for Geometric Abstraction as a more cerebral alternative to the often macho flamboyance of Abstract Expressionism. Over the ensuing decades, artists used geometry to produce abstract works that ranged from the dazzling Op Art of Victor Vasarely to the restrained Minimalism of Sol LeWitt.

"Lessons in Geometry" traces the evolution of hard-edged abstraction in the United States as artists sought to use pure geometric forms to create works with balance, harmony, and order. For these artists, shape, line, and color took precedence over representational compositions. The Everson's collection reflects the wildly varied ways that artists have used geometry to serve their personal expression, from the analytical formulations of Robert Swain to the shaped canvases of Harmony Hammond and the spatial illusions of Tony King.

   

Jake Troyli: Open Season
Everson Museum of Art

Everson Museum of Art
401 Harrison St., Syracuse

Jake Troyli's works address the commodification of Black and Brown bodies, confronting and exploring labor capitalism and sweat equity as a demonstration of value. Troyli also injects his paintings with a sense of humor and absurdity through the inclusion of his own self-portrait. His avatar populates the works in "Open Season," where Troyli is both the hunter and the hunted as he participates in a variety of physical activities. As a former Division I basketball player, Troyli has a potent understanding of how athletes in America, particularly athletes of color, are simultaneously celebrated and criticized.

   

Patterns of Resistance
Everson Museum of Art

Everson Museum of Art
401 Harrison St., Syracuse

In the early 1970s, the Pattern & Decoration Movement emerged as an antidote to the vice grip in which abstraction had held American art since the 1950s. Artists like Valerie Jaudon, Joyce Kozloff, and Miriam Shapiro began juxtaposing colors and patterns that critics and artists alike had previously dismissed as feminine to powerful effect. Simultaneously, other feminist artists like Lynda Benglis were consciously subverting clay's associations as a masculine and/or craft medium.

As the '70s played out, a generation of artists like Andrea Gill, Nancy Selvin, and Betty Woodman did not just embrace the decorative strategies of the Pattern & Decoration Movement, they also sought to place a feminist spin on their work. As ceramics become more common in a fine art context, hierarchies surrounding different materials faded, giving artists the ability to experiment and construct narrative and meaning through pattern. Long denigrated as "decorative" and closely associated with domesticity, patterns are now an integral part of the language of contemporary art.

   

Joyce Kozloff: Contested Territories, 1983-2023
Everson Museum of Art

Everson Museum of Art
401 Harrison St., Syracuse

For more than four decades, Joyce Kozloff has explored how the entanglements of geography, history, and power influence the visual language of maps. "Contested Territories" presents a selection of Kozloff's works that uncover how maps shape our understanding of the world—not as neutral tools, but as instruments of influence, ideology, and control.

Kozloff's wide range of sources include historical maps, classroom wall maps, atlases, globes, and even satellite imagery from Google Maps. Her dense and colorful works often layer these materials with hand-painted details, collage, and intricate ornamentation. By combining sources that span centuries—from Renaissance celestial charts to contemporary digital mapping—she exposes how maps carry the legacies of empire, conflict, and shifting territorial claims.

A founding figure in the Pattern and Decoration movement, Kozloff combines meticulous craftsmanship with political critique. Her works are labor-intensive, involving the detailed process of painting, drawing, and collaging over cartographic surfaces. The resulting richly textured visual field invites viewers to look closely—and to question the conquest, division, and erasure found beneath the official surface narrative.

Whether reimagining educational globes or deconstructing colonial-era charts, Kozloff transforms maps from static documents into contested, dynamic spaces. Her work encourages viewers to reconsider how borders are drawn as well as how art can reclaim such boundaries as sites of resistance, memory, and possibility.

   

Laurent Craste: Iconoclasts
Everson Museum of Art

Everson Museum of Art
401 Harrison St., Syracuse

"Iconoclasts" marks the American museum debut for French-born Canadian ceramist Laurent Craste. Over the past decade, Craste has committed a wide range of indignities and abuse against his ornate vases and urns, including pummeling them with baseball bats and crowbars and piercing them with arrows. Despite the violence that runs through his work, Craste has a great passion for historical porcelain. Working with porcelain allows Craste to explore the prestige and power of upper-class society, but also inequality and the strain that is placed on working people. The anthropomorphic nature of Craste's vases echoes the human body, making it no surprise that people feel strong emotions when seeing a helpless vase struck by a baseball bat. Triggering these strong emotions in his audience allows Craste to connect on a deeper level as he asks questions about class, money, and power.

   

Sesame Street Live! Elmo & Friends Say Hello
Landmark Theatre

Landmark Theatre
362 S. Salina St., Syracuse

Elmo, Abby Cadabby, Cookie Monster, and their friends from Sesame Street are coming to your neighborhood to say hello! At Elmo and Friends Say Hello, sing, dance, and play alongside your favorite furry friends, all while you follow Elmo's puppy, Tango, in a fun game of hide & seek. So put on your dancing shoes and make your way to where the air is sweet for this all-new celebration on Sesame Street!

Tickets

   

Preview: A Christmas Story
Syracuse Stage
Robert Hupp, director

Archbold Theater, Syracuse Stage
820 E. Genesee St., Syracuse

The beloved holiday film, live onstage!

9-year-old Ralphie Parker has his sights set on a coveted Christmas gift, but he'll have to play his cards right if he's going to convince the "Old Man" to leave it under the tree. Meanwhile, he'll have to deal with the neighborhood bully, an annoying kid brother, nagging teachers, and the constant cold of a frigid Indiana winter. Filled with the most memorable moments from the beloved 1983 film — a glorious leg lamp, grandma's bunny pajamas, Orphan Annie's decoder ring, and one serious triple-dog-dare — this nostalgic adaptation faithfully captures author Jean Shepherd's small-town wit while inviting new audiences to discover this timeless family comedy for the first time.

   

Thursday, November 27, 2025

The Portal's Keeper
Urban Video Project

Price: Free
Everson Museum of Art Plaza
401 Harrison St., Syracuse

Media artists LaJuné McMillian and Manuel Molina Martagon worked with local, community-engaged creatives Kofi Antwi, Clove Flores, Sofia Gutierrez, and Martikah Williams. Together, they discussed their practices and their visions for a liberated future. The artists asked them to embody their answers not only through words, but through movement as well. "The Portal's Keeper" realizes those visions through the technological "portal" of a popular game engine better known for first-person shooter and battle royale MMO games. Here, the artists use this technology not to realistically simulate violence, but instead as a means to represent what liberation might look like.

Screening, projected on the museum wall, begins at dusk.