Wednesday, April 29, 2026

Healing Forward: Rituals of Self Repair, Cultivation of Community, and Collective Activation
Community Folk Art Center

Community Folk Art Center
805 E. Genesee St., Syracuse

A retrospective exhibition of over 60 multimedia and quilted works by Amber Robles-Gordon, an interdisciplinary visual artist of Puerto Rican and Caribbean descent who resides in Washington, DC. This body of work traces the through-line of healing — personal, communal, spiritual, and ecological frameworks — across the artistic career of Amber Robles-Gordon. Bringing together installations, quilts, assemblages, and collages created over more than a decade, the exhibition reveals how healing has functioned not only as a thematic concern, but as a methodology and ethical framework within the artist's practice.

   

We're Just Here for the Bad Guys: Brian Van Lau
Light Work Gallery

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

We're Just Here for the Bad Guys chronicles Brian Van Lau's relationship with his estranged father. Lau's father was absent during his childhood due to his incarceration. After his release, he rebuilt his life in Vietnam, remarried, and gradually disappeared from Lau's life. Nearly a decade later, Lau traveled to Vietnam following his father's sudden illness, and learned of his terminal cancer. During their final week together, they collaborated on a photographic project that documented his father's unsuccessful path toward recovery. After his father's passing, Lau returned to his hometown in Hawai'i seeking closure, uncovering hidden correspondence that revealed previously unknown parts of his father's life. Entrusted with dispersing his father's ashes across O'ahu, the artist began working with his grandparents to reconstruct this fragmented family history through photography.

   

Arcanite Pictures: Oracle in the Aperture
Light Work Gallery

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

Arcanite Pictures was started to highlight emerging artists, emphasizing the personal narrative angle and diaristic storytelling in photography. Through online features and group shows, a library of small personal projects began to build, and, excitingly, as more people were invited to share their work, a lineage and an echoing formed, discoveries were made, and the distance between people diminished as a web of connections was established. The pictures shared constituted a language, and a portal to the various practices now joined across different cities, subcultures, and decades-old archives. For Oracle in the Aperture, artists were selected to join with peers, personal influences, and emerging lens-based artists to amplify and enhance each other's stories, emphasizing interpersonal and private relationships and the talismanic ability of photography to illuminate familial and gestural scenes.

   

Possible Worlds: 20 Years of the Wynn Newhouse Awards
Syracuse University Art Museum

Syracuse University Art Museum, Shaffer Art Building
Syracuse University, Syracuse

This landmark exhibition marks the 20th anniversary of the Wynn Newhouse Award, a pioneering initiative that has recognized and elevated artists of excellence who happen to live with disabilities. Established in 2006 by Wynn Newhouse, the award has championed bold, boundary-defying voices in contemporary art — highlighting practices that are as varied in form as they are unified in vision: a vision of art as a space where representation, identity, and access are not peripheral concerns, but central to the discourse.

At the heart of the exhibition is a curatorial inquiry: How do artists with disabilities navigate the art world, and the world at large, on their terms? And how does that navigation inform their work, influence its reception, and expand the field of cultural production? The goal is not to position disability as a central or singular theme, but to acknowledge it as one of many intersecting conditions that inform artistic practice. In doing so, this exhibition prompts us to reconsider who gets seen, whose experiences shape the canon, and how institutions can create more equitable conditions for artistic participation and recognition.

Exhibiting artists include Beverly Baker, Derrick Alexis Coard, Courttney Cooper, Joseph Grigley, Em Kettner, Reverend Joyce McDonald, William Scott, Kambel Smith, Katz Tepper, Melvin Way, and Peter Williams.

   

Undressed: The Nude in Dutch Art, circa 1550-1800
Syracuse University Art Museum

Syracuse University Art Museum, Shaffer Art Building
Syracuse University, Syracuse

This exhibition, encompassing 21 works in various media, surveys the portrayal of nudity and semi-nudity in a variety of subjects rendered by Dutch artists over several centuries. It will explore how the nude has been articulated, both artistically and contextually, to disrupt traditional ideas of nudity in art, which were primarily argued by Sir Kenneth Clark in The Nude: A Study in Ideal Form (1956).

In this influential text, Clark posited that the presence of the nude in art, existed above and beyond cultural circumstances, as a timeless, almost abstract ideal. He advanced a distinction between "naked" and "nude," with the latter explained as an idealization, or an evocation of timeless ideals. To the contrary, this exhibition presents nudity in art as a phenomenon that is time-bound and culturally determined.

   

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.

   

Realities Within
Everson Museum of Art

Everson Museum of Art
401 Harrison St., Syracuse

Realities Within presents four enduring genres of artmaking to explore how artists shape, frame, and inhabit the world. Whether a landscape, cityscape, still life, or representation of the human body, these works show how each artist's reality is impacted by their lived experience. Separated by genre and installed "salon-style" — a term inspired by the 18th and 19th century Paris Salons, where paintings were hung from floor to ceiling, covering every inch of wall space — the dense arrangement invites close looking and visual comparison, encouraging viewers to find connections across time, style, and subject matter.

   

CNY Artist Initiative: Ann Clark: Interior Landscapes
Everson Museum of Art

Everson Museum of Art
401 Harrison St., Syracuse

Ann Clarke is a celebrated fiber artist originally from Rochester, NY. Clarke's newest series, Interior Landscapes, includes large-scale rugs installed on walls for museum visitors to contemplate. Dreamlike images of trees challenge us to consider the vulnerability of our wooded landscapes. Oversized, empty chairs remind us of the consequences of loss — of both people and the environment in which we make our homes.

   

Feats of Clay
Everson Museum of Art

Everson Museum of Art
401 Harrison St., Syracuse

Central New York's Feats of Clay competition was established in 1987 to foster education in the ceramic arts for Syracuse-area high schools. Now in its 37th year, the event includes schools from as far away as the North Country and the Southern Tier and features a juried exhibition that recognizes students who demonstrate excellence in ceramic sculpting and vessel making.

On Friday, May 1, 2026, 500 students representing more than 25 schools will converge on the Everson Community Plaza to compete in a series of Olympic-style competitive events that involve (among other things) throwing blindfolded on the potter's wheel, stacking wheel-thrown cylinders, and building towering constructions out of clay coils.

   

A Long Look: Documentary Photography, 1888-2016
Everson Museum of Art

Everson Museum of Art
401 Harrison St., Syracuse

A Long Look: Documentary Photography, 1888-2016 traces more than a century of photographers turning their lenses toward the world as witnesses, advocates, and storytellers. From the late 19th century, when advances in camera technology first allowed photographers to record spontaneous moments, to the bold and colorful images of today, documentary photography has shaped how people see the world, both its past and its present.

Documentary photographers traditionally immerse themselves in their subjects. Bruce Davidson spent 10 days living in the mining communities of South Wales producing his Welsh Miners portfolio. Aaron Siskind's Harlem Document project plays out over nine years, showing the vibrant life of Black Americans in Harlem in the 1930s. Donna Ferrato has spent decades documenting survivors of domestic violence and advocating for their welfare. Documentary photographers reveal how sustained engagement with their subjects, over ten days or several decades, produces images that challenge stereotypes, humanize the unfamiliar, and deepen public understanding.

A Long Look invites viewers to consider the significance of documentary photography as a medium, asking how photographs shape collective memory and inspire social awareness. Documentary photographers must often navigate the tension between art and journalism, frequently occupying a grey area between the two.

   

A Riding Tide of Plastic in Art
ArtRage Gallery

Price: Free
ArtRage Gallery
505 Hawley Ave., Syracuse

Project Vortex is an international collective of artists, designers, and architects actively focusing on the global problem of plastic pollution through their art. Curated by founding member Aurora Robson, this exhibition features a selection of works by Project Vortex members who are sequestering post-industrial and post-consumer plastic into works of art.

The world produces an estimated 360 million metric tons of plastic waste annually. Only approximately 9% of plastics are actually recycled globally. Current research reveals that microplastics are present in the bodies of virtually all humans. Operating at the intersection of art and science, Project Vortex strives to inspire people to rethink and reinvent plastic debris through innovation, creative stewardship, and education. Dedicated to improving global understanding of the impacts of plastic consumption and pollution, Project Vortex works to restrict the flow of plastic debris into the oceans and subsequently into the bodies of humans and animals.

   

Symphony Orchestra 2026: The Orchestral Dances
LeMoyne College

Price: $20 regular, $15 seniors, $10 LeMoyne faculty and staff, $5 students
Coyne Center for the Performing Arts
LeMoyne College, Syracuse

The Le Moyne College Symphony Orchestra presents music inspired by dance, including Lord of the Dance, Dancing Queen, and Three Cornered Hat.

Tickets

   

Bruce In The USA: Tribute Show
The Oncenter

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

Led by Matt Ryan, Bruce In The USA has been hailed by audiences and critics alike for its meticulous musicianship and authentic stage presence. The production captures the essence of Bruce Springsteen's iconic sound, combining dynamic energy, precision, and emotional intensity that mirror the original performances of "The Boss" and his celebrated E Street Band.

Since its inception, Bruce In The USA has toured extensively throughout North America, earning widespread critical acclaim and a devoted following. The ensemble's faithful interpretations of Springsteen's extensive repertoire deliver a concert experience that transcends mere imitation, instead honoring the artistry and passion that have defined Springsteen's enduring career.

Tickets

   

Big Louie and the Gang that Couldn't Think Straight
Acme Mystery Company

Dinosaur BBQ (upstairs)
246 W. Willow St., Syracuse

You and the rest of the Bangalone Gang are in deep trouble. Big Louie's been beaned by a bocci ball and now he ain't thinking so good. The gang's got to figure out what to do before arch rival gang leader "Muscles" Marinara has you rubbed out. You better move fast. Word on the street is that ruthless hitman Jake "The Weasel" is on the way.

Tickets must be purcased in advance

   

Kentucky
Syracuse University Drama Department
Michelle Chan, director

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

Hiro is a self-made woman making it in New York. But she is also single, almost 30 and estranged from her dysfunctional family who lives in Kentucky. When her little sister, a born-again Christian, decides to marry at 22, Hiro takes it upon herself to do whatever she can to stop the wedding and salvage any shred of hope she had about her sister's future. By Leah Nanako Winkler.

Tickets

   

Thursday, April 30, 2026

Healing Forward: Rituals of Self Repair, Cultivation of Community, and Collective Activation
Community Folk Art Center

Community Folk Art Center
805 E. Genesee St., Syracuse

A retrospective exhibition of over 60 multimedia and quilted works by Amber Robles-Gordon, an interdisciplinary visual artist of Puerto Rican and Caribbean descent who resides in Washington, DC. This body of work traces the through-line of healing — personal, communal, spiritual, and ecological frameworks — across the artistic career of Amber Robles-Gordon. Bringing together installations, quilts, assemblages, and collages created over more than a decade, the exhibition reveals how healing has functioned not only as a thematic concern, but as a methodology and ethical framework within the artist's practice.

   

We're Just Here for the Bad Guys: Brian Van Lau
Light Work Gallery

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

We're Just Here for the Bad Guys chronicles Brian Van Lau's relationship with his estranged father. Lau's father was absent during his childhood due to his incarceration. After his release, he rebuilt his life in Vietnam, remarried, and gradually disappeared from Lau's life. Nearly a decade later, Lau traveled to Vietnam following his father's sudden illness, and learned of his terminal cancer. During their final week together, they collaborated on a photographic project that documented his father's unsuccessful path toward recovery. After his father's passing, Lau returned to his hometown in Hawai'i seeking closure, uncovering hidden correspondence that revealed previously unknown parts of his father's life. Entrusted with dispersing his father's ashes across O'ahu, the artist began working with his grandparents to reconstruct this fragmented family history through photography.

   

Arcanite Pictures: Oracle in the Aperture
Light Work Gallery

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

Arcanite Pictures was started to highlight emerging artists, emphasizing the personal narrative angle and diaristic storytelling in photography. Through online features and group shows, a library of small personal projects began to build, and, excitingly, as more people were invited to share their work, a lineage and an echoing formed, discoveries were made, and the distance between people diminished as a web of connections was established. The pictures shared constituted a language, and a portal to the various practices now joined across different cities, subcultures, and decades-old archives. For Oracle in the Aperture, artists were selected to join with peers, personal influences, and emerging lens-based artists to amplify and enhance each other's stories, emphasizing interpersonal and private relationships and the talismanic ability of photography to illuminate familial and gestural scenes.

   

Undressed: The Nude in Dutch Art, circa 1550-1800
Syracuse University Art Museum

Syracuse University Art Museum, Shaffer Art Building
Syracuse University, Syracuse

This exhibition, encompassing 21 works in various media, surveys the portrayal of nudity and semi-nudity in a variety of subjects rendered by Dutch artists over several centuries. It will explore how the nude has been articulated, both artistically and contextually, to disrupt traditional ideas of nudity in art, which were primarily argued by Sir Kenneth Clark in The Nude: A Study in Ideal Form (1956).

In this influential text, Clark posited that the presence of the nude in art, existed above and beyond cultural circumstances, as a timeless, almost abstract ideal. He advanced a distinction between "naked" and "nude," with the latter explained as an idealization, or an evocation of timeless ideals. To the contrary, this exhibition presents nudity in art as a phenomenon that is time-bound and culturally determined.

   

Possible Worlds: 20 Years of the Wynn Newhouse Awards
Syracuse University Art Museum

Syracuse University Art Museum, Shaffer Art Building
Syracuse University, Syracuse

This landmark exhibition marks the 20th anniversary of the Wynn Newhouse Award, a pioneering initiative that has recognized and elevated artists of excellence who happen to live with disabilities. Established in 2006 by Wynn Newhouse, the award has championed bold, boundary-defying voices in contemporary art — highlighting practices that are as varied in form as they are unified in vision: a vision of art as a space where representation, identity, and access are not peripheral concerns, but central to the discourse.

At the heart of the exhibition is a curatorial inquiry: How do artists with disabilities navigate the art world, and the world at large, on their terms? And how does that navigation inform their work, influence its reception, and expand the field of cultural production? The goal is not to position disability as a central or singular theme, but to acknowledge it as one of many intersecting conditions that inform artistic practice. In doing so, this exhibition prompts us to reconsider who gets seen, whose experiences shape the canon, and how institutions can create more equitable conditions for artistic participation and recognition.

Exhibiting artists include Beverly Baker, Derrick Alexis Coard, Courttney Cooper, Joseph Grigley, Em Kettner, Reverend Joyce McDonald, William Scott, Kambel Smith, Katz Tepper, Melvin Way, and Peter Williams.

   

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.

   

Feats of Clay
Everson Museum of Art

Everson Museum of Art
401 Harrison St., Syracuse

Central New York's Feats of Clay competition was established in 1987 to foster education in the ceramic arts for Syracuse-area high schools. Now in its 37th year, the event includes schools from as far away as the North Country and the Southern Tier and features a juried exhibition that recognizes students who demonstrate excellence in ceramic sculpting and vessel making.

On Friday, May 1, 2026, 500 students representing more than 25 schools will converge on the Everson Community Plaza to compete in a series of Olympic-style competitive events that involve (among other things) throwing blindfolded on the potter's wheel, stacking wheel-thrown cylinders, and building towering constructions out of clay coils.

   

CNY Artist Initiative: Ann Clark: Interior Landscapes
Everson Museum of Art

Everson Museum of Art
401 Harrison St., Syracuse

Ann Clarke is a celebrated fiber artist originally from Rochester, NY. Clarke's newest series, Interior Landscapes, includes large-scale rugs installed on walls for museum visitors to contemplate. Dreamlike images of trees challenge us to consider the vulnerability of our wooded landscapes. Oversized, empty chairs remind us of the consequences of loss — of both people and the environment in which we make our homes.

   

Realities Within
Everson Museum of Art

Everson Museum of Art
401 Harrison St., Syracuse

Realities Within presents four enduring genres of artmaking to explore how artists shape, frame, and inhabit the world. Whether a landscape, cityscape, still life, or representation of the human body, these works show how each artist's reality is impacted by their lived experience. Separated by genre and installed "salon-style" — a term inspired by the 18th and 19th century Paris Salons, where paintings were hung from floor to ceiling, covering every inch of wall space — the dense arrangement invites close looking and visual comparison, encouraging viewers to find connections across time, style, and subject matter.

   

A Long Look: Documentary Photography, 1888-2016
Everson Museum of Art

Everson Museum of Art
401 Harrison St., Syracuse

A Long Look: Documentary Photography, 1888-2016 traces more than a century of photographers turning their lenses toward the world as witnesses, advocates, and storytellers. From the late 19th century, when advances in camera technology first allowed photographers to record spontaneous moments, to the bold and colorful images of today, documentary photography has shaped how people see the world, both its past and its present.

Documentary photographers traditionally immerse themselves in their subjects. Bruce Davidson spent 10 days living in the mining communities of South Wales producing his Welsh Miners portfolio. Aaron Siskind's Harlem Document project plays out over nine years, showing the vibrant life of Black Americans in Harlem in the 1930s. Donna Ferrato has spent decades documenting survivors of domestic violence and advocating for their welfare. Documentary photographers reveal how sustained engagement with their subjects, over ten days or several decades, produces images that challenge stereotypes, humanize the unfamiliar, and deepen public understanding.

A Long Look invites viewers to consider the significance of documentary photography as a medium, asking how photographs shape collective memory and inspire social awareness. Documentary photographers must often navigate the tension between art and journalism, frequently occupying a grey area between the two.

   

A Riding Tide of Plastic in Art
ArtRage Gallery

Price: Free
ArtRage Gallery
505 Hawley Ave., Syracuse

Project Vortex is an international collective of artists, designers, and architects actively focusing on the global problem of plastic pollution through their art. Curated by founding member Aurora Robson, this exhibition features a selection of works by Project Vortex members who are sequestering post-industrial and post-consumer plastic into works of art.

The world produces an estimated 360 million metric tons of plastic waste annually. Only approximately 9% of plastics are actually recycled globally. Current research reveals that microplastics are present in the bodies of virtually all humans. Operating at the intersection of art and science, Project Vortex strives to inspire people to rethink and reinvent plastic debris through innovation, creative stewardship, and education. Dedicated to improving global understanding of the impacts of plastic consumption and pollution, Project Vortex works to restrict the flow of plastic debris into the oceans and subsequently into the bodies of humans and animals.

   

Alisha B Wormsley: The Temple of Our Survival
Urban Video Project

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

The Temple of Our Survival is new video work commissioned by Light Work for projection at UVP exploring what survival means and looks like through a series of interviews conducted by the artist with local care workers, land stewards, and cultural workers in her nomadic film set and project space.

Screening begins at dusk.

   

Loren & LJ Barrigar
The 443 Social Club

The 443 Social Club
443 Burnet Ave., Syracuse

Loren Barrigar started playing guitar when he was only four years old, and by the time he was six, played the Chet Atkins hit "Yackety Axe" in front of thousands of country music fans at the Grand Ole Opry in Nashville. He went on to study with Jimmy Atkins (Chet's brother) which led to a touring career with his family band from Nashville to Las Vegas. Since settling down in Central New York, he has been in constant demand as a studio musician.

These days, his talented son LJ joins him on stage, following in the family business.

Tickets

   

Spring Jazz Concert 2026
LeMoyne College

Price: $20 regular, $15 seniors, $10 LeMoyne faculty and staff, $5 students
Coyne Center for the Performing Arts
LeMoyne College, Syracuse

Join the Le Moyne College Jazzuits and Jazz Ensemble for classic jazz standards and music of the Big Band era.

Tickets

   

Kentucky
Syracuse University Drama Department
Michelle Chan, director

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

Hiro is a self-made woman making it in New York. But she is also single, almost 30 and estranged from her dysfunctional family who lives in Kentucky. When her little sister, a born-again Christian, decides to marry at 22, Hiro takes it upon herself to do whatever she can to stop the wedding and salvage any shred of hope she had about her sister's future. By Leah Nanako Winkler.

Tickets

   

Friday, May 1, 2026

We're Just Here for the Bad Guys: Brian Van Lau
Light Work Gallery

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

We're Just Here for the Bad Guys chronicles Brian Van Lau's relationship with his estranged father. Lau's father was absent during his childhood due to his incarceration. After his release, he rebuilt his life in Vietnam, remarried, and gradually disappeared from Lau's life. Nearly a decade later, Lau traveled to Vietnam following his father's sudden illness, and learned of his terminal cancer. During their final week together, they collaborated on a photographic project that documented his father's unsuccessful path toward recovery. After his father's passing, Lau returned to his hometown in Hawai'i seeking closure, uncovering hidden correspondence that revealed previously unknown parts of his father's life. Entrusted with dispersing his father's ashes across O'ahu, the artist began working with his grandparents to reconstruct this fragmented family history through photography.

   

Arcanite Pictures: Oracle in the Aperture
Light Work Gallery

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

Arcanite Pictures was started to highlight emerging artists, emphasizing the personal narrative angle and diaristic storytelling in photography. Through online features and group shows, a library of small personal projects began to build, and, excitingly, as more people were invited to share their work, a lineage and an echoing formed, discoveries were made, and the distance between people diminished as a web of connections was established. The pictures shared constituted a language, and a portal to the various practices now joined across different cities, subcultures, and decades-old archives. For Oracle in the Aperture, artists were selected to join with peers, personal influences, and emerging lens-based artists to amplify and enhance each other's stories, emphasizing interpersonal and private relationships and the talismanic ability of photography to illuminate familial and gestural scenes.

   

Possible Worlds: 20 Years of the Wynn Newhouse Awards
Syracuse University Art Museum

Syracuse University Art Museum, Shaffer Art Building
Syracuse University, Syracuse

This landmark exhibition marks the 20th anniversary of the Wynn Newhouse Award, a pioneering initiative that has recognized and elevated artists of excellence who happen to live with disabilities. Established in 2006 by Wynn Newhouse, the award has championed bold, boundary-defying voices in contemporary art — highlighting practices that are as varied in form as they are unified in vision: a vision of art as a space where representation, identity, and access are not peripheral concerns, but central to the discourse.

At the heart of the exhibition is a curatorial inquiry: How do artists with disabilities navigate the art world, and the world at large, on their terms? And how does that navigation inform their work, influence its reception, and expand the field of cultural production? The goal is not to position disability as a central or singular theme, but to acknowledge it as one of many intersecting conditions that inform artistic practice. In doing so, this exhibition prompts us to reconsider who gets seen, whose experiences shape the canon, and how institutions can create more equitable conditions for artistic participation and recognition.

Exhibiting artists include Beverly Baker, Derrick Alexis Coard, Courttney Cooper, Joseph Grigley, Em Kettner, Reverend Joyce McDonald, William Scott, Kambel Smith, Katz Tepper, Melvin Way, and Peter Williams.

   

Undressed: The Nude in Dutch Art, circa 1550-1800
Syracuse University Art Museum

Syracuse University Art Museum, Shaffer Art Building
Syracuse University, Syracuse

This exhibition, encompassing 21 works in various media, surveys the portrayal of nudity and semi-nudity in a variety of subjects rendered by Dutch artists over several centuries. It will explore how the nude has been articulated, both artistically and contextually, to disrupt traditional ideas of nudity in art, which were primarily argued by Sir Kenneth Clark in The Nude: A Study in Ideal Form (1956).

In this influential text, Clark posited that the presence of the nude in art, existed above and beyond cultural circumstances, as a timeless, almost abstract ideal. He advanced a distinction between "naked" and "nude," with the latter explained as an idealization, or an evocation of timeless ideals. To the contrary, this exhibition presents nudity in art as a phenomenon that is time-bound and culturally determined.

   

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.

   

Feats of Clay
Everson Museum of Art

Everson Museum of Art
401 Harrison St., Syracuse

Central New York's Feats of Clay competition was established in 1987 to foster education in the ceramic arts for Syracuse-area high schools. Now in its 37th year, the event includes schools from as far away as the North Country and the Southern Tier and features a juried exhibition that recognizes students who demonstrate excellence in ceramic sculpting and vessel making.

On Friday, May 1, 2026, 500 students representing more than 25 schools will converge on the Everson Community Plaza to compete in a series of Olympic-style competitive events that involve (among other things) throwing blindfolded on the potter's wheel, stacking wheel-thrown cylinders, and building towering constructions out of clay coils.

   

Realities Within
Everson Museum of Art

Everson Museum of Art
401 Harrison St., Syracuse

Realities Within presents four enduring genres of artmaking to explore how artists shape, frame, and inhabit the world. Whether a landscape, cityscape, still life, or representation of the human body, these works show how each artist's reality is impacted by their lived experience. Separated by genre and installed "salon-style" — a term inspired by the 18th and 19th century Paris Salons, where paintings were hung from floor to ceiling, covering every inch of wall space — the dense arrangement invites close looking and visual comparison, encouraging viewers to find connections across time, style, and subject matter.

   

CNY Artist Initiative: Ann Clark: Interior Landscapes
Everson Museum of Art

Everson Museum of Art
401 Harrison St., Syracuse

Ann Clarke is a celebrated fiber artist originally from Rochester, NY. Clarke's newest series, Interior Landscapes, includes large-scale rugs installed on walls for museum visitors to contemplate. Dreamlike images of trees challenge us to consider the vulnerability of our wooded landscapes. Oversized, empty chairs remind us of the consequences of loss — of both people and the environment in which we make our homes.

   

A Long Look: Documentary Photography, 1888-2016
Everson Museum of Art

Everson Museum of Art
401 Harrison St., Syracuse

A Long Look: Documentary Photography, 1888-2016 traces more than a century of photographers turning their lenses toward the world as witnesses, advocates, and storytellers. From the late 19th century, when advances in camera technology first allowed photographers to record spontaneous moments, to the bold and colorful images of today, documentary photography has shaped how people see the world, both its past and its present.

Documentary photographers traditionally immerse themselves in their subjects. Bruce Davidson spent 10 days living in the mining communities of South Wales producing his Welsh Miners portfolio. Aaron Siskind's Harlem Document project plays out over nine years, showing the vibrant life of Black Americans in Harlem in the 1930s. Donna Ferrato has spent decades documenting survivors of domestic violence and advocating for their welfare. Documentary photographers reveal how sustained engagement with their subjects, over ten days or several decades, produces images that challenge stereotypes, humanize the unfamiliar, and deepen public understanding.

A Long Look invites viewers to consider the significance of documentary photography as a medium, asking how photographs shape collective memory and inspire social awareness. Documentary photographers must often navigate the tension between art and journalism, frequently occupying a grey area between the two.

   

A Riding Tide of Plastic in Art
ArtRage Gallery

Price: Free
ArtRage Gallery
505 Hawley Ave., Syracuse

Project Vortex is an international collective of artists, designers, and architects actively focusing on the global problem of plastic pollution through their art. Curated by founding member Aurora Robson, this exhibition features a selection of works by Project Vortex members who are sequestering post-industrial and post-consumer plastic into works of art.

The world produces an estimated 360 million metric tons of plastic waste annually. Only approximately 9% of plastics are actually recycled globally. Current research reveals that microplastics are present in the bodies of virtually all humans. Operating at the intersection of art and science, Project Vortex strives to inspire people to rethink and reinvent plastic debris through innovation, creative stewardship, and education. Dedicated to improving global understanding of the impacts of plastic consumption and pollution, Project Vortex works to restrict the flow of plastic debris into the oceans and subsequently into the bodies of humans and animals.

   

Alisha B Wormsley: The Temple of Our Survival
Urban Video Project

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

The Temple of Our Survival is new video work commissioned by Light Work for projection at UVP exploring what survival means and looks like through a series of interviews conducted by the artist with local care workers, land stewards, and cultural workers in her nomadic film set and project space.

Screening begins at dusk.

   

Brandon Santini
The 443 Social Club

The 443 Social Club
443 Burnet Ave., Syracuse

Blues and Roots rock harmonica player Brandon Santini radiates raw emotion and infectious energy to audiences worldwide. Born in the Piedmont region of North Carolina and raised on historic Beale Street in Memphis, Tennessee, Santini's profound connection to the blues & American roots music fuels his high-energy blend of traditional blues with a contemporary twist, earning him critical acclaim and awards along the way.

Tickets

   

Member Appreciation Show: Leslie Mendelson with Steve McEwan
Folkus Project

Price: $22 regular, Folkus members free
May Memorial Unitarian Society
3800 E. Genesee St., Syracuse

Elegant and precise vocals with emotional resonance.

Grammy award-nominated artist, Leslie Mendelson (vocals, guitar, harmonica), has won the hearts of both an adoring fan base and fellow artists alike. Mendelson crafts a distinctive vintage rock, folk-pop flavor, evoking the sounds of Laurel Canyon, but with the grit and sharp wit of Brooklyn, the city she calls home. There are realness and musicality that's both nostalgic and new within her music and especially her new album, After The Party, co-produced by Peter Asher, Tyler Chester, and longtime songwriting partner, Steve McEwan.

Steve McEwan (guitar and vocals) shares the stage with her, playing songs and telling stories through lyrics that they have written together. He is a London-born, three-time Grammy Award-winning songwriter. McEwan has written music for artists like Chris Stapleton, Kenny Chesney, Faith Hill, and many more.

Together, these two blend their talents, pleasing crowds with enchanted vocals and evocative songwriting.

Tickets

   

Echoes before Dawn: A Workshop Reading

Price: $10, limited seating available
ArtRage Gallery
505 Hawley Ave., Syracuse

JFK and Jackie O, Alexander and Eliza, Liz and Dick... who doesn't love a good old fashion American love story?

Echoes Before Dawn, a new play by Josh Gadek, follows three couples across three pivotal moments in American history. In 1955 Chicago, an interracial pair risks everything by falling in love in Jim Crow America. In 1973 Hamptons, two young men navigate their sexuality in the aftermath of Stonewall, when homosexuality was still classified as a mental disorder. In 2001 New York City, an interfaith couple battles politics while their relationship is tested in the wake of the 9/11 attacks.

Each loving outside the lines drawn by society, each paying a price for it. The "land of the free" has never offered freedom to love equally. This play asks: who gets to love, and what do they risk for it?

This play contains strong language, mature themes, and references to violence and sexual content, and is recommended for mature audiences.

Tickets

   

Kentucky
Syracuse University Drama Department
Michelle Chan, director

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

Hiro is a self-made woman making it in New York. But she is also single, almost 30 and estranged from her dysfunctional family who lives in Kentucky. When her little sister, a born-again Christian, decides to marry at 22, Hiro takes it upon herself to do whatever she can to stop the wedding and salvage any shred of hope she had about her sister's future. By Leah Nanako Winkler.

Tickets

   

Saturday, May 2, 2026

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.

   

Feats of Clay
Everson Museum of Art

Everson Museum of Art
401 Harrison St., Syracuse

Central New York's Feats of Clay competition was established in 1987 to foster education in the ceramic arts for Syracuse-area high schools. Now in its 37th year, the event includes schools from as far away as the North Country and the Southern Tier and features a juried exhibition that recognizes students who demonstrate excellence in ceramic sculpting and vessel making.

On Friday, May 1, 2026, 500 students representing more than 25 schools will converge on the Everson Community Plaza to compete in a series of Olympic-style competitive events that involve (among other things) throwing blindfolded on the potter's wheel, stacking wheel-thrown cylinders, and building towering constructions out of clay coils.

   

CNY Artist Initiative: Ann Clark: Interior Landscapes
Everson Museum of Art

Everson Museum of Art
401 Harrison St., Syracuse

Ann Clarke is a celebrated fiber artist originally from Rochester, NY. Clarke's newest series, Interior Landscapes, includes large-scale rugs installed on walls for museum visitors to contemplate. Dreamlike images of trees challenge us to consider the vulnerability of our wooded landscapes. Oversized, empty chairs remind us of the consequences of loss — of both people and the environment in which we make our homes.

   

Realities Within
Everson Museum of Art

Everson Museum of Art
401 Harrison St., Syracuse

Realities Within presents four enduring genres of artmaking to explore how artists shape, frame, and inhabit the world. Whether a landscape, cityscape, still life, or representation of the human body, these works show how each artist's reality is impacted by their lived experience. Separated by genre and installed "salon-style" — a term inspired by the 18th and 19th century Paris Salons, where paintings were hung from floor to ceiling, covering every inch of wall space — the dense arrangement invites close looking and visual comparison, encouraging viewers to find connections across time, style, and subject matter.

   

A Long Look: Documentary Photography, 1888-2016
Everson Museum of Art

Everson Museum of Art
401 Harrison St., Syracuse

A Long Look: Documentary Photography, 1888-2016 traces more than a century of photographers turning their lenses toward the world as witnesses, advocates, and storytellers. From the late 19th century, when advances in camera technology first allowed photographers to record spontaneous moments, to the bold and colorful images of today, documentary photography has shaped how people see the world, both its past and its present.

Documentary photographers traditionally immerse themselves in their subjects. Bruce Davidson spent 10 days living in the mining communities of South Wales producing his Welsh Miners portfolio. Aaron Siskind's Harlem Document project plays out over nine years, showing the vibrant life of Black Americans in Harlem in the 1930s. Donna Ferrato has spent decades documenting survivors of domestic violence and advocating for their welfare. Documentary photographers reveal how sustained engagement with their subjects, over ten days or several decades, produces images that challenge stereotypes, humanize the unfamiliar, and deepen public understanding.

A Long Look invites viewers to consider the significance of documentary photography as a medium, asking how photographs shape collective memory and inspire social awareness. Documentary photographers must often navigate the tension between art and journalism, frequently occupying a grey area between the two.

   

Arcanite Pictures: Oracle in the Aperture
Light Work Gallery

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

Arcanite Pictures was started to highlight emerging artists, emphasizing the personal narrative angle and diaristic storytelling in photography. Through online features and group shows, a library of small personal projects began to build, and, excitingly, as more people were invited to share their work, a lineage and an echoing formed, discoveries were made, and the distance between people diminished as a web of connections was established. The pictures shared constituted a language, and a portal to the various practices now joined across different cities, subcultures, and decades-old archives. For Oracle in the Aperture, artists were selected to join with peers, personal influences, and emerging lens-based artists to amplify and enhance each other's stories, emphasizing interpersonal and private relationships and the talismanic ability of photography to illuminate familial and gestural scenes.

   

We're Just Here for the Bad Guys: Brian Van Lau
Light Work Gallery

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

We're Just Here for the Bad Guys chronicles Brian Van Lau's relationship with his estranged father. Lau's father was absent during his childhood due to his incarceration. After his release, he rebuilt his life in Vietnam, remarried, and gradually disappeared from Lau's life. Nearly a decade later, Lau traveled to Vietnam following his father's sudden illness, and learned of his terminal cancer. During their final week together, they collaborated on a photographic project that documented his father's unsuccessful path toward recovery. After his father's passing, Lau returned to his hometown in Hawai'i seeking closure, uncovering hidden correspondence that revealed previously unknown parts of his father's life. Entrusted with dispersing his father's ashes across O'ahu, the artist began working with his grandparents to reconstruct this fragmented family history through photography.

   

A Riding Tide of Plastic in Art
ArtRage Gallery

Price: Free
ArtRage Gallery
505 Hawley Ave., Syracuse

Project Vortex is an international collective of artists, designers, and architects actively focusing on the global problem of plastic pollution through their art. Curated by founding member Aurora Robson, this exhibition features a selection of works by Project Vortex members who are sequestering post-industrial and post-consumer plastic into works of art.

The world produces an estimated 360 million metric tons of plastic waste annually. Only approximately 9% of plastics are actually recycled globally. Current research reveals that microplastics are present in the bodies of virtually all humans. Operating at the intersection of art and science, Project Vortex strives to inspire people to rethink and reinvent plastic debris through innovation, creative stewardship, and education. Dedicated to improving global understanding of the impacts of plastic consumption and pollution, Project Vortex works to restrict the flow of plastic debris into the oceans and subsequently into the bodies of humans and animals.

   

Undressed: The Nude in Dutch Art, circa 1550-1800
Syracuse University Art Museum

Syracuse University Art Museum, Shaffer Art Building
Syracuse University, Syracuse

This exhibition, encompassing 21 works in various media, surveys the portrayal of nudity and semi-nudity in a variety of subjects rendered by Dutch artists over several centuries. It will explore how the nude has been articulated, both artistically and contextually, to disrupt traditional ideas of nudity in art, which were primarily argued by Sir Kenneth Clark in The Nude: A Study in Ideal Form (1956).

In this influential text, Clark posited that the presence of the nude in art, existed above and beyond cultural circumstances, as a timeless, almost abstract ideal. He advanced a distinction between "naked" and "nude," with the latter explained as an idealization, or an evocation of timeless ideals. To the contrary, this exhibition presents nudity in art as a phenomenon that is time-bound and culturally determined.

   

Possible Worlds: 20 Years of the Wynn Newhouse Awards
Syracuse University Art Museum

Syracuse University Art Museum, Shaffer Art Building
Syracuse University, Syracuse

This landmark exhibition marks the 20th anniversary of the Wynn Newhouse Award, a pioneering initiative that has recognized and elevated artists of excellence who happen to live with disabilities. Established in 2006 by Wynn Newhouse, the award has championed bold, boundary-defying voices in contemporary art — highlighting practices that are as varied in form as they are unified in vision: a vision of art as a space where representation, identity, and access are not peripheral concerns, but central to the discourse.

At the heart of the exhibition is a curatorial inquiry: How do artists with disabilities navigate the art world, and the world at large, on their terms? And how does that navigation inform their work, influence its reception, and expand the field of cultural production? The goal is not to position disability as a central or singular theme, but to acknowledge it as one of many intersecting conditions that inform artistic practice. In doing so, this exhibition prompts us to reconsider who gets seen, whose experiences shape the canon, and how institutions can create more equitable conditions for artistic participation and recognition.

Exhibiting artists include Beverly Baker, Derrick Alexis Coard, Courttney Cooper, Joseph Grigley, Em Kettner, Reverend Joyce McDonald, William Scott, Kambel Smith, Katz Tepper, Melvin Way, and Peter Williams.

   

Alisha B Wormsley: The Temple of Our Survival
Urban Video Project

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

The Temple of Our Survival is new video work commissioned by Light Work for projection at UVP exploring what survival means and looks like through a series of interviews conducted by the artist with local care workers, land stewards, and cultural workers in her nomadic film set and project space.

Screening begins at dusk.

   

Eliot Lewis
The 443 Social Club

The 443 Social Club
443 Burnet Ave., Syracuse

A singer, songwriter, and multi-instrumentalist, Eliot Lewis has toured the world over as a member of the Daryl Hall & John Oates band, as well as a former member of The Average White Band. Eliot has also been the only musician to appear on every episode of Daryl Hall's popular "Live From Daryl's House" show, all while keeping his own solo career going at a seemingly impossible pace.

Tickets

   

Dover Quartet
Syracuse Friends of Chamber Music

Price: $30 regular, $25 seniors
Grant Middle School
2400 Grant Blvd., Syracuse

Schubert String Quartet no. 11, D. 353
Grazyna Bacewicz String Quartet no. 4
Mendelssohn String Quartet no. 6, op. 80

   

Kentucky
Syracuse University Drama Department
Michelle Chan, director

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

Hiro is a self-made woman making it in New York. But she is also single, almost 30 and estranged from her dysfunctional family who lives in Kentucky. When her little sister, a born-again Christian, decides to marry at 22, Hiro takes it upon herself to do whatever she can to stop the wedding and salvage any shred of hope she had about her sister's future. By Leah Nanako Winkler.

Tickets

   

Echoes before Dawn: A Workshop Reading

Price: $10, limited seating available
ArtRage Gallery
505 Hawley Ave., Syracuse

JFK and Jackie O, Alexander and Eliza, Liz and Dick... who doesn't love a good old fashion American love story?

Echoes Before Dawn, a new play by Josh Gadek, follows three couples across three pivotal moments in American history. In 1955 Chicago, an interracial pair risks everything by falling in love in Jim Crow America. In 1973 Hamptons, two young men navigate their sexuality in the aftermath of Stonewall, when homosexuality was still classified as a mental disorder. In 2001 New York City, an interfaith couple battles politics while their relationship is tested in the wake of the 9/11 attacks.

Each loving outside the lines drawn by society, each paying a price for it. The "land of the free" has never offered freedom to love equally. This play asks: who gets to love, and what do they risk for it?

This play contains strong language, mature themes, and references to violence and sexual content, and is recommended for mature audiences.

Tickets

   

Kentucky
Syracuse University Drama Department
Michelle Chan, director

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

Hiro is a self-made woman making it in New York. But she is also single, almost 30 and estranged from her dysfunctional family who lives in Kentucky. When her little sister, a born-again Christian, decides to marry at 22, Hiro takes it upon herself to do whatever she can to stop the wedding and salvage any shred of hope she had about her sister's future. By Leah Nanako Winkler.

Tickets

   

Sunday, May 3, 2026

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.

   

Feats of Clay
Everson Museum of Art

Everson Museum of Art
401 Harrison St., Syracuse

Central New York's Feats of Clay competition was established in 1987 to foster education in the ceramic arts for Syracuse-area high schools. Now in its 37th year, the event includes schools from as far away as the North Country and the Southern Tier and features a juried exhibition that recognizes students who demonstrate excellence in ceramic sculpting and vessel making.

On Friday, May 1, 2026, 500 students representing more than 25 schools will converge on the Everson Community Plaza to compete in a series of Olympic-style competitive events that involve (among other things) throwing blindfolded on the potter's wheel, stacking wheel-thrown cylinders, and building towering constructions out of clay coils.

   

Realities Within
Everson Museum of Art

Everson Museum of Art
401 Harrison St., Syracuse

Realities Within presents four enduring genres of artmaking to explore how artists shape, frame, and inhabit the world. Whether a landscape, cityscape, still life, or representation of the human body, these works show how each artist's reality is impacted by their lived experience. Separated by genre and installed "salon-style" — a term inspired by the 18th and 19th century Paris Salons, where paintings were hung from floor to ceiling, covering every inch of wall space — the dense arrangement invites close looking and visual comparison, encouraging viewers to find connections across time, style, and subject matter.

   

CNY Artist Initiative: Ann Clark: Interior Landscapes
Everson Museum of Art

Everson Museum of Art
401 Harrison St., Syracuse

Ann Clarke is a celebrated fiber artist originally from Rochester, NY. Clarke's newest series, Interior Landscapes, includes large-scale rugs installed on walls for museum visitors to contemplate. Dreamlike images of trees challenge us to consider the vulnerability of our wooded landscapes. Oversized, empty chairs remind us of the consequences of loss — of both people and the environment in which we make our homes.

   

A Long Look: Documentary Photography, 1888-2016
Everson Museum of Art

Everson Museum of Art
401 Harrison St., Syracuse

A Long Look: Documentary Photography, 1888-2016 traces more than a century of photographers turning their lenses toward the world as witnesses, advocates, and storytellers. From the late 19th century, when advances in camera technology first allowed photographers to record spontaneous moments, to the bold and colorful images of today, documentary photography has shaped how people see the world, both its past and its present.

Documentary photographers traditionally immerse themselves in their subjects. Bruce Davidson spent 10 days living in the mining communities of South Wales producing his Welsh Miners portfolio. Aaron Siskind's Harlem Document project plays out over nine years, showing the vibrant life of Black Americans in Harlem in the 1930s. Donna Ferrato has spent decades documenting survivors of domestic violence and advocating for their welfare. Documentary photographers reveal how sustained engagement with their subjects, over ten days or several decades, produces images that challenge stereotypes, humanize the unfamiliar, and deepen public understanding.

A Long Look invites viewers to consider the significance of documentary photography as a medium, asking how photographs shape collective memory and inspire social awareness. Documentary photographers must often navigate the tension between art and journalism, frequently occupying a grey area between the two.

   

Arcanite Pictures: Oracle in the Aperture
Light Work Gallery

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

Arcanite Pictures was started to highlight emerging artists, emphasizing the personal narrative angle and diaristic storytelling in photography. Through online features and group shows, a library of small personal projects began to build, and, excitingly, as more people were invited to share their work, a lineage and an echoing formed, discoveries were made, and the distance between people diminished as a web of connections was established. The pictures shared constituted a language, and a portal to the various practices now joined across different cities, subcultures, and decades-old archives. For Oracle in the Aperture, artists were selected to join with peers, personal influences, and emerging lens-based artists to amplify and enhance each other's stories, emphasizing interpersonal and private relationships and the talismanic ability of photography to illuminate familial and gestural scenes.

   

We're Just Here for the Bad Guys: Brian Van Lau
Light Work Gallery

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

We're Just Here for the Bad Guys chronicles Brian Van Lau's relationship with his estranged father. Lau's father was absent during his childhood due to his incarceration. After his release, he rebuilt his life in Vietnam, remarried, and gradually disappeared from Lau's life. Nearly a decade later, Lau traveled to Vietnam following his father's sudden illness, and learned of his terminal cancer. During their final week together, they collaborated on a photographic project that documented his father's unsuccessful path toward recovery. After his father's passing, Lau returned to his hometown in Hawai'i seeking closure, uncovering hidden correspondence that revealed previously unknown parts of his father's life. Entrusted with dispersing his father's ashes across O'ahu, the artist began working with his grandparents to reconstruct this fragmented family history through photography.

   

Possible Worlds: 20 Years of the Wynn Newhouse Awards
Syracuse University Art Museum

Syracuse University Art Museum, Shaffer Art Building
Syracuse University, Syracuse

This landmark exhibition marks the 20th anniversary of the Wynn Newhouse Award, a pioneering initiative that has recognized and elevated artists of excellence who happen to live with disabilities. Established in 2006 by Wynn Newhouse, the award has championed bold, boundary-defying voices in contemporary art — highlighting practices that are as varied in form as they are unified in vision: a vision of art as a space where representation, identity, and access are not peripheral concerns, but central to the discourse.

At the heart of the exhibition is a curatorial inquiry: How do artists with disabilities navigate the art world, and the world at large, on their terms? And how does that navigation inform their work, influence its reception, and expand the field of cultural production? The goal is not to position disability as a central or singular theme, but to acknowledge it as one of many intersecting conditions that inform artistic practice. In doing so, this exhibition prompts us to reconsider who gets seen, whose experiences shape the canon, and how institutions can create more equitable conditions for artistic participation and recognition.

Exhibiting artists include Beverly Baker, Derrick Alexis Coard, Courttney Cooper, Joseph Grigley, Em Kettner, Reverend Joyce McDonald, William Scott, Kambel Smith, Katz Tepper, Melvin Way, and Peter Williams.

   

Undressed: The Nude in Dutch Art, circa 1550-1800
Syracuse University Art Museum

Syracuse University Art Museum, Shaffer Art Building
Syracuse University, Syracuse

This exhibition, encompassing 21 works in various media, surveys the portrayal of nudity and semi-nudity in a variety of subjects rendered by Dutch artists over several centuries. It will explore how the nude has been articulated, both artistically and contextually, to disrupt traditional ideas of nudity in art, which were primarily argued by Sir Kenneth Clark in The Nude: A Study in Ideal Form (1956).

In this influential text, Clark posited that the presence of the nude in art, existed above and beyond cultural circumstances, as a timeless, almost abstract ideal. He advanced a distinction between "naked" and "nude," with the latter explained as an idealization, or an evocation of timeless ideals. To the contrary, this exhibition presents nudity in art as a phenomenon that is time-bound and culturally determined.

   

Finale Screening and 60th Anniversary Celebration
Syracuse Cinephile Society

Price: RSVP required
Palace Theater
2384 James St., Syracuse

See website for RSVP instructions

   

Kentucky
Syracuse University Drama Department
Michelle Chan, director

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

Hiro is a self-made woman making it in New York. But she is also single, almost 30 and estranged from her dysfunctional family who lives in Kentucky. When her little sister, a born-again Christian, decides to marry at 22, Hiro takes it upon herself to do whatever she can to stop the wedding and salvage any shred of hope she had about her sister's future. By Leah Nanako Winkler.

Tickets

   

Monday, May 4, 2026

We're Just Here for the Bad Guys: Brian Van Lau
Light Work Gallery

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

We're Just Here for the Bad Guys chronicles Brian Van Lau's relationship with his estranged father. Lau's father was absent during his childhood due to his incarceration. After his release, he rebuilt his life in Vietnam, remarried, and gradually disappeared from Lau's life. Nearly a decade later, Lau traveled to Vietnam following his father's sudden illness, and learned of his terminal cancer. During their final week together, they collaborated on a photographic project that documented his father's unsuccessful path toward recovery. After his father's passing, Lau returned to his hometown in Hawai'i seeking closure, uncovering hidden correspondence that revealed previously unknown parts of his father's life. Entrusted with dispersing his father's ashes across O'ahu, the artist began working with his grandparents to reconstruct this fragmented family history through photography.

   

Arcanite Pictures: Oracle in the Aperture
Light Work Gallery

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

Arcanite Pictures was started to highlight emerging artists, emphasizing the personal narrative angle and diaristic storytelling in photography. Through online features and group shows, a library of small personal projects began to build, and, excitingly, as more people were invited to share their work, a lineage and an echoing formed, discoveries were made, and the distance between people diminished as a web of connections was established. The pictures shared constituted a language, and a portal to the various practices now joined across different cities, subcultures, and decades-old archives. For Oracle in the Aperture, artists were selected to join with peers, personal influences, and emerging lens-based artists to amplify and enhance each other's stories, emphasizing interpersonal and private relationships and the talismanic ability of photography to illuminate familial and gestural scenes.

   

Tuesday, May 5, 2026

Arcanite Pictures: Oracle in the Aperture
Light Work Gallery

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

Arcanite Pictures was started to highlight emerging artists, emphasizing the personal narrative angle and diaristic storytelling in photography. Through online features and group shows, a library of small personal projects began to build, and, excitingly, as more people were invited to share their work, a lineage and an echoing formed, discoveries were made, and the distance between people diminished as a web of connections was established. The pictures shared constituted a language, and a portal to the various practices now joined across different cities, subcultures, and decades-old archives. For Oracle in the Aperture, artists were selected to join with peers, personal influences, and emerging lens-based artists to amplify and enhance each other's stories, emphasizing interpersonal and private relationships and the talismanic ability of photography to illuminate familial and gestural scenes.

   

We're Just Here for the Bad Guys: Brian Van Lau
Light Work Gallery

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

We're Just Here for the Bad Guys chronicles Brian Van Lau's relationship with his estranged father. Lau's father was absent during his childhood due to his incarceration. After his release, he rebuilt his life in Vietnam, remarried, and gradually disappeared from Lau's life. Nearly a decade later, Lau traveled to Vietnam following his father's sudden illness, and learned of his terminal cancer. During their final week together, they collaborated on a photographic project that documented his father's unsuccessful path toward recovery. After his father's passing, Lau returned to his hometown in Hawai'i seeking closure, uncovering hidden correspondence that revealed previously unknown parts of his father's life. Entrusted with dispersing his father's ashes across O'ahu, the artist began working with his grandparents to reconstruct this fragmented family history through photography.

   

Undressed: The Nude in Dutch Art, circa 1550-1800
Syracuse University Art Museum

Syracuse University Art Museum, Shaffer Art Building
Syracuse University, Syracuse

This exhibition, encompassing 21 works in various media, surveys the portrayal of nudity and semi-nudity in a variety of subjects rendered by Dutch artists over several centuries. It will explore how the nude has been articulated, both artistically and contextually, to disrupt traditional ideas of nudity in art, which were primarily argued by Sir Kenneth Clark in The Nude: A Study in Ideal Form (1956).

In this influential text, Clark posited that the presence of the nude in art, existed above and beyond cultural circumstances, as a timeless, almost abstract ideal. He advanced a distinction between "naked" and "nude," with the latter explained as an idealization, or an evocation of timeless ideals. To the contrary, this exhibition presents nudity in art as a phenomenon that is time-bound and culturally determined.

   

Possible Worlds: 20 Years of the Wynn Newhouse Awards
Syracuse University Art Museum

Syracuse University Art Museum, Shaffer Art Building
Syracuse University, Syracuse

This landmark exhibition marks the 20th anniversary of the Wynn Newhouse Award, a pioneering initiative that has recognized and elevated artists of excellence who happen to live with disabilities. Established in 2006 by Wynn Newhouse, the award has championed bold, boundary-defying voices in contemporary art — highlighting practices that are as varied in form as they are unified in vision: a vision of art as a space where representation, identity, and access are not peripheral concerns, but central to the discourse.

At the heart of the exhibition is a curatorial inquiry: How do artists with disabilities navigate the art world, and the world at large, on their terms? And how does that navigation inform their work, influence its reception, and expand the field of cultural production? The goal is not to position disability as a central or singular theme, but to acknowledge it as one of many intersecting conditions that inform artistic practice. In doing so, this exhibition prompts us to reconsider who gets seen, whose experiences shape the canon, and how institutions can create more equitable conditions for artistic participation and recognition.

Exhibiting artists include Beverly Baker, Derrick Alexis Coard, Courttney Cooper, Joseph Grigley, Em Kettner, Reverend Joyce McDonald, William Scott, Kambel Smith, Katz Tepper, Melvin Way, and Peter Williams.

   

Spring Concert
Central New York Flute Choir

Jamesville Community Church
6300 East Seneca Tpke (Route 173), Jamesville

   

Wednesday, May 6, 2026

Arcanite Pictures: Oracle in the Aperture
Light Work Gallery

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

Arcanite Pictures was started to highlight emerging artists, emphasizing the personal narrative angle and diaristic storytelling in photography. Through online features and group shows, a library of small personal projects began to build, and, excitingly, as more people were invited to share their work, a lineage and an echoing formed, discoveries were made, and the distance between people diminished as a web of connections was established. The pictures shared constituted a language, and a portal to the various practices now joined across different cities, subcultures, and decades-old archives. For Oracle in the Aperture, artists were selected to join with peers, personal influences, and emerging lens-based artists to amplify and enhance each other's stories, emphasizing interpersonal and private relationships and the talismanic ability of photography to illuminate familial and gestural scenes.

   

We're Just Here for the Bad Guys: Brian Van Lau
Light Work Gallery

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

We're Just Here for the Bad Guys chronicles Brian Van Lau's relationship with his estranged father. Lau's father was absent during his childhood due to his incarceration. After his release, he rebuilt his life in Vietnam, remarried, and gradually disappeared from Lau's life. Nearly a decade later, Lau traveled to Vietnam following his father's sudden illness, and learned of his terminal cancer. During their final week together, they collaborated on a photographic project that documented his father's unsuccessful path toward recovery. After his father's passing, Lau returned to his hometown in Hawai'i seeking closure, uncovering hidden correspondence that revealed previously unknown parts of his father's life. Entrusted with dispersing his father's ashes across O'ahu, the artist began working with his grandparents to reconstruct this fragmented family history through photography.

   

Possible Worlds: 20 Years of the Wynn Newhouse Awards
Syracuse University Art Museum

Syracuse University Art Museum, Shaffer Art Building
Syracuse University, Syracuse

This landmark exhibition marks the 20th anniversary of the Wynn Newhouse Award, a pioneering initiative that has recognized and elevated artists of excellence who happen to live with disabilities. Established in 2006 by Wynn Newhouse, the award has championed bold, boundary-defying voices in contemporary art — highlighting practices that are as varied in form as they are unified in vision: a vision of art as a space where representation, identity, and access are not peripheral concerns, but central to the discourse.

At the heart of the exhibition is a curatorial inquiry: How do artists with disabilities navigate the art world, and the world at large, on their terms? And how does that navigation inform their work, influence its reception, and expand the field of cultural production? The goal is not to position disability as a central or singular theme, but to acknowledge it as one of many intersecting conditions that inform artistic practice. In doing so, this exhibition prompts us to reconsider who gets seen, whose experiences shape the canon, and how institutions can create more equitable conditions for artistic participation and recognition.

Exhibiting artists include Beverly Baker, Derrick Alexis Coard, Courttney Cooper, Joseph Grigley, Em Kettner, Reverend Joyce McDonald, William Scott, Kambel Smith, Katz Tepper, Melvin Way, and Peter Williams.

   

Undressed: The Nude in Dutch Art, circa 1550-1800
Syracuse University Art Museum

Syracuse University Art Museum, Shaffer Art Building
Syracuse University, Syracuse

This exhibition, encompassing 21 works in various media, surveys the portrayal of nudity and semi-nudity in a variety of subjects rendered by Dutch artists over several centuries. It will explore how the nude has been articulated, both artistically and contextually, to disrupt traditional ideas of nudity in art, which were primarily argued by Sir Kenneth Clark in The Nude: A Study in Ideal Form (1956).

In this influential text, Clark posited that the presence of the nude in art, existed above and beyond cultural circumstances, as a timeless, almost abstract ideal. He advanced a distinction between "naked" and "nude," with the latter explained as an idealization, or an evocation of timeless ideals. To the contrary, this exhibition presents nudity in art as a phenomenon that is time-bound and culturally determined.

   

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.

   

CNY Artist Initiative: Ann Clark: Interior Landscapes
Everson Museum of Art

Everson Museum of Art
401 Harrison St., Syracuse

Ann Clarke is a celebrated fiber artist originally from Rochester, NY. Clarke's newest series, Interior Landscapes, includes large-scale rugs installed on walls for museum visitors to contemplate. Dreamlike images of trees challenge us to consider the vulnerability of our wooded landscapes. Oversized, empty chairs remind us of the consequences of loss — of both people and the environment in which we make our homes.

   

Realities Within
Everson Museum of Art

Everson Museum of Art
401 Harrison St., Syracuse

Realities Within presents four enduring genres of artmaking to explore how artists shape, frame, and inhabit the world. Whether a landscape, cityscape, still life, or representation of the human body, these works show how each artist's reality is impacted by their lived experience. Separated by genre and installed "salon-style" — a term inspired by the 18th and 19th century Paris Salons, where paintings were hung from floor to ceiling, covering every inch of wall space — the dense arrangement invites close looking and visual comparison, encouraging viewers to find connections across time, style, and subject matter.

   

Feats of Clay
Everson Museum of Art

Everson Museum of Art
401 Harrison St., Syracuse

Central New York's Feats of Clay competition was established in 1987 to foster education in the ceramic arts for Syracuse-area high schools. Now in its 37th year, the event includes schools from as far away as the North Country and the Southern Tier and features a juried exhibition that recognizes students who demonstrate excellence in ceramic sculpting and vessel making.

On Friday, May 1, 2026, 500 students representing more than 25 schools will converge on the Everson Community Plaza to compete in a series of Olympic-style competitive events that involve (among other things) throwing blindfolded on the potter's wheel, stacking wheel-thrown cylinders, and building towering constructions out of clay coils.

   

A Long Look: Documentary Photography, 1888-2016
Everson Museum of Art

Everson Museum of Art
401 Harrison St., Syracuse

A Long Look: Documentary Photography, 1888-2016 traces more than a century of photographers turning their lenses toward the world as witnesses, advocates, and storytellers. From the late 19th century, when advances in camera technology first allowed photographers to record spontaneous moments, to the bold and colorful images of today, documentary photography has shaped how people see the world, both its past and its present.

Documentary photographers traditionally immerse themselves in their subjects. Bruce Davidson spent 10 days living in the mining communities of South Wales producing his Welsh Miners portfolio. Aaron Siskind's Harlem Document project plays out over nine years, showing the vibrant life of Black Americans in Harlem in the 1930s. Donna Ferrato has spent decades documenting survivors of domestic violence and advocating for their welfare. Documentary photographers reveal how sustained engagement with their subjects, over ten days or several decades, produces images that challenge stereotypes, humanize the unfamiliar, and deepen public understanding.

A Long Look invites viewers to consider the significance of documentary photography as a medium, asking how photographs shape collective memory and inspire social awareness. Documentary photographers must often navigate the tension between art and journalism, frequently occupying a grey area between the two.

   

A Riding Tide of Plastic in Art
ArtRage Gallery

Price: Free
ArtRage Gallery
505 Hawley Ave., Syracuse

Project Vortex is an international collective of artists, designers, and architects actively focusing on the global problem of plastic pollution through their art. Curated by founding member Aurora Robson, this exhibition features a selection of works by Project Vortex members who are sequestering post-industrial and post-consumer plastic into works of art.

The world produces an estimated 360 million metric tons of plastic waste annually. Only approximately 9% of plastics are actually recycled globally. Current research reveals that microplastics are present in the bodies of virtually all humans. Operating at the intersection of art and science, Project Vortex strives to inspire people to rethink and reinvent plastic debris through innovation, creative stewardship, and education. Dedicated to improving global understanding of the impacts of plastic consumption and pollution, Project Vortex works to restrict the flow of plastic debris into the oceans and subsequently into the bodies of humans and animals.

   

World Ballet Company: Cinderella
The Oncenter

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

The beloved fairy tale comes to life in a spectacular Broadway-style production that delights all ages, blending humor, romance, and the timeless majesty of classical ballet.

World Ballet Company's Cinderella features a dazzling cast of 40 international dancers, over 150 radiant hand-sewn costumes, exquisite hand-crafted sets, and enchanting choreography by Marina Kesler. From the mischievous evil stepsisters to the breathtaking ballroom scenes, every moment is filled with charm, wonder, and everything you've loved about this story for years.

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