ÁñÁ«ÊÓÆµ

Irreplaceable You: Personhood and Dignity in Art, 1980s to Now

Museum of Art Museum of Art

Exhibition: Irreplaceable You: Personhood and Dignity in Art, 1980s to Now

Seated figure with a lattice structure perched on top of head

Dates:

January 16, 2025 - June 01, 2025

Location:

Media Gallery, Rotunda, Focus Gallery, Center Gallery

Irreplaceable You features works of art that resist the rendering of human lives into objects of consumption, data sets, and/or algorithms. The exhibition touches on subjects from the recent and not-so-recent past, looking at how art helps build our capacity for empathy when our worldviews are often shaped by the twenty-four-hour news cycle and the Internet. Employing strategies like portraiture, storytelling, naming, and sometimes even traces of their own bodies, artists featured in Irreplaceable You work with diverse media and engage with social and political issues in numerous contexts. Several are also educators and activists. They ask us to consider: How do we navigate the tensions and ambiguities between things like empathy and dehumanization, visibility and spectacle, safety and precarity? How do we—as individuals and as a society—recognize the personhood and dignity of those we don’t know and perhaps even those we do?

This exhibition is curated by Sean J. Kramer, Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Curatorial Fellow at the ÁñÁ«ÊÓÆµ Museum of Art. Support for this exhibition provided by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Endowment Fund.