McDonough Museum to open 2025 season with “Spring Exhibitions”

The McDonough Museum will open its 2025 season with five dynamic exhibits featuring guest artists Julia Betts, Anna Chapman, Abby Cipar, Will Hutnick, and Sidney Mullis in a grand presentation named the “Spring Exhibitions.”

The exhibits will be on display beginning Tuesday, January 21, through Friday, February 28.

Betts’ “The Dams are Broken” explores the human body as a fragile vessel yearning to break through boundaries and let its identity come forward.

“‘The Dams are Broken’ oscillates between containment and release, shifting fluidly between abstract and recognizable forms,” Betts said.

Betts is currently an adjunct professor at Carnegie Mellon University. She has been the recipient of numerous residencies, and her work has been exhibited nationally and has appeared in several publications. Betts will give a lecture as part of the Department of Art Lecture Series Wednesday, February 5, at 5:30 PM in the McDonough Auditorium.

Chapman’s exhibit, “Underworld/Otherworld,” focuses on death and grieving.

“Death is an undeniable aspect of all our lives. Yet there is little space carved out in culture to process personal, collective, and environmental loss. To grieve is to love. Grief has the power to rearrange us; to ground us and to give us wisdom. Preparing us with integrity for what comes next. How do we move through the underworld to meet the ‘Otherworld’?” Chapman said.

An artist and educator, Chapman investigates transformative approaches to art-making, community practice, and the connection to land in light of destabilized socio-ecological contexts. She will give an artist lecture Wednesday, January 22, at 5:30 PM in the McDonough Auditorium.

Abby Cipar, the 2025 McDonough Emerging Artist, states that their artwork presented in “Sometime, Somehow, For You” is “performing as stand-ins for my own, trans-nonbinary body. [My] work is that of an assembling. I am thinking about the simultaneous strangeness and beauty of my body as it exists in a pre-medical, not-quite-there-but-getting-there state of transition and affirmation.”

A multidisciplinary artist, advocate, curator, and wage laborer, Cipar’s work has been exhibited nationally and can be found in several private collections. They will give an artist lecture Wednesday, February 12, at 5:30 PM in the McDonough Auditorium.

Hutnick’s exhibit, “QUEER HORIZONS,” is focused on the intersection of the natural environment, digital spaces, and queerness.

“The disruption of a heteronormative sense of time—and by extension, sense of place—is inherently queer, oscillating in a present tense that is not fixed. We’re moving at a pace that is becoming ridiculously challenging to keep up with, which, it seems, has little hope of slowing down anytime soon. The present is right now and just out of reach,” Hutnick said.

Currently the director of artistic programming at the Wassaic Project in New York, Hutnick has had numerous solo national exhibitions and has received grant residencies as both an artist and curator. He will lecture as part of the Department of Art Lecture Series Thursday, February 27, at 5:30 PM in the McDonough Auditorium.

Mullis’ installation, “Caught Skies and Pillowed Pines,” “is a make-believe forest. It is an invented landscape to think about childhood selves and to find where they retreat to in adulthood. The forest—often considered a transformational space in children’s stories—is built of many parts that come together as sculptural installations,” Mullis said.

Based in Pittsburgh, Mullis is a sculptor whose work has been exhibited both nationally and internationally and has been featured in several art periodicals. She will give a lecture as part of the Department of Art Lecture Series Thursday, February 20, at 5:30 PM in the McDonough Auditorium.

A closing reception for all five exhibits will be held Friday, February 28, from 5:00 – 7:00 PM at the McDonough Museum.

Entry to the exhibits and reception is free and open to the public. Parking is available in the Wick Avenue Deck (M30) for a $5 fee payable in cash only. The McDonough Museum is open Tuesday through Saturday from 11:00 AM – 4:00 PM.