Unearthing: Searching Through Strata

May 24, 2025 - March 1, 2026

Opening May 24, 2025, the Springfield Museum of Art presents Unearthing: Searching through Strata, a survey of work by artist Anita Cooke. This exhibition traces a 20-year creative journey beginning when Hurricane Katrina buried her clay studio in the Louisiana mud.

Before the storm, Cooke was a ceramic sculptor and functional potter. In the wreckage of Katrina, she unearthed her Aunt Genie’s 1950s Singer Featherweight sewing machine. This discovery sparked a profound shift in her artistic medium and method. Using the sewing machine, Cooke began stitching together intricate textile constructions, embedded with evidence of her time and labor.

Cooke is a process artist. Her primary goal is in the making, and the effort of her work is visible. She paints canvases, tears them apart, pins, organizes, gathers, layers, stitches, and compresses. Cooke’s complex work evokes loss and finding, chaos and order, and searching for meaning in what remains.

Anita Cooke is a visual artist living and making work in New Orleans. Formerly from Springfield, Ohio, Cooke took her first pottery class at the Springfield Art Center (now the Springfield Museum of Art) while in high school. Cooke continued in ceramics, earning a BFA in Ceramics from Kent State University. She received an MFA in Ceramics and Sculpture from Newcomb College at Tulane University in New Orleans, Louisiana.

Aminah Robinson:  Journeys Home, A Visual Memoir

February 1, 2025-July 13, 2025

Aminah Brenda Lynn Robinson (1940–2015) was an exceptionally prolific artist who used traditional and unconventional, non-traditional materials to create a staggering body of work. Her drawings, paintings, sculptures, and mixed media textiles chronicle her family’s African ancestry, her travels worldwide, and her witness to African American life.

The MacArthur Award recipient was also a researcher, historian, poet, author, illustrator, composer, and teacher who used her vast talents to draw harmony into a discordant world. When Robinson passed away, she entrusted her art, writing, personal belongings, and home studio to the Columbus Museum of Art in Ohio, her hometown museum.

Aminah Robinson: Journeys Home, a Visual Memoir brings together some of the artist’s most profound works and words, produced over seven decades from 1948 to 2012. Drawing upon Robinson’s historical research, folklore, and personal narrative, the exhibition presents a visual memoir of the artist’s life and a compelling tableau of the African American experience.

Line | Drawing Meaning from the Mark

July 20, 2024 - Ongoing

Curated from the museum’s permanent collection, this is the first of a new series of exhibitions exploring the big ideas of visual art.

Line is language. Line is expressive. It can whisper, shout, proclaim.
Line can be bold, certain, searching, delicate.
Line can be quick, clipped, staccato.
Line can be sinuous, curving, undulating.

Line can build stability through structure and scaffolding.
Line can convey movement and energy by changing direction.
Line can be an edge, a contour, a border.
Line can mark a boundary between what is and what isn’t.

Line can be an index of where the artist’s mind–or the artist–has traveled, a record of moving, searching, observing, measuring.
Line is a point traveling through space.
Line is a path.

ZZ (detail image), Jack Moulthrop, ceramic, 2009

Celebrating Women: Female Artists from the Permanent Collection

Jul 15, 2020 – Current

Historically, female artists have been underrepresented in museum collections and are shown at significantly lower rates than their male counterparts. During the 100th anniversary of women’s suffrage, the Museum is highlighting female artists whose works are in the permanent collection. These works of art showcase the wide range of media, subject, and technique with which female artists have traditionally worked and demonstrate how women continue to conceptually advance the art world today. Featuring work by well-known and lesser known artists alike, this show explores artistic contributions of female artists, not only regionally, but nationally and internationally as well. Artists in the show include Davira Fisher, Frances Hynes, Helen Bosart Morgan, Aminah Robinson, Alice Schille, Kara Walker, and Stella Waitzkin, to name a few.

In addition to new art on display, the Museum has been awarded a grant from Smithsonian Affiliations. Funding for this project allows us to host a Smithsonian speaker in support of their American Women’s History Initiative taking place this year.

Girl with Cigarette (The Model’s Break) (detail), n.d., Harriet Woodfin Titlow, Oil on canvas, Gift of Mrs. John Westcott