More Clay-The Power of Repetition presents nine artists who build powerful ceramic sculpture through accumulation, repetition, and innovative feats of construction to magnify and multiply their messages in clay. Included are rising star Kahlil Robert Irving and well-known American sculptor, Walter McConnell, whose previous solo exhibit at AU Museum was in 2015.

Through mixed media paintings and sculptures, Make Believe explores the creation of alternative realities. Artists Georgia Saxelby and Devan Shimoyama have come together to show the importance of imagination and fantasy as we emerge in a post-pandemic world. Not only will this exhibit look to the future, but it draws inspiration from the history of fashion, drag, cinema, animation, furniture, costume jewelry and interior design. This body of work gave both artists an opportunity to better understand the artistic contributions of marginalized communities in America.

Haunted Koreas, an exhibit by Mina Cheon and her North Korean alter-ego, Kim II Soon, is a striking commentary on the communication and blurred boundaries between North and South Korea. While political, this exhibit is also deeply personal, as Cheon is originally from South Korea and was the first artist to send video art into North Korea. She herself has blurred the boundary line between these two countries and used her own art as a way of connecting.

Singularities & Infinities juxtaposes art and science, by featuring the art of Shanthi Chandrasekar, a multimedia, multidisciplinary artist with an academic background in physics and psychology, and the words of Dr. Michael Albrow, Scientist Emeritus at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, or FermiLab, and former professor at Stockholm University. Chandrasekar is an award-winning artist who has exhibited and presented her work in various galleries and institutions in the United States and in India. A show of Chandrasekar’s art at FermiLab, the national laboratory for particle physics research, and a colloquium she gave there, inspired Albrow to suggest a collaboration, resulting in the current exhibition at AU Museum. There is beauty in science, very obvious in the universe of stars and galaxies, but also in the ideas of how space and time originated in the Big Bang and collapse in black holes, and in the pattern of the most elementary particles known today. That beauty inspires and underlies Chandrasekar’s art, while Albrow’s writing is an attempt to explain the science as simply as possible through prose and poetry.

Nan Montgomery: Counterpoint is the first major retrospective showcasing the artist’s 50+ year career. Montgomery’s signature geometric abstract style uses color and surface to communicate invisible truths in large scale paintings. Curated by Virginia Mecklenburg, the show will be supplemented with a full color catalog and a video interview.

International artist Maria Karametou presents Kallos, a mixed media display that incorporates both two- and three-dimensional pieces. Kallos, Greek for “beauty,” explores the meaning of identity and Karametou's personal journey. Karametou shares that her art identifies “the relationship between gender and identity, beauty, time, and family history,” all of which have affected her self-discovery.

Sitting Pretty: Two Hundred Years of American Portrait Painting from the Collection of the Corcoran Gallery of Art features selected portraits by multiple American artists, drawn from the museum’s Corcoran Legacy Collection and ranging in date from the early 18^th-century to 1970. Major artists whose work is on display include 18^th-century artists John Wollaston, John Hesselius, Edward Savage and Edward Malbone. From the 19^th century, works by Rembrandt Peale, Henry Inman, Thomas Sully and George Peter Alexander Healy, are on display. Works on view by artists who made their reputation in the last quarter of the century include William Morris Hunt, Frank Duveneck, and Theodore Robinson; Julian Alden Weir, Philip Leslie Hale, Eugene Speicher are among the important early 20^th-century artists on view, as well as 20^th-century artists who were affiliated with the Corcoran School of Art either as faculty or students: Edmund Tarbell, Edgar Nye, Richard Meryman, Richard Lahey and Charles Dunn, Frances Eanes, and Alice Acheson.

Special Event:

Art All Night at American University’s Katzen Arts Center, 7-10 p.m., Sept. 24As part of Tenleytown Main Street’s Art All Night, visit the AU Museum after dark to explore its six exhibitions on view for the fall. Meet artists who are enrolled and pursuing Master of Fine Arts degrees in AU’s studio art program, peruse their open studios and see their work, and hear live music from student performers from AU’s music program.