Saturday, December 27, 2025

Patterns of Resistance
Everson Museum of Art

Everson Museum of Art
401 Harrison St., Syracuse

In the early 1970s, the Pattern & Decoration Movement emerged as an antidote to the vice grip in which abstraction had held American art since the 1950s. Artists like Valerie Jaudon, Joyce Kozloff, and Miriam Shapiro began juxtaposing colors and patterns that critics and artists alike had previously dismissed as feminine to powerful effect. Simultaneously, other feminist artists like Lynda Benglis were consciously subverting clay's associations as a masculine and/or craft medium.

As the '70s played out, a generation of artists like Andrea Gill, Nancy Selvin, and Betty Woodman did not just embrace the decorative strategies of the Pattern & Decoration Movement, they also sought to place a feminist spin on their work. As ceramics become more common in a fine art context, hierarchies surrounding different materials faded, giving artists the ability to experiment and construct narrative and meaning through pattern. Long denigrated as "decorative" and closely associated with domesticity, patterns are now an integral part of the language of contemporary art.

   

Lessons in Geometry
Everson Museum of Art

Everson Museum of Art
401 Harrison St., Syracuse

Artists have obsessed over the relationship between mathematics and art for millennia. As artists turned toward abstraction in the early 20th century, Europeans like Piet Mondrian used geometry to create a set of rules and parameters that guided their creative process. Meanwhile, American artists began developing their own styles and movements—particularly Abstract Expressionism, which was typified by bold, quickly executed brushwork, drips, and splashes. In the mid-20th century in the United States, artists laid the groundwork for Geometric Abstraction as a more cerebral alternative to the often macho flamboyance of Abstract Expressionism. Over the ensuing decades, artists used geometry to produce abstract works that ranged from the dazzling Op Art of Victor Vasarely to the restrained Minimalism of Sol LeWitt.

"Lessons in Geometry" traces the evolution of hard-edged abstraction in the United States as artists sought to use pure geometric forms to create works with balance, harmony, and order. For these artists, shape, line, and color took precedence over representational compositions. The Everson's collection reflects the wildly varied ways that artists have used geometry to serve their personal expression, from the analytical formulations of Robert Swain to the shaped canvases of Harmony Hammond and the spatial illusions of Tony King.

   

Jake Troyli: Open Season
Everson Museum of Art

Everson Museum of Art
401 Harrison St., Syracuse

Jake Troyli's works address the commodification of Black and Brown bodies, confronting and exploring labor capitalism and sweat equity as a demonstration of value. Troyli also injects his paintings with a sense of humor and absurdity through the inclusion of his own self-portrait. His avatar populates the works in "Open Season," where Troyli is both the hunter and the hunted as he participates in a variety of physical activities. As a former Division I basketball player, Troyli has a potent understanding of how athletes in America, particularly athletes of color, are simultaneously celebrated and criticized.

   

Joyce Kozloff: Contested Territories, 1983-2023
Everson Museum of Art

Everson Museum of Art
401 Harrison St., Syracuse

For more than four decades, Joyce Kozloff has explored how the entanglements of geography, history, and power influence the visual language of maps. "Contested Territories" presents a selection of Kozloff's works that uncover how maps shape our understanding of the world—not as neutral tools, but as instruments of influence, ideology, and control.

Kozloff's wide range of sources include historical maps, classroom wall maps, atlases, globes, and even satellite imagery from Google Maps. Her dense and colorful works often layer these materials with hand-painted details, collage, and intricate ornamentation. By combining sources that span centuries—from Renaissance celestial charts to contemporary digital mapping—she exposes how maps carry the legacies of empire, conflict, and shifting territorial claims.

A founding figure in the Pattern and Decoration movement, Kozloff combines meticulous craftsmanship with political critique. Her works are labor-intensive, involving the detailed process of painting, drawing, and collaging over cartographic surfaces. The resulting richly textured visual field invites viewers to look closely—and to question the conquest, division, and erasure found beneath the official surface narrative.

Whether reimagining educational globes or deconstructing colonial-era charts, Kozloff transforms maps from static documents into contested, dynamic spaces. Her work encourages viewers to reconsider how borders are drawn as well as how art can reclaim such boundaries as sites of resistance, memory, and possibility.

   

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.

   

A Christmas Story
Syracuse Stage
Robert Hupp, director

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

The beloved holiday film, live onstage!

9-year-old Ralphie Parker has his sights set on a coveted Christmas gift, but he'll have to play his cards right if he's going to convince the "Old Man" to leave it under the tree. Meanwhile, he'll have to deal with the neighborhood bully, an annoying kid brother, nagging teachers, and the constant cold of a frigid Indiana winter. Filled with the most memorable moments from the beloved 1983 film — a glorious leg lamp, grandma's bunny pajamas, Orphan Annie's decoder ring, and one serious triple-dog-dare — this nostalgic adaptation faithfully captures author Jean Shepherd's small-town wit while inviting new audiences to discover this timeless family comedy for the first time.

   

A Christmas Story
Syracuse Stage
Robert Hupp, director

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

The beloved holiday film, live onstage!

9-year-old Ralphie Parker has his sights set on a coveted Christmas gift, but he'll have to play his cards right if he's going to convince the "Old Man" to leave it under the tree. Meanwhile, he'll have to deal with the neighborhood bully, an annoying kid brother, nagging teachers, and the constant cold of a frigid Indiana winter. Filled with the most memorable moments from the beloved 1983 film — a glorious leg lamp, grandma's bunny pajamas, Orphan Annie's decoder ring, and one serious triple-dog-dare — this nostalgic adaptation faithfully captures author Jean Shepherd's small-town wit while inviting new audiences to discover this timeless family comedy for the first time.

   

Sunday, December 28, 2025

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.

   

Joyce Kozloff: Contested Territories, 1983-2023
Everson Museum of Art

Everson Museum of Art
401 Harrison St., Syracuse

For more than four decades, Joyce Kozloff has explored how the entanglements of geography, history, and power influence the visual language of maps. "Contested Territories" presents a selection of Kozloff's works that uncover how maps shape our understanding of the world—not as neutral tools, but as instruments of influence, ideology, and control.

Kozloff's wide range of sources include historical maps, classroom wall maps, atlases, globes, and even satellite imagery from Google Maps. Her dense and colorful works often layer these materials with hand-painted details, collage, and intricate ornamentation. By combining sources that span centuries—from Renaissance celestial charts to contemporary digital mapping—she exposes how maps carry the legacies of empire, conflict, and shifting territorial claims.

A founding figure in the Pattern and Decoration movement, Kozloff combines meticulous craftsmanship with political critique. Her works are labor-intensive, involving the detailed process of painting, drawing, and collaging over cartographic surfaces. The resulting richly textured visual field invites viewers to look closely—and to question the conquest, division, and erasure found beneath the official surface narrative.

Whether reimagining educational globes or deconstructing colonial-era charts, Kozloff transforms maps from static documents into contested, dynamic spaces. Her work encourages viewers to reconsider how borders are drawn as well as how art can reclaim such boundaries as sites of resistance, memory, and possibility.

   

Jake Troyli: Open Season
Everson Museum of Art

Everson Museum of Art
401 Harrison St., Syracuse

Jake Troyli's works address the commodification of Black and Brown bodies, confronting and exploring labor capitalism and sweat equity as a demonstration of value. Troyli also injects his paintings with a sense of humor and absurdity through the inclusion of his own self-portrait. His avatar populates the works in "Open Season," where Troyli is both the hunter and the hunted as he participates in a variety of physical activities. As a former Division I basketball player, Troyli has a potent understanding of how athletes in America, particularly athletes of color, are simultaneously celebrated and criticized.

   

Lessons in Geometry
Everson Museum of Art

Everson Museum of Art
401 Harrison St., Syracuse

Artists have obsessed over the relationship between mathematics and art for millennia. As artists turned toward abstraction in the early 20th century, Europeans like Piet Mondrian used geometry to create a set of rules and parameters that guided their creative process. Meanwhile, American artists began developing their own styles and movements—particularly Abstract Expressionism, which was typified by bold, quickly executed brushwork, drips, and splashes. In the mid-20th century in the United States, artists laid the groundwork for Geometric Abstraction as a more cerebral alternative to the often macho flamboyance of Abstract Expressionism. Over the ensuing decades, artists used geometry to produce abstract works that ranged from the dazzling Op Art of Victor Vasarely to the restrained Minimalism of Sol LeWitt.

"Lessons in Geometry" traces the evolution of hard-edged abstraction in the United States as artists sought to use pure geometric forms to create works with balance, harmony, and order. For these artists, shape, line, and color took precedence over representational compositions. The Everson's collection reflects the wildly varied ways that artists have used geometry to serve their personal expression, from the analytical formulations of Robert Swain to the shaped canvases of Harmony Hammond and the spatial illusions of Tony King.

   

Patterns of Resistance
Everson Museum of Art

Everson Museum of Art
401 Harrison St., Syracuse

In the early 1970s, the Pattern & Decoration Movement emerged as an antidote to the vice grip in which abstraction had held American art since the 1950s. Artists like Valerie Jaudon, Joyce Kozloff, and Miriam Shapiro began juxtaposing colors and patterns that critics and artists alike had previously dismissed as feminine to powerful effect. Simultaneously, other feminist artists like Lynda Benglis were consciously subverting clay's associations as a masculine and/or craft medium.

As the '70s played out, a generation of artists like Andrea Gill, Nancy Selvin, and Betty Woodman did not just embrace the decorative strategies of the Pattern & Decoration Movement, they also sought to place a feminist spin on their work. As ceramics become more common in a fine art context, hierarchies surrounding different materials faded, giving artists the ability to experiment and construct narrative and meaning through pattern. Long denigrated as "decorative" and closely associated with domesticity, patterns are now an integral part of the language of contemporary art.

   

A Christmas Story
Syracuse Stage
Robert Hupp, director

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

The beloved holiday film, live onstage!

9-year-old Ralphie Parker has his sights set on a coveted Christmas gift, but he'll have to play his cards right if he's going to convince the "Old Man" to leave it under the tree. Meanwhile, he'll have to deal with the neighborhood bully, an annoying kid brother, nagging teachers, and the constant cold of a frigid Indiana winter. Filled with the most memorable moments from the beloved 1983 film — a glorious leg lamp, grandma's bunny pajamas, Orphan Annie's decoder ring, and one serious triple-dog-dare — this nostalgic adaptation faithfully captures author Jean Shepherd's small-town wit while inviting new audiences to discover this timeless family comedy for the first time.

   

Wednesday, December 31, 2025

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.

   

Patterns of Resistance
Everson Museum of Art

Everson Museum of Art
401 Harrison St., Syracuse

In the early 1970s, the Pattern & Decoration Movement emerged as an antidote to the vice grip in which abstraction had held American art since the 1950s. Artists like Valerie Jaudon, Joyce Kozloff, and Miriam Shapiro began juxtaposing colors and patterns that critics and artists alike had previously dismissed as feminine to powerful effect. Simultaneously, other feminist artists like Lynda Benglis were consciously subverting clay's associations as a masculine and/or craft medium.

As the '70s played out, a generation of artists like Andrea Gill, Nancy Selvin, and Betty Woodman did not just embrace the decorative strategies of the Pattern & Decoration Movement, they also sought to place a feminist spin on their work. As ceramics become more common in a fine art context, hierarchies surrounding different materials faded, giving artists the ability to experiment and construct narrative and meaning through pattern. Long denigrated as "decorative" and closely associated with domesticity, patterns are now an integral part of the language of contemporary art.

   

Lessons in Geometry
Everson Museum of Art

Everson Museum of Art
401 Harrison St., Syracuse

Artists have obsessed over the relationship between mathematics and art for millennia. As artists turned toward abstraction in the early 20th century, Europeans like Piet Mondrian used geometry to create a set of rules and parameters that guided their creative process. Meanwhile, American artists began developing their own styles and movements—particularly Abstract Expressionism, which was typified by bold, quickly executed brushwork, drips, and splashes. In the mid-20th century in the United States, artists laid the groundwork for Geometric Abstraction as a more cerebral alternative to the often macho flamboyance of Abstract Expressionism. Over the ensuing decades, artists used geometry to produce abstract works that ranged from the dazzling Op Art of Victor Vasarely to the restrained Minimalism of Sol LeWitt.

"Lessons in Geometry" traces the evolution of hard-edged abstraction in the United States as artists sought to use pure geometric forms to create works with balance, harmony, and order. For these artists, shape, line, and color took precedence over representational compositions. The Everson's collection reflects the wildly varied ways that artists have used geometry to serve their personal expression, from the analytical formulations of Robert Swain to the shaped canvases of Harmony Hammond and the spatial illusions of Tony King.

   

Jake Troyli: Open Season
Everson Museum of Art

Everson Museum of Art
401 Harrison St., Syracuse

Jake Troyli's works address the commodification of Black and Brown bodies, confronting and exploring labor capitalism and sweat equity as a demonstration of value. Troyli also injects his paintings with a sense of humor and absurdity through the inclusion of his own self-portrait. His avatar populates the works in "Open Season," where Troyli is both the hunter and the hunted as he participates in a variety of physical activities. As a former Division I basketball player, Troyli has a potent understanding of how athletes in America, particularly athletes of color, are simultaneously celebrated and criticized.

   

Joyce Kozloff: Contested Territories, 1983-2023
Everson Museum of Art

Everson Museum of Art
401 Harrison St., Syracuse

For more than four decades, Joyce Kozloff has explored how the entanglements of geography, history, and power influence the visual language of maps. "Contested Territories" presents a selection of Kozloff's works that uncover how maps shape our understanding of the world—not as neutral tools, but as instruments of influence, ideology, and control.

Kozloff's wide range of sources include historical maps, classroom wall maps, atlases, globes, and even satellite imagery from Google Maps. Her dense and colorful works often layer these materials with hand-painted details, collage, and intricate ornamentation. By combining sources that span centuries—from Renaissance celestial charts to contemporary digital mapping—she exposes how maps carry the legacies of empire, conflict, and shifting territorial claims.

A founding figure in the Pattern and Decoration movement, Kozloff combines meticulous craftsmanship with political critique. Her works are labor-intensive, involving the detailed process of painting, drawing, and collaging over cartographic surfaces. The resulting richly textured visual field invites viewers to look closely—and to question the conquest, division, and erasure found beneath the official surface narrative.

Whether reimagining educational globes or deconstructing colonial-era charts, Kozloff transforms maps from static documents into contested, dynamic spaces. Her work encourages viewers to reconsider how borders are drawn as well as how art can reclaim such boundaries as sites of resistance, memory, and possibility.

   

A Dickens of a Death
Acme Mystery Company

Spaghetti Warehouse
689 N. Clinton St., Syracuse

It's been three years since the ghosts came to visit Scrooge and he is a changed man. He is making up for all that he has missed in life and we're not just talking charity work. He is living La Vida Loca, baby, with expensive wine, fast women, and way too much song! Huzzah! He is throwing money around like a lottery winner in Vegas! Bob Cratchit, nephew Freddy, and the rest of the Scrooge gravy train have to stop him soon or they are all headed for the Poor House. Join us for Scrooge's Third Annual Holiday Bash and raise a glass to old Fezziwig (but try not to be the one who goes face down in the Figgy Pudding). Cheers!

   

Friday, January 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.

   

Joyce Kozloff: Contested Territories, 1983-2023
Everson Museum of Art

Everson Museum of Art
401 Harrison St., Syracuse

For more than four decades, Joyce Kozloff has explored how the entanglements of geography, history, and power influence the visual language of maps. "Contested Territories" presents a selection of Kozloff's works that uncover how maps shape our understanding of the world—not as neutral tools, but as instruments of influence, ideology, and control.

Kozloff's wide range of sources include historical maps, classroom wall maps, atlases, globes, and even satellite imagery from Google Maps. Her dense and colorful works often layer these materials with hand-painted details, collage, and intricate ornamentation. By combining sources that span centuries—from Renaissance celestial charts to contemporary digital mapping—she exposes how maps carry the legacies of empire, conflict, and shifting territorial claims.

A founding figure in the Pattern and Decoration movement, Kozloff combines meticulous craftsmanship with political critique. Her works are labor-intensive, involving the detailed process of painting, drawing, and collaging over cartographic surfaces. The resulting richly textured visual field invites viewers to look closely—and to question the conquest, division, and erasure found beneath the official surface narrative.

Whether reimagining educational globes or deconstructing colonial-era charts, Kozloff transforms maps from static documents into contested, dynamic spaces. Her work encourages viewers to reconsider how borders are drawn as well as how art can reclaim such boundaries as sites of resistance, memory, and possibility.

   

Jake Troyli: Open Season
Everson Museum of Art

Everson Museum of Art
401 Harrison St., Syracuse

Jake Troyli's works address the commodification of Black and Brown bodies, confronting and exploring labor capitalism and sweat equity as a demonstration of value. Troyli also injects his paintings with a sense of humor and absurdity through the inclusion of his own self-portrait. His avatar populates the works in "Open Season," where Troyli is both the hunter and the hunted as he participates in a variety of physical activities. As a former Division I basketball player, Troyli has a potent understanding of how athletes in America, particularly athletes of color, are simultaneously celebrated and criticized.

   

Lessons in Geometry
Everson Museum of Art

Everson Museum of Art
401 Harrison St., Syracuse

Artists have obsessed over the relationship between mathematics and art for millennia. As artists turned toward abstraction in the early 20th century, Europeans like Piet Mondrian used geometry to create a set of rules and parameters that guided their creative process. Meanwhile, American artists began developing their own styles and movements—particularly Abstract Expressionism, which was typified by bold, quickly executed brushwork, drips, and splashes. In the mid-20th century in the United States, artists laid the groundwork for Geometric Abstraction as a more cerebral alternative to the often macho flamboyance of Abstract Expressionism. Over the ensuing decades, artists used geometry to produce abstract works that ranged from the dazzling Op Art of Victor Vasarely to the restrained Minimalism of Sol LeWitt.

"Lessons in Geometry" traces the evolution of hard-edged abstraction in the United States as artists sought to use pure geometric forms to create works with balance, harmony, and order. For these artists, shape, line, and color took precedence over representational compositions. The Everson's collection reflects the wildly varied ways that artists have used geometry to serve their personal expression, from the analytical formulations of Robert Swain to the shaped canvases of Harmony Hammond and the spatial illusions of Tony King.

   

Patterns of Resistance
Everson Museum of Art

Everson Museum of Art
401 Harrison St., Syracuse

In the early 1970s, the Pattern & Decoration Movement emerged as an antidote to the vice grip in which abstraction had held American art since the 1950s. Artists like Valerie Jaudon, Joyce Kozloff, and Miriam Shapiro began juxtaposing colors and patterns that critics and artists alike had previously dismissed as feminine to powerful effect. Simultaneously, other feminist artists like Lynda Benglis were consciously subverting clay's associations as a masculine and/or craft medium.

As the '70s played out, a generation of artists like Andrea Gill, Nancy Selvin, and Betty Woodman did not just embrace the decorative strategies of the Pattern & Decoration Movement, they also sought to place a feminist spin on their work. As ceramics become more common in a fine art context, hierarchies surrounding different materials faded, giving artists the ability to experiment and construct narrative and meaning through pattern. Long denigrated as "decorative" and closely associated with domesticity, patterns are now an integral part of the language of contemporary art.

   

Saturday, January 3, 2026

Patterns of Resistance
Everson Museum of Art

Everson Museum of Art
401 Harrison St., Syracuse

In the early 1970s, the Pattern & Decoration Movement emerged as an antidote to the vice grip in which abstraction had held American art since the 1950s. Artists like Valerie Jaudon, Joyce Kozloff, and Miriam Shapiro began juxtaposing colors and patterns that critics and artists alike had previously dismissed as feminine to powerful effect. Simultaneously, other feminist artists like Lynda Benglis were consciously subverting clay's associations as a masculine and/or craft medium.

As the '70s played out, a generation of artists like Andrea Gill, Nancy Selvin, and Betty Woodman did not just embrace the decorative strategies of the Pattern & Decoration Movement, they also sought to place a feminist spin on their work. As ceramics become more common in a fine art context, hierarchies surrounding different materials faded, giving artists the ability to experiment and construct narrative and meaning through pattern. Long denigrated as "decorative" and closely associated with domesticity, patterns are now an integral part of the language of contemporary art.

   

Lessons in Geometry
Everson Museum of Art

Everson Museum of Art
401 Harrison St., Syracuse

Artists have obsessed over the relationship between mathematics and art for millennia. As artists turned toward abstraction in the early 20th century, Europeans like Piet Mondrian used geometry to create a set of rules and parameters that guided their creative process. Meanwhile, American artists began developing their own styles and movements—particularly Abstract Expressionism, which was typified by bold, quickly executed brushwork, drips, and splashes. In the mid-20th century in the United States, artists laid the groundwork for Geometric Abstraction as a more cerebral alternative to the often macho flamboyance of Abstract Expressionism. Over the ensuing decades, artists used geometry to produce abstract works that ranged from the dazzling Op Art of Victor Vasarely to the restrained Minimalism of Sol LeWitt.

"Lessons in Geometry" traces the evolution of hard-edged abstraction in the United States as artists sought to use pure geometric forms to create works with balance, harmony, and order. For these artists, shape, line, and color took precedence over representational compositions. The Everson's collection reflects the wildly varied ways that artists have used geometry to serve their personal expression, from the analytical formulations of Robert Swain to the shaped canvases of Harmony Hammond and the spatial illusions of Tony King.

   

Jake Troyli: Open Season
Everson Museum of Art

Everson Museum of Art
401 Harrison St., Syracuse

Jake Troyli's works address the commodification of Black and Brown bodies, confronting and exploring labor capitalism and sweat equity as a demonstration of value. Troyli also injects his paintings with a sense of humor and absurdity through the inclusion of his own self-portrait. His avatar populates the works in "Open Season," where Troyli is both the hunter and the hunted as he participates in a variety of physical activities. As a former Division I basketball player, Troyli has a potent understanding of how athletes in America, particularly athletes of color, are simultaneously celebrated and criticized.

   

Joyce Kozloff: Contested Territories, 1983-2023
Everson Museum of Art

Everson Museum of Art
401 Harrison St., Syracuse

For more than four decades, Joyce Kozloff has explored how the entanglements of geography, history, and power influence the visual language of maps. "Contested Territories" presents a selection of Kozloff's works that uncover how maps shape our understanding of the world—not as neutral tools, but as instruments of influence, ideology, and control.

Kozloff's wide range of sources include historical maps, classroom wall maps, atlases, globes, and even satellite imagery from Google Maps. Her dense and colorful works often layer these materials with hand-painted details, collage, and intricate ornamentation. By combining sources that span centuries—from Renaissance celestial charts to contemporary digital mapping—she exposes how maps carry the legacies of empire, conflict, and shifting territorial claims.

A founding figure in the Pattern and Decoration movement, Kozloff combines meticulous craftsmanship with political critique. Her works are labor-intensive, involving the detailed process of painting, drawing, and collaging over cartographic surfaces. The resulting richly textured visual field invites viewers to look closely—and to question the conquest, division, and erasure found beneath the official surface narrative.

Whether reimagining educational globes or deconstructing colonial-era charts, Kozloff transforms maps from static documents into contested, dynamic spaces. Her work encourages viewers to reconsider how borders are drawn as well as how art can reclaim such boundaries as sites of resistance, memory, and possibility.

   

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.