Carolla Arts Exhibition Center

MFA Thesis Exhibit, a Springfield Art Museum collaboration
May 27 – June 6 | First Friday Art Walk: June 6

This exhibition features the thesis body of work by Master of Fine Arts in Visual Studies Candidates Collins Antwi, Andy Corbett, Joy Okokon, and Erin Tyler at Missouri State University. This program promotes advanced study in Visual Arts and Design with emphasis placed on the student’s individual research.Various artistic approaches from students with differing backgrounds and research interests are highlighted. The Springfield Art Museum’s Curatorial Staff has provided guidance in the coordination and installation of the work as a further learning opportunity for the students.

Let me tell you a story
Gathering our roots to find belonging
July 7 – August 1 | First Friday Art Walk: August 1

The traditional art of storytelling is best understood as a tool of communication, often inherited through our ancestors. We are raised to understand the world around us from those who pass down stories of our past, present, and future. The LatinX community currently exists in a state of corporeal disruption and displacement of the soul as a result of the unstable land and identity in which we exist. How do we even begin to find ourselves? Who do we turn to for guidance? Is it our family, peers, authority, ourselves, our community? What even ties us together anymore?

Let Me Tell You a Story explores work from six artists that contribute to the tapestry of our shared identity. Work in this exhibit from Marco Hernandez, Veronica Ibargüengoitia, Xavier Tavera, Tina Tavera, Mariana Ruvalcaba, and Leandra Urrutia contribute to the roots that form the tapestry of our belonging, braiding together the accumulation of lives we’ve all lived. It is the mythology passed down from our ancestors to the skin we inherited. It’s the recipes handed down and who we share those meals with now. It is the traditions we uphold to say we have learned from ancestral guidance, and we are still here.

Historically, how we identify has been forced upon us through boxes to check and categories to contort ourselves into–state census, ID cards, papers, and various racist terms for LatinX people. Yet the secret to authentically grounding ourselves and standing confidently in who we are will always be our stories; they are our heritage and our liberation. Sharing our stories is our path to finding place and identity as a people in this world. Let us tell you who we are.

Curated by Olga Shute, MFA Visual Studies candidate in collaboration with Jodi McCoy, Director of Exhibitions.

Brick City Gallery

The Long Ride Home: Black Cowboys in America
Ron Tarver
July 7 – August 1 | First Friday Art Walk: August 1

The Long Ride Home: Black Cowboys in America deconstructs ideas of Black identity and challenges the whitewashed myth of the all-American cowboy. Simply stated, the exhibition is about the beauty, romance, and majesty of the Black West.

For decades the idea of the cowboy has been romanticized in books, television, and movies as a white hero wearing a white hat. This nostalgic idea is sewn into the national fabric. The Black cowboy, if recognized at all, is represented as an historical side note resigned, to a distant memory. Ron Tarver’s The Long Ride Home: Black Cowboys in America offers a contemporary counterpoint through its insightful photographs of Black people embodying their Western cultural heritage.

Taken between 1993 and 1997, these photographs offer testimony to the lived experiences of thriving communities. Celebrating a wide variety of circumstances, from Black owned ranches to big city riding clubs across the United States, Tarver’s images speak to Black joy, Black freedom, and Black resistance.