Upcoming Exhibitions

South Arts Southern Prize & State Fellowships for Visual Arts

on view June 4–September 6, 2026

The LSU Museum of Art presents the show South Arts Southern Prize & State Fellowships for Visual Arts, June 4–September 6, 2026, a touring exhibition featuring artwork by the 2025 Southern Prize & State Fellowship for Visual Arts recipients.

Launched in 2017 by South Arts, the Southern Prize & State Fellowships for Visual Arts program celebrates and supports exemplary contemporary art in the American South. This exhibition features work by the nine 2025 recipients—one each from Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Tennessee—representing the South Arts region. Represented artists and Fellows include: Loretta Pettway Bennett (Alabama), Gonzalo Fuenmayor (Florida), Masela Nkolo (Georgia), Travis Townsend (Kentucky), Edgar Cano (Louisiana), Stephen Phillips (Mississippi), Lydia C. Thompson (North Carolina), Felicia Greenlee (South Carolina), and Tabitha Arnold (Tennessee).

The 2025 Visual Arts cohort presents a striking synthesis of past and present, channeling a timeless futurism that intertwines ancestral craft with contemporary urgency. Using ceramics, textiles, drawing, and sculpture, these artists revive time-honored practices—from quilting traditions and African mask-making to apocalyptic Biblical imagery—recasting them within today’s global narratives of migration, labor, and identity. Their work is rooted in a deep respect for material expertise: the delicate sheen of a ceramic glaze, the expressive tension of charcoal on paper, the tactile complexity of woven fiber. Yet the objects resist nostalgia. Instead, they stretch tradition into new, often surreal forms that feel both grounded and speculative. The result is an aesthetic of tension and harmony, where history and imagination coexist, with each work serving as both a cultural relic and visionary statement, resonating powerfully within the shifting Southern landscape.

South Arts is a nonprofit regional arts organization that advances creativity and innovation across the American South by supporting artists, organizations, and communities. Through grantmaking, professional development, touring exhibitions, and regional initiatives in partnership with the National Endowment for the Arts and state arts agencies, it expands access to the arts and strengthens cultural infrastructure throughout its nine-state region. South Arts’ Southern Prize & State Fellowships for Visual Arts is generously supported by the Maxwell/Hanrahan Foundation, the Windgate Foundation, Southern First Bank, The Warner Fund, and the Hambidge Center. Learn more about South Arts by visiting southarts.org.

ReVision: Women in Photography

on view June 11–August 30, 2026

This summer, the LSU Museum of Art partners with the Paul R. Jones Collection at the University of Alabama to present ReVision: Women in Photography, on view June 11– August 30, 2026. The show affirms the continuing impact of women artists who have shaped—and continue to shape—the visual language of photography.

The exhibition showcases powerful images that explore themes such as social justice, aging, feminism, relationships, and feminine aesthetics. Representing a wide range of backgrounds, heritages, and lived experiences, the featured photographers offer perspectives grounded in the viewpoints of women. Through intimate portraits, conceptual narratives, and documentary approaches, the artists challenge assumptions about gender, identity, and representation while expanding conversations on the evolving roles of women in art and society.

Many of the works drawn from the LSU Museum of Art’s collection were acquired within the last ten years and are on view for the first time. Combined with the diverse images from the Paul R. Jones Collection, the artworks illuminate the intersections of personal and collective histories, demonstrating how photography can function as both a tool of empowerment and a means of reimagining shared and individual narratives.

Featured photographers include Amalia Amaki, Sheila Pree Bright, Lynn Hershman Leeson, Suda House, Celestia Morgan, Martina Mullaney, Dianora Niccolini, Anne Noggle, Kenda North, Akasha Rabut, Ming Murray Smith, Clarissa Thompson Sligh, Sheila Turner, Kristine Thompson, Melanie Walker, and Carrie Mae Weems.

Anne Noggle, a veteran fighter pilot, professor, curator, and artist known for her candid self-portraits celebrating aging. Noggle once reflected, “I like older faces, not because of aging itself, but rather the look of the face, the revelation of life, and the conflict between what was and what they are now.” She fearlessly explores the maturing female form, embracing the effects of time on the human body and the interpersonal relationships she formed later in life.

Sheila Pree Bright’s Plastic Bodies series examines the pressures of contemporary beauty culture through visually arresting photographs that blur the line between human subjects and manufactured ideals. By referencing the polished perfection of dolls and commercial imagery, her work underscores how media-driven standards shape perceptions of the body and self-worth. Bright’s work contributes a critical and timely perspective to broader conversations about representation, conformity, and the politics of beauty.

Suda House’s 1980s Aqueous Myths series reflects on the status of women during that decade and the tensions of pursuing careers and equal rights while maintaining traditional roles as caregivers and mothers—swimming through what House described as the “torrent waters of trying to have it all.” Using water as both a literal and symbolic element, House situates her figures in fluid, dreamlike spaces that evoke resilience, vulnerability, and the constant negotiation between personal ambition and societal expectation.

The South's Most Elusive Artist: Walter Inglis Anderson

September 17, 2026–January 3, 2027

This fall, audiences are invited to experience the luminous and deeply personal world of Walter Inglis Anderson (1903–1965), one of the most compelling and singular artists of the twentieth-century American South. The South’s Most Elusive Artist: Walter Inglis Anderson brings together forty original works drawn from the permanent collection of The Walter Anderson Museum of Art in Ocean Springs, Mississippi, and the family of the artist.

This intimate view into a creative life shaped by nature, solitude, and an unyielding devotion to artistic expression, features jewel-toned watercolors alongside lyrical pen-and-ink illustrations. Deft pencil sketches reveal Anderson’s masterful understanding of form and line, while glowing examples of hand-decorated ceramics underscore his versatility and ingenuity. Together, these works demonstrate the breadth of an artist who moved fluidly between media, capturing the vitality of the Gulf Coast with uncommon sensitivity and energy.

Born in 1903 on Broadway Street in New Orleans, Louisiana, Anderson came of age during a period of rapid modernization across the American South. As industrialization reshaped the mainland, he increasingly sought refuge in the solitude of the natural world, particularly the barrier islands beyond the Mississippi Sound. His subject matter ranges widely—from the Indigenous inhabitants of the Gulf Coast to the endangered birds and animals that once freely roamed its shorelines. He is perhaps best known for his intimate watercolors of Horn Island, a remote barrier island twelve miles off the coast of Ocean Springs, Mississippi. Rowing alone in a small skiff, Anderson spent days observing and recording the island’s flora and fauna, often working on simple 8.5 x 11-inch sheets of typing paper. These modest materials belie the power of the resulting images, which capture both the majesty and the fierce unpredictability of the natural world.

Anderson’s artworks and writings serve as meditations on perception and presence. “The realization of form and space is through feeling,” he wrote. “When I feel the beauty of a flower on the trunk of a tree, I am at once inducted into a world of three dimensions and have a sense of form which is opposite of artificial forms and conventions.” His reflections illuminate the philosophical core of the artist’s practice: a belief that careful attention to nature offers transcendence and renewal.

Anderson lived a life marked by privacy and periods of self-imposed isolation. Yet he left behind an almost complete artistic record, from childhood drawings to works created in the final days of his life, many preserved in his coastal cottage in Ocean Springs. Through these drawings, paintings, and ceramic works, viewers encounter not only the landscapes and creatures of the Gulf Coast, but also the inner life of an artist who struggled against human frailty and found profound meaning in the rhythms of the natural world. The South’s Most Elusive Artist: Walter Inglis Anderson offers a rare opportunity to engage with a body of work that continues to astonish and delight, reconnecting us to the beauty, complexity, and fragile wonder of the environment that surrounds us.