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In his landmark 1800 treatise on landscape painting, Elements of Practical Perspective, Pierre Henri de Valenciennes lamented the difficulty of portraying the sun’s light using oil paint. An artist, he explained, cannot look at the blazing body for longer than a moment, lest they be dazzled, and even if they could, “as there is no color in nature that is luminous by itself, the painter is very limited in the means he uses to copy the light of nature. So we laugh at the vain efforts made by an artist when he wants to imitate the color of the sun.” 

Though little known beyond his native Sweden, sculptor and draftsman Johan Tobias Sergel (1740–1814) was one of the most compelling artistic figures of the late eighteenth century. This exhibition—the first dedicated to Sergel outside Europe—will feature a selection of his drawings alongside sculptural works in terracotta, marble, and plaster.

This exhibition introduces a new generation of visitors to ragtime—one of the first truly global popular music styles. Tracing the genre’s evolution from its roots in West African rhythms and European musical traditions to its pivotal role in the emergence of jazz, the exhibition explores ragtime’s vibrant cultural legacy. Through seven thematic sections, it examines the music’s historical foundations, its rise to mainstream popularity, and its crossover into Broadway, film, and popular culture, offering a rich and comprehensive portrait of ragtime’s enduring dynamism and influence.

This exhibition explores stories of (mis)identification in drawings by some of nineteenth-century France’s most renowned artists and their followers, including Théodore Chassériau, Charles Damour, Eugène Delacroix, Joseph Ducreux, Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres, and Léon Louis Antoine Riesener, examining portraiture’s powers and limitations in capturing histories, personalities, and identities.