Built in the mid-1960s, Everson Museum of Art is an architectural masterpiece that impresses especially upon entering its lofty lobby with a stunning central spiral staircase and its collection of 11,000 artworks, including one of the largest and most notable collections of ceramic art in the country.
It specializes in American art—paintings, sculpture, drawings, video, graphics and ceramics from Colonial times to the present—and has since its early days. It was founded as the Syracuse Museum of Fine Arts in 1897 by art historian and Metropolitan Museum founder George Fisk Comfort, but in 1911, the museum announced it’d only collect American art, becoming the first museum to do so.
It wasn’t until 1965 that work on the Everson Museum began, thanks to a $1 million gift to the city from Helen Everson. Upon its opening in 1968, it was already known for its Ceramic National exhibitions—one of the most prestigious juried ceramics exhibitions—and the Syracuse China Center for the Study of Ceramics, which now has ancient sculpture and Ming dynasty porcelain up to contemporary works. It was also home to one of the first video art collections in the country and today has the biggest collection of video art.
These days, it collaborates with Light Work and the Urban Video Project to project video art on its facade, which has included works by artists like Bill Viola, Jenny Holzer and William Wegman. It also hosts a film series every summer.
When I visited, I got to see an immense exhibit called “Off the Rack,” which displayed hundreds of framed works that are usually in storage. Because of a major renovation of its art storage, the Everson took the opportunity to showcase these works rather than hide them elsewhere. They were hung altogether salon-style across its galleries and it was a feast for the eyes.
“Sana Musasama: I Never Played with Dolls” was another collection that wowed me. Musasama, an artist in Queens, New York City, showcased a collection of rotating Topsy Turvy Dolls. Topsy Turvy dolls are two-headed dolls conjoined at the waist that originated in the South by enslaved women for their children. One side is a black doll and the other is a white doll. Flipping them reveals one doll at a time and obscures the other with its skirt.
Musasama’s dolls rotated on the wall within the gallery and depicted Condoleezza Rice/Monica Lewinsky, Nina Simone/Winnie Mandela, Rosa Parks/Elizabeth Jennings, Musasama/her mother in a powerful display of figures we both revere and have complicated feelings about.
Everson is certainly a highlight of visiting Syracuse and should be on any itinerary. And soon, it’ll offer even more with the addition of a farm-and-kiln-to-table restaurant called Louise.
