A new Postindustrial columnist and Erie art expert writes that a museum’s purpose isn’t only to preserve and present art, but to notice what this region is already talking about and curate exhibitions that give those conversations room to happen.
Right now, three exhibitions at the Erie Art Museum are shaping important conversations.
Between Here and Elsewhere: A Portrait of the New American Experience takes on immigration and what it means to be a New American, here, now.
Erie is a Postindustrial City. We’ve lost population for decades.
The one group that has consistently grown here is New Americans: refugees and immigrants who began resettling in Erie in meaningful numbers in the 1990s and made it, for years, one of Pennsylvania’s largest resettlement destinations.
Curator Maria Ferguson, who organized this show with our regional partner, PennWest University, said it plainly: arrival isn’t a single moment; it’s a negotiation that keeps happening. Much of Erie, like much of our country, is confronting the renegotiation of the immigrant experience.
Eileen Woods | The Waiting Room #43 | Woodburning, Acrylic, Graphite, Clocks | 2024
Intimate Landscapes is Thomas Paquette’s exhibition, and it’s about looking, really looking, at the natural world we’ve built around and over. Paquette paints what most of us walk past: the non-human-built environments at the edges of our attention.
In a moment when environmental catastrophe isn’t a hypothetical anymore, Paquette’s sustained attention feels less like a nature study and more like a discipline worth learning. Paquette lives outside Warren, about ninety minutes southeast of Erie.
Monsters, Beloveds and Invisible Whales takes the stories we’ve inherited: myths, monsters, familiar figures, and asks what they still owe us. Patricia Bellan-Gillen’s monumental drawings don’t retell these stories so much as complicate them, which is the more useful thing to do with a story you’ve outgrown. Bellan-Gillen has spent decades in the Pittsburgh art scene.
Thomas Paquette | Highland Ponies, Glen Mor, Alladale Wilderness | Oil on Canvas | 2019
None of these three exhibitions happened by accident, and none of them happened in isolation. They’re here because we observed what this region wants to talk about, and found artists with something to say about it.
This work of connecting is behind everything we do. We hold a collection of roughly 8,000 objects and steward a LEED Gold-certified historic building that’s been part of this city for well over a century.
The work of caring for the past and making it accessible to the people living now is, as far as I’m concerned, the definition of hope. It says the past is worth keeping and the future is worth showing it to.
We’re not doing this alone. Every exhibition we build pulls in artists and partners from across Erie, western Pennsylvania, and beyond, and that works in both directions.
It brings new ideas into Erie, and it makes Erie part of something larger than itself. A city reimagining itself needs exactly that: connection, in both directions, at once.
