Springfield, Missouri is home to a vibrant artistic community. This exhibition highlights and celebrates the creativity of our community focusing on artists living and working in the many neighborhoods that make up our city. This exhibition not only concentrates on the artists on display but also their neighborhoods and what it means to live and work creatively in Springfield. The exhibit will rotate every six months; the first exhibition will feature work by eight artists from five neighborhoods located in City Council Zone 1 and will run through March 18, 2018.

Grant Wood, born and raised in Iowa, achieved international recognition in the mid 1930s for promoting a style of art that depicted everyday scenes of Midwestern life. Coined "Regionalism," Wood, along with fellow Midwestern artists Thomas Hart Benton and John Steuart Curry, gained popularity during the Great Depression for focusing on American scenes that upheld supposedly American values. Wood produced 19 lithographs in his lifetime; 17 of these are in the Springfield Art Museum's permanent collection. This exhibit will examine Wood's thematic concerns and role in the growth and popularity of printmaking in America.

Richard Tuttle has spent the majority of his career working within a very limited set of formal constraints - line, color, and form - to explore deeper issues of abstraction. His practice has encompassed a wide variety of materials including from etchings, aquatints, and woodcuts to more ordinary materials such as cardboard, Styrofoam, wire, wood, cloth and rope. From nearly the beginning of his career, line has been elemental to his work ranging from simple filaments of wire to thin pencil marks drawn directly on the wall. This exhibit will explore Tuttle's exploration of line within the limits of printmaking, and reflects his desire to bend those constraints outward. He is particularly interested in seeking the answer to this basic question - when does a line become a sign? This exhibit is pulled from the Museum's permanent collections and will feature three significant portfolios by the artist including The Edge, Line, and Edges.

Buildings of all shapes, sizes, and styles are ever-present in our environment. A simple landscape becomes more interesting when dwellings or other architectural structures are included as part of the scene. Familiar structures in a painting may help tell a story, evoke memories, indicate a place, or define a moment in time. They engage the viewer with questions such as: where is this place, who constructed these buildings, why were they built, and where are the people who built them? What memories will the artwork in this exhibit evoke in you? This exhibition is the sixth in a series, focusing on various artists, styles and trends, pulled exclusively from the Museum's outstanding collection of contemporary American aquamedia. This exhibit was guest curated by Cindy Quayle, Exhibitions Manager.

Modern day museums developed out of two apparently basic aspects of human nature - our curiosity and our desire to collect. Early collections were arranged and contained within private homes in rooms referred to as cabinets. These collections usually included a wide range of objects from taxidermy to paintings and sculpture. As their popularity grew, they began to be called wonder or curiosity cabinets, from the German "wunderkammer." "Wonder Rooms" examines this human desire to collect, with a specific focus on private collections in Southwest Missouri, in order to discover the underlying stories and driving impulses behind collecting. The exhibit will present representative works from a number of local collections, and will feature a wide range of media arranged in 'rooms,' including ceramics, photography, outsider art, local art, furniture, prints, and drawings.