Critters: Representations of Animals in Art from the Permanent Collection

Opening February 2025

This permanent collection exhibition highlights diverse depictions of animals in art. It examines our complex emotional and social relationships with animals and the environments we share with them. We revere, fear, love, appreciate, and are comforted by animals. Throughout history, animals have been, and continue to be, crucial to our survival – providing people with food, clothing, and shelter. We share their curiosity and look to their example to understand our changing environment and for strategies for adaptation and resilience.

Using various media, the artworks on view speak to the nuances of animal relationships. In contemporary paintings, Inuit sculptures, beaded whimsies, and a variety of prints, artists employ a range of techniques from carving and chasing, drawing and painting, beading, embroidering, and quilling to show animals engaged in work and play as friends and foes, hunters and prey, grazers, entertainers, wanderers, bathers, singers and swimmers, high sky flyers, observers, protectors, guides and trailblazers. The primary environments organize the gallery space or the places where animals live and work – water, land, and sky.