This fall, the Hilliard Art Museum at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette presents four new exhibitions featuring some of the most compelling voices in 20th century and contemporary art. These exhibitions, together, ask a question as urgent as it is timeless: What do we carry forward, and what do we leave behind?
Opening September 18 with a member preview, the Hilliard debuts three exhibitions featuring multi-media installation, painting, sculpture, and photography by multi-disciplinary artist Matthew Day Jackson, sculptor and Louisiana native Curtis Patterson, and 20th Century Women Photographers, such as Dorthea Lang and Helen Levitt.
Then, On October 9, the Smithsonian Center for American Folklife and Cultural Heritage, presents Elemore Morgan, Jr.: Photographs from the Festival of American Folklife, 1976. The opening of this show coincides with the opening of Festivals Acadiens et Créoles.
The Hilliard also announces a season of community and education programs running from September through December, including member receptions, the annual Bienvenue Lecture Series, Hilliard Fête, and more.
“As our country marks its 250th year,” says Molly Rowe, Executive Director of the Hilliard Art Museum, “these exhibitions ask us to look in both directions at once: back toward the choices that shaped us, and forward toward the futures we are actively building. Gathered here are some of the most compelling and consequential artists of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, each turning the tension between art and archive into a way of seeing the world, and ourselves, more clearly."
About Fall Exhibitions
Matthew Day Jackson: Yesterday’s Tomorrow
September 19, 2026 – August 2, 2027
Presented by the Emory Family Trust
Supported by the Hilliard Exhibition Fund
In the boom years after World War II, America built its idea of the future and moved in, filling millions of new suburban kitchens with Formica, laminate, and molded plywood, surfaces sold as clean, modern, and permanent. The New York-based artist builds his paintings, furniture, and sculpture from these same materials, tracing centuries-old images and recasting them in the manufactured stuff of the American home. He arranges the works inside a house with no walls, an open steel frame you can walk through, its private interior turned fully out.
The materials were sold as permanent, yet built to last about a lifetime, so a single object can hold aspiration and impermanence at once. That gap runs through the exhibition, which reaches from the kitchen counter to the moon landing, LIFE magazine, and the frontier, the many places America once pictured its future. Domestic Ideal turns that ideal to face several directions in time at once, asking what our pursuit of progress has actually built, and how the ideals we still carry will shape the lives that come after.
A Century in Focus: Images from Women Photographers of the 20th Century
September 19, 2026 – February 20, 2027
Supported by the Robert and Joie Shelton Exhibition Fund with generous contributions from Jeanine Piskurich.
Photography changed how the twentieth century saw itself. So did the women who mastered it.
Working through decades of upheaval, war, depression, migration, and rapid industrial change, the ten artists in this exhibition pushed photography past pure documentation and made it an art form. Each found a different way in. Dorothea Lange and Sabine Weiss turned photojournalism toward the hardships of ordinary life. Anne W. Brigman and Ruth Bernhard leaned into experiment and abstraction. Together they produced some of the most enduring images of the modern era.
The practices of these artists challenged narratives long controlled by men and opened the medium to the women who came after. It shaped how we picture identity, family, memory, and struggle, and it still speaks to those questions now. Drawn entirely from the Hilliard's permanent collection, these photographs trace a century in focus.
The exhibition features work by Linda Alterwitz, Ruth Bernhard, Ilse Bing, Margaret Bourke-White, Anne W. Brigman, Debbie Fleming Caffery, Anna Eaton Collins, Adrian Deckbar, Abbey Drucker, Antoinette Marie Ducrest, Lynda Frese, Mildred Grossman, Dorthea Lange, Helen Levitt, Rose Mandel, Allison Petit, Barbara Riley, Sandra Russell-Clark, Margaret Bourke-White and Sabine Weiss.
Curtis Patterson: Persistent Vision
Sculptures from 2011 – 2026
September 19, 2026 – February 20, 2027
Supported by the Hilliard Exhibition Fund.
Born in Shreveport, Louisiana, in 1944, Atlanta-based sculptor Curtis Patterson's exhibition Persistent Vision presents more than fifteen years of the artist's practice, focusing on bronze and steel pedestal-scale and wall-based works that incorporate African diasporic motifs and symbolic forms inspired by the improvisational nature of jazz. Through abstraction, Patterson invites viewers into visual metaphors steeped in history and cross-cultural exchange, evoking movement, continuity, and the rhythms of lived experience. Persistent Vision marks Patterson's first museum exhibition in his home state.
Patterson grew up in Louisiana and drew early lessons in discipline and craft from his family. The grandson of a master carpenter, he inherited a deep affinity for working with his hands. He earned his BA in Art Education from Grambling State University and went on to become the first African American to receive an MFA in Sculpture from Georgia State University, later teaching at the Atlanta College of Art for more than three decades.
Elemore Morgan, Jr.: Photographs from the Festival of American Folklife, 1976
October 9, 2026 – February 20, 2027
Presented by the Smithsonian Center for American Folklife and Cultural Heritage with support from the Center for Louisiana Studies and the Hilliard Exhibition Fund.
On October 9, coinciding with the opening of Festivals Acadiens et Créoles, the Hilliard Art Museum unveils Elemore Morgan, Jr.: Photographs from the Festival of American Folklife, 1976. In the summer of 1976, as the country marked its Bicentennial on the National Mall, the Louisiana artist trained his camera on Cajun and Creole musicians performing as recognized bearers of a national heritage. He photographed the performers from home and the crowds who gathered to hear them, capturing a unique moment when the country paused to look at itself.
Printed for the first time from his original slides, these images appear publicly fifty years on, during America's 250th They are at once witness and interpretation, archive and artistic vision, and the exhibition holds that tension at its center. Together they revisit the questions that drew Morgan to the Mall: what makes a people, and what holds their differences together? Featured performers include Dewey Balfa, Nathan Abshire, Bois Sec Ardoin, and Inez Catalon, among other Louisiana musicians who carried Cajun and Creole tradition to the national stage.
Select Fall Events and Programs
Fall Opening Preview
Friday, September 18
5:30 p.m. Member Preview; 6:30 p.m. Public Preview; 7:30 Hilliard After Dark (21+)
Presented by the Hilliard Society
Opening Reception & Moderated Conversation for
Elemore Morgan, Jr.: Photographs from the Festival of American Folklife, 1976
Friday, October 9
3:30 p.m.
*This event is part of the collaborative Symposium presented by Center for Louisiana Studies, Festivals Acadiens et Créoles, and Smithsonian Center for American Folkways.
Hilliard Fête
Saturday, October 24
10 a.m. - 3 p.m.
Presented by Ochsner Lafayette General
One Museum, One Day, Endless Exploration. An all-ages celebration of artmaking, music, wellness inspired by exhibitions on view.
Bienvenu Lecture Series
Wednesday, October 28
5 p.m.
The lecture provides a researched perspective into the work of Dorthea Lang, one of the greatest 20th century photographers whose work is featured in the exhibition Century in Focus.
Cross Currents: Improvised Truths—Curtis Patterson and the Jazz of Form
Thursday, November 19
5:30 p.m.
Presented by Louisiana Endowment for the Arts
An interdisciplinary series that presents the visual art as a catalyst for cultural dialogue. The fall iteration is anchored in the work of exhibiting artist Curtis Patterson, whose practice, rooted in improvisational jazz, African diasporic symbol systems, and America’s civil rights history, has shaped generations of artists.
For more information on exhibitions, events and programs, visit hilliardartmuseum.org or follow @HilliardArtMuseum on social media.
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