LINCOLN, NEB.- Three innovative exhibitions featuring works by contemporary artists open August 12 at Sheldon Museum of Art.

“Uncommon Likeness: Identity in Flux” brings together major paintings, photographs, and sculptural works by a diverse group of international artists who explore the complex relationship between identity and the politics, struggles, and pleasures of the body.

“Lago” is the first museum exhibition of a series of color photographs made by Oregon-based artist Ron Jude, who returns to the California-desert landscape of his childhood in search of clues to his own identity.

In “ChimaTEK: Kaleidoscopic Camouflage,” multimedia artist Saya Woolfalk responds to a work by Alma Thomas in the museum’s collection, creating a new, site-specific chapter in a decade-long fictional utopian narrative.

“The artists included in these exhibitions pose compelling questions for themselves as well as the viewer on the how identity can be defined, negotiated, reimagined, and revealed,” said Wally Mason, Sheldon’s director and chief curator. “The body and extensions of self continue to provide fertile ground for meaningful inquiry and critique.”

Located at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln, Sheldon schedules its major exhibitions to coincide with semesters on the academic calendar. The exhibitions “Uncommon Likeness,” “Lago,” and “ChimaTEK: Kaleidoscopic Camouflage” will be on view August 12 through December 31.

Uncommon Likeness: Identity in Flux
Drawn from the museum’s holdings and prominent private collections, “Uncommon Likeness” presents works by contemporary artists who choose to depict the body as a point of examining mortality, transience, and identity. The objects in the exhibition speak to the human condition of negotiating both literal and figurative borders of geography, society, psychology, gender, and spirituality.

The exhibition includes works by Carlos Alfonzo, Nick Cave, Enrique Chagoya, Anita Dube, Philip Guston, iROZEALb, Kyle Meyer, Richard Mosse, Nathaniel Mary Quinn, Heidi Schwegler, Cindy Sherman, Shine Shivan, Yinka Shonibare, Laurie Simmons, Do Hoh Suh, and Kehinde Wiley.

On Thursday, October 27, artist Enrique Chagoya will present a lecture titled “Mindful Savage Guide to Reverse Modernism” related to his painting “Le Cannibale Moderniste,” which is featured in “Uncommon Likeness” and is part of Sheldon’s permanent collection. Chagoya’s lecture, which will begin at 6 p.m., is free, open to the public, and available by simulcast at http://go.unl.edu/chagoya-lecture.

Ron Jude: Lago
In search of clues to his own identity, artist Ron Jude attempts to reconcile the vagaries of memory with a human need to create narratives based on lived experience. "Lago" is a series of recent color photographs of the landscape of Jude’s childhood, the California desert near the Salton Sea.

On Tuesday, October 11, at 5:30 p.m. Jude will discuss the dubious empirical and storytelling assumptions we make about photographic images, his sleight-of-hand influence on these expectations, and how this strategy employs narrative as an artificial container for an engagement with the poetics of experience. His lecture, titled “Those Are Not Mountains You See,” is free, open to the public, and will be simulcast at http://go.unl.edu/jude-lecture.

Saya Woolfalk: ChimaTEK: Kaleidoscopic Camouflage
Brooklyn-based multimedia artist Saya Woolfalk has spent a decade creating a fictional utopian universe that blends cultural anthropology, fantasy, and science fiction to examine issues of identity, ethnicity, gender, and culture. With this exhibition, Woolfalk adds to her ongoing narrative a new, site-specific chapter that includes a response to the Sheldon-held painting "Winter Pool" by Alma Thomas.