Neuberger Museum of Art

Current Exhibitions

Stephen Antonakos: Proscenium
On view now

Named for a type of Greek stage, Proscenium — created in 2000 by light artist Stephen Antonakos — animates the vast, darkened space of the Museum’s Theater Gallery with vibrant, saturated color, glowing light, and calligraphic line.

Antonakos (1926–2013) was a pioneer in the use of neon as a fine art. In a career that spanned over five decades, he created illuminated works for indoor rooms and outdoor spaces around the world including the United States, Greece, Japan, Germany, France, and Israel. As the artist observed, “For me neon is not aggressive, but it has certain powers. I simply thought so much more could be done with it abstractly than with words and images. I had a feeling that it could connect with people in real, immediate, kinetic, and spatial ways.”

Antonakos’s neon installations are classic studies in light, space, and form. Using a simple, minimal vocabulary of straight and undulating lines and incomplete circles and squares, his luminous environments are both tangible and transcendent. According to Antonakos, “Visual experience is inner experience. What I hope to do is offer access to a more intense, heightened kind of experience. One that is more conscious, more open.” Of course, the essence of this experience is light, which from time immemorial has been associated with spirituality and the divine presence.

The formal, radiant beauty of Proscenium evokes this mystical relationship.

Stephen Antonakos: Proscenium is organized by the Neuberger Museum of Art, Purchase College, SUNY. This monumental site-specific neon installation was commissioned for the Museum twenty-five years ago. Generous support for this exhibition is provided by the Friends of the Neuberger Museum of Art.

 

Taking Collective Discontent to the Street: Nicolás de Jesús’s Street Banners
February 25 – July 26, 2026

Nicolás de Jesús uses art in the streets and public spaces to provoke dialogue, visibility, and action that promote social justice.

Created between 2009 and 2016, his monumental banners in Taking Collective Discontent to the Street confront histories of resistance, violence, and exclusion against Indigenous people across the Americas—communities that have been victims of massacres since colonial times and continue to face discrimination today.

Carried into the streets and displayed in the heart of municipalities, these banners transform protest into public image and collective memory. In The Charco Massacre and the Triptych for the Disappeared of Ayotzinapa, de Jesús addresses acts of violence perpetrated by paramilitaries against community leaders and students through explicit scenes, portraying fleshy figures and injured bodies rendered with unsettling realism.

Other works attest to the artist’s ability to perceive life with wit and irony. In Political Dungheap, politicians are featured as kings. In The Artist’s Funeral, de Jesús envisions his own funeral in a scene dominated by humor. Rather than fleshy figures, these later works recuperate the mocking skeleton characters, called calaveras, which were popularized in Mexico by José Guadalupe Posada (1852–1913), whose prints exposed the abuses of political power and social inequality in Mexico on the eve of the Revolution.

As an active community member and witness, de Jesús’s courageous works transform the language of protest into a powerful visual experience that resonates from the street to the Museum’s walls.

Taking Collective Discontent to the Street: Nicolás de Jesús’s Street Banners is organized by the Neuberger Museum of Art, Purchase College, SUNY, and curated by Patrice Giasson, the Alex Gordon Curator for the Art of the Americas. Generous support for this exhibition is provided by the Friends of the Neuberger Museum of Art.

 

Tobias Putrih: Studio at Neuberger
January 17 - May 17, 2026

In Studio at Neuberger, artist Tobias Putrih invites visitors to “construct and deconstruct almost everything they encounter.”

The Studio series comprises systems of modular plywood shapes that can be slotted together to “construct functional furniture as well as semi-functional and non-functional objects.” The zagging, curving planks challenge visitors to balance structural foundations with sculptural flares and flights.

This tentative balance between the stable and the dynamic, the manufactured and the organic, systems and imagination emerges from Putrih’s background. He studied mathematics and physics in the former Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia before becoming an artist, and reflects on these formative experiences in his work.

“Such entropy fascinates me. Every utopia anticipates a possible meltdown.”

Tobias Putrih: Studio at Neuberger is organized by the Neuberger Museum of Art, Purchase College, SUNY, and curated by Jacqueline Shilkoff, Curator of New Media and Director of Digital Initiatives. Generous support is provided by the Friends of the Neuberger Museum of Art.

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