Ways of Seeing - The Art of Travel, Trade, and Transportation

April 17, 2021 – January 02, 2022 – Bohorfoush Gallery
Ways of Seeing: The Art of Travel, Trade, and Transportation is an exhibition that brings together over seventy objects from BMA’s permanent collection to explore subjects of travelling for both pleasure and necessity.

Even in the digital age, access to affordable, reliable, and safe transportation is vital to life. Transportation—beginning with our feet—supports all travel and thus all trade, which includes securing food for survival, access to work, and connections to communities that are necessary to thrive. The Art of Travel, Trade & Transportation, the fifth iteration of the exhibition series Ways of Seeing, explores the experience of the wider world through not only the visual arts, but also the very materials that comprise them.

Both artists who traveled to foreign lands and those who stayed closer to home, generated aspirational and enjoyable imagery for the armchair traveler—often their intended audience. The joys of leisure travel are contrasted by the more poignant aspects of necessities of travel—for economic opportunity, military service, fleeing hardship, or being transported against one’s will. Localized and globalized trade in prized goods such as silver, ivory, tea, tobacco and glass have a lasting and complicated legacy of beauty and tragedy. These works of art will surprise and delight viewers as well as provide room for reflection on the costs and benefits of travel, trade and transportation.

Drawn entirely from the Museum’s permanent collection, the exhibition features over 70 works, many of which have never been seen by the public. Nearly all media is represented ranging from paintings to woodblock prints, lithographs and photographs to quilts and jewelry. Works range in date from the 2nd to the 20th centuries and feature works by artists from: China, Cote d’Ivoire, England, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Mali, Navajo Nation, Scotland, South Africa, Sri Lanka, and the United States of America—including a number of Alabama artists.