The Arkansas Museum of Fine Arts (AMFA) announces its upcoming exhibition schedule for the remainder of 2025 and into 2026, highlighting key works in the AMFA Foundation Collection and traveling exhibitions from Europe and beyond.
On view in the Harriet and Warren Stephens Family Gallery from February 19 – September 6, 2026, is A Month of Sundays: Art and the Persistence of Time, an exhibition examining the human perception of time.
“Presenting A Month of Sundays alongside two contemplative new media works — Eija-Liisa Ahtila’s On Breathing and the U.S. premiere of Mat Collishaw’s Aftermaths — AMFA is creating a place to reflect on how the universal themes of humanity’s relationship with time and nature impact today’s culture,” shares AMFA Curator Dr. Jennifer Jankauskas.
After Uncommon Threads in Contemporary Art closes in April, Will Barnet: Seasons of Life takes over the Berta and John Baird Gallery, showcasing works on paper by this celebrated American artist.
Material Nature: The Robyn and John Horn Collection brings an expansive craft collection to AMFA Galleries in August, demonstrating the devotion of skilled artists who explore an innovative approach to traditional materials.
AMFA concludes 2026 with the opening of The Age of Anxiety: German Expressionism in Art and Film and Soviet Cinema: Mikhail Dlugach and 1920s Poster Design. Together, these two exhibitions explore how artists responded to a post-World War I era.
“These two exhibitions explore major historical moments that transformed our visual culture,” says Dr. Catherine Walworth, Jackye and Curtis Finch, Jr. Curator of Drawings. “While The Age of Anxiety expresses a cultural and political nervousness between world wars, the Soviet Cinema celebrates film in a post-revolutionary era using dramatically modern graphic design.”
Admission to AMFA is always free. For more information about AMFA or upcoming exhibitions, visit arkmfa.org. See the full schedule of exhibitions below:
A Month of Sundays: Art and the Persistence of Time
Harriet and Warren Stephens Family Gallery
February 19 – September 6, 2026
Think about how you experience time. Are there moments that slow down and stretch? Or do they happen as quickly as the blink of an eye? The Southern turn of phrase, “a month of Sundays,” suggests a prolonged period of time. The exhibition A Month of Sundays: Art and the Persistence of Time explores the concept of time through modern and contemporary works of art in a wide range of media including craft, video, painting, drawing, and sculpture by nearly fifty artists. Organized into five sections, Slow Time, For the Duration, Aging and Decay, Marking Time, and A Sense of Pause, the works of art in the exhibition demonstrate and expand upon the way we mark and experience time in our lives and in the environment.
George Segal’s life-sized sculpture Woman on A Bench, 1997, portrays a tired figure waiting for a bus or taking a moment to rest, and Richard Yarde’s painting, The Stoop, 1969-1970, depicts several men sitting on a stoop, relaxing and passing time together. Other artworks demonstrate how we measure time, such as Mimi Smith’s drawing December 14, 1978, The Eleven O’Clock News, 1979, where the artist transcribed an evening news broadcast marking the activities of the day. Photographer William Ferris tracks the ageing process on the human body in his portraits of authors Alex Haley and Alice Walker taken years apart, and a rocking chair by artist and designer George Nakashima represents a desire to sit, slow down, and rest. These works of art and the others included in A Month of Sundays set a fresh new cadence of slow looking. They offer unique surprises, broaden our thinking about time, and encourage us to rebel against our fast-paced world.
Curated by AMFA Curator, Dr. Jennifer Jankauskas, A Month of Sundays: Art and the Persistence of Time is organized by the Mid-South Cohort, an art-sharing collaboration among the Memphis Brooks Museum of Art; Arkansas Museum of Fine Arts; Birmingham Museum of Art; Fisk University Galleries; and Mississippi Museum of Art.
The Mid-South Cohort presents a series of American art exhibitions created through a multi-year, multi-institutional partnership formed by the Memphis Brooks Museum of Art as part of the Art Bridges Cohort Program.
On Breathing: Eija-Liisa Ahtila
Fine Arts Club New Media Gallery
December 13, 2025 – May 24, 2026
Renowned Finnish artist and filmmaker Eija-Liisa Ahtila’s (b. 1959) On Breathing is a visual reminder to slow down, take a moment, and concentrate on our breath. In this film, Ahtila portrays a stately oak tree consumed by morning fog. New rhythms appear with Ahtila’s pattern of boxes that focus on parts of the tree emerging from fog before fading away. These, along with the sounds of birdsong, the ebb and flow of the tides of the nearby seashore, and wind rustling through the leaves, all create the illusion that the tree itself is breathing. In and out, our breaths merge with the sounds and the movement of the tree, creating a shared connection with another living thing. As we focus on our breath, our sense of the passage of time slows, bringing us into a meditative space.
Courtesy of the Artist and Marian Goodman Gallery. This exhibition is organized by the Arkansas Museum of Fine Arts.
Will Barnet: Seasons of Life
Berta and John Baird Gallery
May 2 – October 11, 2026
Drawing from an extensive selection of works on paper by Will Barnet (1911 – 2012) in the AMFA Foundation Collection, this exhibition celebrates an artist for whom the pendulum between realism and abstraction swung profoundly. Barnet was at the center of major American art movements—documenting social realities during the Great Depression, developing abstraction in the postwar New York art scene, and returning to a new type of realism in the 1960s. This exhibition, evoking the title of the artist’s famous screenprint series, The Silent Seasons, represents the shifting modes of Barnet’s career, looks for continuous throughlines, and commemorates AMFA’s long relationship with the artist.
Will Barnet: Seasons of Life is supported in part by Jackye and Curtis Finch, Jr.
This exhibition is organized by the Arkansas Museum of Fine Arts.
Aftermaths: Mat Collishaw
Fine Arts Club New Media Gallery
June 6 – November 15, 2026
In his newest film, Aftermaths, British painter, photographer, sculptor, and filmmaker Mat Collishaw (b. 1966) portrays an uncanny and unsettling vision of our not-too-distant future. Plunging us into the depths of the ocean, Collishaw’s grotesque sea creatures mutate, evolve, and swim through a dystopian world to vividly illustrate the price of progress and humanity’s impact on the planet. In the watery depths, Collishaw reveals the consequences of unchecked human pollution from industrial waste, heavy metals, and microplastics, combined with the ecological toll from the energy demands of artificial intelligence.
Courtesy of Mat Collishaw and Arvo Pärt’s Cantus in Memory of Benjamin Britten incorporated within the artwork by kind permission of the composer, performed by Hungarian State Opera Orchestra and Tamas Benedek (conductor), courtesy of NAXOS.
This exhibition is organized by the Arkansas Museum of Fine Arts.
Material Nature: The Robyn and John Horn Collection
Robyn and John Horn Gallery
August 22, 2026 – April 25, 2027
Robyn and John Horn built their collection on personal artistic inspiration, a devoted relationship with the craft community, and lifelong friendships. They started purchasing work with no intention of amassing an extensive craft collection.
Craft is deeply rooted in tradition. Historically, crafts were made by highly skilled artisans creating furniture, textiles, utilitarian ceramics, glassware, and silver service sets.
In the 20th century, craft began to split into two directions: functional objects and nonfunctional works. Most of the art in the AMFA Foundation Collection from the Horns is non-functional, sculptural works, exploring how materials are pushed, explored, and reimagined into forms that embody mass, movement, and sophistication.
Their collection ranges from the pioneers of the Studio Craft Movement in the 1950s and 1960s, with works by Toshiko Takaezu, Ed Rossbach, Stephen de Stabler, and Dale Chihuly, to the current voices of Hoss Haley, Michael Peterson, Todd Hoyer, Thomas Spleth, Mary Giles, and more.
The Horns have generously gifted over 250 works to AMFA. Material Nature will be presented in both the Robyn and John Horn Gallery in the Windgate Art School from August 22, 2026 until April 25, 2027, and on view in the Governor Winthrop Rockefeller Gallery from March 14, 2026 until March 7, 2027.
This exhibition is organized by the Arkansas Museum of Fine Arts.
The Age of Anxiety: German Expressionism in Art and Film
Harriet and Warren Stephens Family Gallery
October 9, 2026 – January 10, 2027
The Age of Anxiety: German Expressionism in Art and Film takes a bold new look at an extraordinary modern movement. Germany was in political and economic turmoil following World War I. Out of the chaos, prewar Expressionists found new subjects, creating unforgettable art with jagged lines, shadowy settings, and unsettling beauty.
While German Expressionists sought to outwardly reflect the energies and tensions of contemporary life, films of the 1920s took this to an imaginative new level, creating a new brand of horror and science fiction cinema. In The Age of Anxiety, paintings, sculptures, and graphic works sit side-by-side with images from the era’s iconic films, including The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920), Nosferatu (1921), and Metropolis (1927). Together, they form a startling visual outcry from one of the most pivotal eras in history, one whose legacy still impacts us today.
Having toured Europe, an expanded version of the exhibition will make its United States debut at the Arkansas Museum of Fine Arts.
The Age of Anxiety: German Expressionism in Art and Film is in cooperation with the Institute for Cultural Exchange and the Friedrich-Wilhelm-Murnau Foundation.
Soviet Cinema: Mikhail Dlugach and 1920s Poster Design
Berta and John Baird Gallery
October 24, 2026 – March 14, 2027
In 1920s Moscow, poster artists created an exciting new graphic design language that is still relevant today. At the center of this art of persuasion was Ukrainian artist Mikhail O. Dlugach (1893-1988). Having arrived in Moscow in 1922, his work reflects one of the most critical periods of modern art and politics. The decade that followed the 1917 Russian Revolution saw modern artists exuberantly, if briefly, enlisted to help reimagine society, before the ultimate governmental suppression. In this politically tense era, film poster design straddled the competing worlds of abstraction and realism, while engaging the young art of film.
Timed to coincide with The Age of Anxiety: German Expressionism in Art and Film, this presentation offers a parallel world of Soviet poster art. This exhibition celebrates San Francisco-based collector and gallerist Martin Muller’s recent donation of modern and contemporary art to AMFA. Just one area of his extensive gift, these Soviet-era posters highlight Muller’s commitment to collecting and offering rare glimpses of Eastern European art since 1980—a decade before the fall of the Soviet Union.
This exhibition is organized by the Arkansas Museum of Fine Arts.
About the Arkansas Museum of Fine Arts
Founded in 1937, the Arkansas Museum of Fine Arts is the largest cultural institution of its kind in the state, offering a unique blend of visual and performing arts experiences. AMFA is committed to featuring diverse media and artistic perspectives within its permanent collection as well as through rotating temporary exhibitions. AMFA’s international collection spans eight centuries, with strengths in works on paper and contemporary craft, and includes notable holdings by artists from Arkansas, the South, and across the United States and Europe.
With a vibrant mix of ideas, cultures, people, and places, AMFA extends this commitment to diversity through the innovative Windgate Art School, a dynamic children’s theatre and performing arts program, and community-focused educational programs for all ages. Located in Little Rock’s oldest urban green space, MacArthur Park, AMFA’s landmark building and grounds are designed by Studio Gang and SCAPE, in collaboration with Polk Stanley Wilcox Architects.