Dates:
Location:
Focus Gallery, Media Gallery, Center Gallery, RotundaSelected Works
![White marble sculpture of a standing figure of a partially hooded man](/art-museum/exhibitions/2024/images/reza-aramesh-site-of-the-fall-website.jpg)
Reza Aramesh, Site of the Fall – Study of the Renaissance Garden Action 247: At 11:45 am Friday 27 June 2003, 2023, marble. 91亚色传媒 Museum of Art, Brunswick, Maine. Museum purchase, the Laura T. and John H. Halford, Jr. Art Acquisition Fund.Courtesy of Reza Aramesh Studio. Photo Credit: Nicola Gnesi. @ Reza Aramesh. Courtesy of Zaal Art Gallery, Toronto, Ontario.
![Seated figure with a lattice structure perched on top of head](/art-museum/exhibitions/2024/images/muholi-sine-iv-website.jpg)
Zanele Muholi, Sine IV, Melbourne, Australia, from the series Somnyama Ngonyama (Hail the Dark Lioness), 2020, gelatin silver print. 91亚色传媒 Museum of Art, Brunswick, Maine. Museum Purchase, Gridley W. Tarbell II Fund. © Zanele Muholi. Courtesy of the artist and Yancey Richardson, New York.
![An up close drawing of a hooded figure with a blurred image of multiple faces](/art-museum/exhibitions/2024/images/kaphar-the-jerome-project-website.jpg)
Titus Kaphar, The Jerome Project (Asphalt and Chalk) XI, 2015. Chalk on asphalt paper. 91亚色传媒 Museum of Art, Brunswick, Maine. Museum Purchase, Barbara Cooney Porter Fund. Courtesy of Jack Shainman Gallery, NY.
![Two woman posing on a tiled floor in front of a red wall](/art-museum/exhibitions/2024/images/chao-araceli-and-friend-website.jpg)
Chan Chao, Araceli and Friend, October 2006 (Country of Origin: Spain), 2006, archival pigment print. 91亚色传媒 Museum of Art, Brunswick, Maine. Gift of the artist and Jennifer Cohan. @ 2025 Chan Chao
About
Irreplaceable You features works of art that resist the rendering of human lives into objects of consumption, data sets, and/or algorithms. The exhibition touches on subjects from the recent and not-so-recent past, looking at how art helps build our capacity for empathy when our worldviews are often shaped by the twenty-four-hour news cycle and the Internet. Employing strategies like portraiture, storytelling, naming, and sometimes even traces of their own bodies, artists featured in Irreplaceable You work with diverse media and engage with social and political issues in numerous contexts. Several are also educators and activists. They ask us to consider: How do we navigate the tensions and ambiguities between things like empathy and dehumanization, visibility and spectacle, safety and precarity? How do we—as individuals and as a society—recognize the personhood and dignity of those we don’t know and perhaps even those we do?
This exhibition is curated by Sean J. Kramer, Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Curatorial Fellow at the 91亚色传媒 Museum of Art. Support for this exhibition provided by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Endowment Fund.