Fort Wayne Museum of Art is a quiet place yet brimming with stunning visuals and thought-provoking displays that reflect the human experience. 

What brings me back throughout the year is the museum rotates in new exhibitions, from their permanent collection and from touring exhibitions featuring living artists.

To find out what’s new, I spoke with Brit Micho, associate curator of exhibitions, who joined the museum in July after completing her master’s degree in art history at the University of Oregon.

America’s Everglades: Through the Lens of Clyde Butcher, through Jan. 26

Clyde Butcher, 82, is one of the most celebrated nature and landscape photographers and is compared to the great Ansel Adams, who died in 1984. Butcher’s life’s work is photographing the Florida Everglades, highlighting the need to preserve and restore a fragile, threatened ecosystem.

Step into the museum’s gallery and view the sheer scale of his stunning black-and-white photographs, real silver-halide photochemical prints as large as 5-by-9 feet, taken with giant cameras of a 150-year-old design using film negatives as large as 12-by-20 inches, processed in a massive darkroom with techniques Butcher has spent his life refining. 

The images are crisp and sparkling with tremendous detail and contrast between light and shade.

Now focus on the subject matter, from panoramas of cypress swamps, egrets, pelicans, and alligators, down to macro photos of orchids. You’ll learn how Butcher spent years planning photographs, carrying equipment deep into the swamps, setting it up chest-deep in black water, and working in seemingly impossible conditions.

On Oct. 21, Butcher was awarded the National Medal of the Arts, the highest award given by the U.S. government, for this work.

You might go online and find images, but nothing digital on a computer screen can do justice to his work. You have to see these gigantic handmade prints with your own eyes.

“Not only can you say it’s awesome to go back to the original ways of making photographs and taking photographs, but also learning how to be patient, I guess,” Micho said.

“Taking old ways of photographing things and shifting them into a contemporary light, that’s not anything that feels old-fashioned. It feels very contemporary.

“His whole artistic statement is to bring awareness to the Everglades and how they need to be protected. He goes into a lot of depth about the importance of the sawgrass marshes and the swamps and all the different types of trees that you can find in there, the homes for animals, even the ghost orchid, which is very, very rare.

“It’s very important to him to bring awareness to this.”

In the Paradigm Gallery, the museum’s fascinating shop, you’ll see several books of Butcher’s for sale, including a collection ranging across America’s national parks.

Habatat International Glass Invitational, through Jan. 26

The jewel of the museum, and its main focus as a collection, is the permanent, year-round exhibition in the Glass Wing, opened in 2022. It’s dedicated to studio glass, a dazzling and easy-to-appreciate form that melds art with industrial technology developed in the late 20th century. The Glass Wing features pieces from the tiny to the gigantic from artists around the world.

Through Jan. 26 you can also see the cutting-edge work of new artists in studio glass on loan from the Habatat Galleries in Detroit. Every year the Fort Wayne museum’s president, Charles Shepard, takes his staff to Habatat to identify new artists whose work they will feature in Fort Wayne.

Metropolis: Modernity in the Making, through Feb. 9

This is Micho’s first exhibition as curator: lithographs and drawings depicting the rise of America’s cities in the Modern era. 

To art historians, “Modern” refers to a specific period, between 1900 and the 1940s, crossing two world wars, and extending into the 1960s. 

In this exhibition, the erection of monumental skylines and machinery are contrasted with the gritty underbelly of the conditions of the laborers that built it all, flocking to rapidly growing cities. Featured artists include Rockwell Kent, Charles Rosen, Louis Lozowick, and Jan Matulka.

A centerpiece will be a kiosk showing a portion of Fritz Lang’s celebrated German silent film from 1927, Metropolis. 

“It’s what I wrote my master’s thesis on,” Micho said. “It’s the mother of all sci-fi films. It’s relevant to all of the anxieties of the growing cities.

“Fritz Lang took the inspiration from his first trip to New York City in 1924.”

Movement: Black Art in Focus, through March 2

Examine works by Black artists in the 20th and 21st centuries, in three parts: the spread of people, the drives for social and racial justice, and visual movement. 

Featured artists include Jacob Lawrence, Faith Ringgold, and Ernest Withers.

Print and Drawing Study Center

With the new year, Sachi Yanari-Rizzo, curator of prints and drawings, will continue a series of exhibitions from the museum’s permanent collection: The Mexican Portfolios from Jan. 7-Feb. 27; Expressionism and Spirituality from March 11-May 2; Surrealism Into Abstract Expressionism from May 13-June 27; and 20th Century Japanese Prints: Shin Hanga and Sosaku Hanga from July 8-Aug. 29.

And there’s more

Micho hinted at exhibitions not yet announced: a major one on 19th century realist paintings and a whimsical show called My Purseonal Favorites, over 300 handbags from the massive collection of fashion historian Ilene Hochberg Wood. They’ll also host a big fashion show May 5 featuring 10 local designers. 

We’re waiting on those press releases and we’ll keep you posted.

As I’m bound to say, you can follow the museum’s posts on social media and watch virtual tours on their YouTube channel, but this pales in comparison to going there and seeing these works up close with your own eyes. So take your family; it’s a great outing. 

Admission is $10 for adults and $25 for families, and there are discounts and memberships, too. The museum will be closed a couple of days around Christmas and New Year’s so check their schedule at fwmoa.org before you visit.

December and January are quiet months at the museum, but through the coming year they’ll have art education events and curator’s tours for schools, families, adults, and seniors.