Amalia Wojciechowski, assistant director and collections curator
At the Woodson Art Museum, we’re always living a few years in the future. Even as Birds in Art Fifty fills our galleries and delights visitors this fall, the next exhibitions are quietly taking shape behind the scenes.
Curating, despite its name, is rarely about the quick or the new. It’s a long game — a process of aligning artworks, ideas, and timing so that they speak to one another in meaningful ways. The best exhibitions, like the best conversations, emerge from sustained attention. They’re built through years of collecting, researching, and thinking alongside artists, colleagues, and visitors.
One of those upcoming projects, Hot off the Press, will open in summer 2026. It celebrates the expressive potential of printmaking — from relief and intaglio to lithography and serigraphy — and highlights the ingenuity artists bring to these centuries-old techniques. It’s also an exhibition about the kind of slow collaboration between perspectives: mine and my colleague Shannon Pueschner’s.
Sherrie York, Interlace (5/20), undated, linocut
Shannon’s approach centers on process and the artist’s hand — on how experimentation and technique shape meaning. My own perspective leans toward art history, tracing how the visual language of printmaking has evolved and how individual works converse across time. Together, Hot off the Press will bridge these viewpoints, showing how artists both honor and upend tradition to keep the medium alive and inventive.
Right now, we’re finalizing the exhibition checklist — the list of works that will appear on the walls — while considering design elements, reviewing framing needs, and thinking through how to make the installation both cohesive and dynamic. Beyond the artworks themselves, there’s an entire infrastructure taking shape: coordinating with our coworkers in marketing, education, visitor services, and facilities to ensure every detail aligns well before opening day. The planning may be quiet, but it’s constant — a rhythm that hums beneath every exhibition on view.
Dale C. Bradley, Wood Duck (2/5) Artist Proof, 1980
Curating, after all, is the long game. It requires patience, foresight, and trust that the small decisions made today will add up to something resonant years from now. As Birds in Art celebrates its remarkable legacy, we’re already looking ahead — building the foundation for the next exhibition that will continue the Museum’s commitment to creativity, craft, and connection.
