The Dayton/Kyoto Invitational is an international print exchange between the Dayton Printmaker’s Cooperative and Gen Studio Group in Kyoto, Japan, which has been taking place since 2003. Each exhibition is centered around a central theme, with the 2025 theme being “Water.” This is the first time this innovative collaboration will be featured at the Dayton Art Institute.
Throughout human history, people have loved putting things on their fingers. Often made with precious materials, they serve a wide range of purposes, from enhancing one’s appearance and indicating social status to establishing relationships and providing protection. Drawn from the collection of more than 180 rings gathered by one of the DAI’s founders, Brainerd Thresher, this exhibition presents a wide range of rings from places as different as Egypt and Thailand and spanning thousands of years, reflecting humans’ endless fascination with these small circles.
For commercial and fine art photographer Jay Hoops, exploration and experimentation drove her work. The Long Island photographer returned again and again to the Polaroid format, valued for its instantaneous results and trusted for its honest capture of a moment in time. Polaroids have no need for darkroom development or printing, which means little chance to manipulate an image—yet Hoops created a series of dreamy, atmospheric scenes with dramatic lighting and mysterious subjects that are difficult to explain. The exhibition is exclusive to the DAI.
A sense of joy and wonder is apparent in the art of American artist Alexander Calder. With his recognizable use of solid colors and floating shapes, the works express the artist’s delightful approach to artistic creation. This exhibition includes works from the collection, promised gifts as well as loans from private collections.
These complementary exhibitions look at images of our beloved pets within the Dayton Art Institute collection. Whether you are a dog person or a cat person (or, like many, you love both equally), these paired exhibitions draw on objects from across the collection and feature a range of media, including paintings, photographs, prints and sculptures. These charming exhibitions are exclusive to the DAI.
One of the outstanding series in the history of Japanese woodblock prints, Tsukioka Yoshitoshi’s 100 Aspects of the Moon is also the culmination of the artist’s career. Issued as individual prints from 1885–1892, the series is a tour-de-force, combining diverse, striking designs with dramatic historical and mythical stories from Japan’s past. Drawing a selection from the DAI’s complete set, the exhibition is presented in three installments, each focusing on a different theme in the series.
Dayton Art Institute showcases work by painter and educator, Curtis Barnes, Sr. Barnes, a longtime fixture of Dayton’s art scene. His bold, colorful and experimental paintings are a distinctive blend of naturalism with abstraction. Barnes’ works frequently include self-portraits and portraiture depicting the people in his life. His influence is still felt today among his students and in the African American Visual Arts Guild, which he co-founded with artist “Bing” Davis in 1992. He is recognized for his artistic contribution and was presented with the “Paul Laurence Dunbar Humanitarian Award” in 1994 and the “Lifetime Achievement Award” from the Ohio Arts Council in 2008.
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