This guide is sponsored by Rochester Art Center

This winter, Rochester Art Center is filled with ways to experience art, from powerful exhibitions to hands-on activities. Exhibitions on view include Erin Smith: Hard Copy, which explores the shifting boundaries between digital and physical form through the artist’s ceramic and scanning practices; Moving Beyond Bars, an immersive exhibition created in collaboration with incarcerated artists in Florida and South Dakota; Cyclone, a reflective installation tracing the 1883 tornado that forever shaped Rochester’s evolution into a global medical destination; and Celebrations in Fiber, organized by the Zumbro River Fiber Arts Guild. Each exhibition invites visitors to connect with art, history, and community in meaningful ways.

Beyond the galleries, free Public Art Tours offer a chance to experience Rochester through a new lens. Join a Peace Plaza tour at 1 PM starting at the Historic Chateau Theater, or a Mayo Park tour beginning at 1 PM at the Art Center’s main entrance. Both last about 45 minutes and highlight work by celebrated local and international artists.

For those who want to create, the Art Center will offer special screen printing workshops in December and January in conjunction with Cyclone. These hands-on sessions invite participants of all experience levels to learn the basics of screen printing while producing original prints inspired by the exhibition. The Creative Studio also remains open for all ages, providing self-guided activities and materials inspired by current exhibitions.

Whether you’re visiting for an exhibition, a tour, or a chance to make art yourself, the Art Center offers something for everyone this season!

Hard Copy

ARTIST: Erin Smith

DATES: November 29, 2025 – August 2, 2026

Rochester Art Center presents Erin Smith: Hard Copy, a solo exhibition that examines how objects shift as they move between the physical and digital realms. Drawing from her long practice of collecting rocks, Smith begins by scanning natural stones shaped over millennia and bringing them into photogrammetry and CAD environments. She then reinterprets these forms through 3D-printed clay and plastic, creating molds that allow for repetition, experimentation, and a deeper investigation into how each translation alters the original object. Through this process, Smith reveals the subtle distortions and reinterpretations that emerge when ancient materials are filtered through contemporary tools.

The resulting works challenge the idea that digital production is fast or immaterial. Each step introduces a change in fidelity that becomes part of the object’s evolving identity, merging geological history with digital transformation. Some pieces flatten visually in reference to screen-based environments, while others echo early pixel graphics through hand-cast repetition that contrasts sharply with the ease of software duplication. Displayed on mosaic stone bases inspired by Midwestern grotto folk art, the sculptures ultimately reconnect the digital-to-physical loop to place and tradition, grounding Hard Copy in Smith’s Midwestern roots.

DATES: October 26, 2025 – March 29, 2026

Cyclone traces the remarkable chain of events set in motion on August 21, 1883, when a devastating F5 tornado tore through downtown Rochester. In the storm’s wake, local physicians led by Dr. William Worrall Mayo treated hundreds of wounded residents, aided by Mother Alfred Moes and the Sisters of St. Francis, who converted a dance hall into an emergency hospital. Their collaboration ultimately inspired Mother Alfred’s vision for a permanent medical facility. Despite initial reluctance, Dr. Mayo agreed to serve as medical director if she could secure the funding, and in 1889 St. Marys Hospital opened with the Mayos as its sole medical staff and the Sisters providing skilled nursing care. This partnership formed the foundation of what would become the Mayo Clinic, transforming a small prairie town into a center of global medical innovation.

The exhibition reflects on this pivotal moment, asking how communities are shaped by forces of resilience and reinvention. A committee of historians, curators, and community members selected sixty artifacts from the History Center of Olmsted County’s collection—objects representing themes such as the Mayo Clinic, IBM, Immigration, and Civil Rights—and invited regional artists to reinterpret them through contemporary, interactive installations. The resulting works illuminate how the past continues to inform the present, each shaped by the artists’ lived experiences and questions. Cyclone invites visitors into an evolving dialogue between memory and creativity, encouraging them to consider how history, like a powerful storm, continually reshapes the cultural landscape of Rochester.

Moving Beyond Bars

ARTIST: Co-Created by Suzanne Costello & Ariadne Albright

DATES: October 11, 2025 – February 8, 2026

Rochester Art Center presents Moving Beyond Bars, an immersive exhibition shaped by the voices and creative labor of incarcerated women in Florida and incarcerated men in South Dakota. Developed through multi-year artist residencies supported by the National Endowment for the Arts, the project brings together large-scale murals, personal writings, movement-based documentation, and an original soundscape. Co-led by dance and theater director Suzanne Costello and visual artist Ariadne Albright, the exhibition offers a rare public window into work created within prisons and reentry environments across the United States, inviting viewers to encounter stories of humanity, resilience, and self-reclamation.

Through its powerful blend of visual art, performance, and reflective writing, Moving Beyond Bars demonstrates how creative practice can foster healing, agency, and a renewed sense of identity for people experiencing incarceration. Participants, whose ages, cultural backgrounds, and sentences vary widely, collaborate in intensive residencies that culminate in artworks and group presentations rooted in personal truth. Many enter the process with little or no artistic experience, yet leave with a strengthened sense of possibility. This exhibition offers visitors the chance to witness that transformation and consider the profound role art can play in shaping futures, communities, and the systems that hold them.

Celebrations in Fiber

DATES: March 12, 2025 – March 31, 2026

ARTISTS: Zumbro River Fiber Arts Guild

Rochester Art Center is proud to present Celebrations in Fiber, a dynamic exhibition that showcases the rich and varied world of fiber arts. Framed works, scrolls, and installations highlight both the beauty and functionality of fiber in everyday life. We touch, wear, and admire fiber daily in the form of paper, cloth, wool, felt, patterns, yarn, thread, rugs, and clothing. Yet usefulness is only part of the story. Fiber also decorates, inspires, tells stories, commemorates events, and connects us to memory and emotion. Like a river, fiber flows through our lives in countless ways, meeting our needs and moving our spirits.

About the Installation
The atrium features a striking multi-story river and waterfall surrounded by hoops filled with fiber art. Each balcony overlooking the river offers a new perspective, drawing visitors deeper into the artistry and versatility of fiber.

About the Artists
The exhibition is organized by the Zumbro River Fiber Arts Guild, a dedicated community of fiber artists founded in 1975 during a time of renewed interest in traditional crafts. What began as a small group passionate about spinning and weaving has grown into a vibrant collective embracing every facet of fiber arts, from knitting and sewing to dyeing and contemporary practices. Over the years, the Guild has hosted style shows, retreats, workshops, and conferences, fostering creativity and connection among fiber artists and the wider community.

Moudhi Alhajri: Qatari Heritage

ARTIST: Moudhi Abusatwa Alhajri (موضي الهاجري)

DATES: December 2024 – March 2026

Rochester Art Center presents an exhibition of photographs by Qatari artist Moudhi Abusatwa Alhajri (موضي الهاجري). Author of the documentary book Yemen, A Passion that Captivates You, Alhajri has spent years documenting cultural landscapes through travel photography and personal reflection. Her work celebrates history, tradition, and the vibrancy of daily life.

This exhibition highlights photographs of Qatari people, animals, and scenery. By layering up to six digital images, Alhajri adds depth and texture, creating a multi-sensory effect. Juxtaposing traditional occupations with contemporary skylines, her images invite viewers into the dynamic culture of a rapidly changing nation.

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Ascend

ARTISTS: Alyssa Baguss & Erin Sharkey

DATES: 2024-2034

A Public Art Initiative for Bird Safety

Rochester Art Center presents a public art project at the intersection of creativity and conservation. In 2024, artists Alyssa Baguss and Erin Sharkey collaborated on two 50-foot-tall window installations designed both as powerful works of art and as deterrents to bird collisions, a longstanding challenge for the building since 2004.

Sharkey contributed a poem with themes of sky, flight, and migration, while Baguss created imagery in response. The words appear on the front windows, and the artwork, titled Ascend, fills the rear windows with geometric forms that reference migration, return, and the fragility of glass. Produced with perforated vinyl, the installations allow light to filter through while protecting birds in flight. Together, these works demonstrate how art can spark awareness, protect the natural world, and inspire new solutions.

Extraordinary Elsewhere

FEATURED ARTISTS: Dahn Gim, Ivonne Yáñez, Mayumi Amada, Peng Wu, Prima Jalichandra-Sakuntabhai, Rituparna Rana, Roshan Ganu, Shafrin Islam, and Ziba Rajabi.

CURATOR: Zoe Cinel

DATES: June 7, 2025 – February 1, 2026

Rochester Art Center presents Extraordinary Elsewhere, an exhibition that asks what we carry with us when we leave home and how objects, rituals, and stories help us connect across distance and time. Featuring nine international artists based in Minnesota, the exhibition brings together works that span dance, storytelling, poetry, site-specific installations, mixed media sculpture, expanded painting, and experimental animation.

The exhibition reflects on movement, memory, and the search for belonging in unfamiliar spaces. Both ephemeral and enduring, the works create a dialogue about living between present and past, reconciliation and discovery. An accompanying short documentary by Pawan Sharma, with interviews by Rituparna Rana, further explores how cultural histories and personal journeys shape artistic expression.

Face in Clouds, invisible ink

ARTIST: Ryan Woodring

CURATOR: Zoe Cinel

DATES: September 13, 2025 – April 2026

Rochester Art Center presents Face in Clouds, invisible ink, a solo exhibition by New York–based artist Ryan Woodring. The exhibition brings together recent bodies of work shaped by Woodring’s ongoing reckoning with invisible illness. Drawing from ritualized visualization practices, the works trace cycles of visibility and obscurity, translating internal afflictions into speculative material forms.

Highlights include Today (and Possibly Tomorrow), a series of 3D-printed candies modeled in real time as the artist experienced symptoms, and Sick and Tired at the Met, a drawing series and installation created by rendering every object in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s database tagged with “sick” or “tired.” Across sculpture, drawing, and time-based practices, Woodring explores how pain, language, and legibility intersect in a hyper-classified, post-AI world.

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Creative Studio

DATES: Fridays & Saturdays, 11 AM – 3:30 PM // September – May*

ADMISSION:  FREE for Members, Non-members: $5 at the front desk plus general admission fee

The Creative Studio at Rochester Art Center is a vibrant, hands-on space where visitors of all ages can dive into self-led art activities inspired by the exhibitions on view. Whether you’re visiting with kids, friends, or flying solo, you’ll find everything you need to turn your ideas into expressive, one-of-a-kind creations—no experience needed, and all materials provided.

A friendly Creative Studio Assistant is always nearby to get you started and answer questions. Just bring your curiosity and we’ll supply the rest.

Come get inspired, get messy, and leave with something you made yourself. Art is for everyone—and so is the Creative Studio.

*The Creative Studio will be closed on the following dates:

• Friday, November 28 & Saturday, November 29, 2025

• Friday, December 26 & Saturday, December 27, 2025

• Friday, January 2 & Saturday, January 3, 2026

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Drop-In Tours

Saturdays at 1 pm*

$8 for Adults, $5 for Seniors & Military

Free for Ages 21 & Under, Free for Members

No reservations required.

Enjoy a docent-led, guided tour of the Rochester Art Center’s current exhibitions featuring the work of regional, national and international artists in a contemporary architectural setting. Tours last approximately 45 minutes. Tours not available on holiday weekends.

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