Julie Wills’s ‘The Bitter Pains’ Opens at Academy Art Museum in Easton

The Academy Art Museum in Easton, Maryland, has opened ‘Julie Wills: The Bitter Pains,’ an exhibition of sculptural forms and fragmented text that examines the relationship between myth, architecture and the construction of meaning. The museum’s own listing gives the run as August 18 through November 8, 2026, at its building at 106 South Street.

Wills’s installation considers myth and architecture as forms of world-building: systems people use to make sense of unstable conditions. According to the museum, visitors encounter shifting narratives of love, loss and endurance through text fragments and sculptural objects, moving through language as though it were a physical space.

The works are made primarily from cast-off materials drawn from the building trades. Their use connects the exhibition’s formal language to cycles of use, abandonment and reuse, while addressing overlapping social, political and climatic uncertainties. The museum describes Wills’s approach as an examination of how consumerism and ecology have become intertwined in the landscapes people inhabit.

The museum’s biography of the artist specifies the materials: drywall, rigid foam insulation and roofing tar, layered into compositions that appear to peel back the skin of a building and expose its infrastructure — presented as a figure for the social and psychological frameworks that usually remain unseen. Her assemblages also take their references from architecture, landscape and the night sky.

An opening reception and artist talk with Julie Wills is scheduled for Saturday, August 22, at 2 p.m., and admission to the museum is free. The museum’s newsletter frames the programme through Wills’s use of salvaged material, fragmented text and what it calls the architecture of storytelling.

The exhibition is accompanied by a one-day workshop led by the artist, ‘Julie Wills: Text as Sculpture,’ on Saturday, October 10 from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. in the museum’s printmaking studio. Participants generate text from writing prompts and then site a temporary text-based work in or around the building; enrolment is capped at twelve, and the fee is $85 for members and $100 for non-members.

Wills lives and works in Baltimore and is an associate professor of art at Washington College. She holds an MFA from the University of Colorado at Boulder and an MA in art criticism from the University of Montana. Recent solo exhibitions include Plain Sight in Washington, DC, commissioned by the Embassy of Sweden and the European Union National Institutes for Culture, together with presentations at Bloomsburg University of Pennsylvania, Gettysburg College and MoCA Arlington.

The Academy Art Museum programmes exhibitions alongside classes, workshops and lectures. Concurrent activity includes ‘Under the Mexican Sky: A Revolution in Modern Photography,’ which the museum’s newsletter calls an anchor exhibition of its season, with related lectures by Monica Bravo on August 28 and Robin Owen Joyce on September 11, and ‘Art for the People: WPA-Era Prints from the Ponemone-Frommeyer Collection,’ running from September 8 to January 10, 2027. Admission is always free. ‘The Bitter Pains’ remains on view through November 8, 2026.