Image: Akron Art Museum
Akron Art Museum will open ‘Barbara Kasten: Threshold’ on August 8, presenting a career-spanning exhibition by the photographer, video artist and installation artist across two interconnected sites in the museum. The show runs through January 31, 2027 and combines a sculptural installation in the Beatrice Knapp McDowell Grand Lobby with a survey of photography and video in the Fred and Laura Bidwell Gallery.
The museum describes Kasten as one of photography’s most innovative practitioners. For more than five decades, her work has moved between photography, sculpture and installation, using constructed studio environments built from geometric forms, mirrors and theatrical lighting. Those arrangements are then photographed to produce images that sit between the record of three-dimensional space and two-dimensional abstraction, with the artist’s practice focused on optical illusion and spatial ambiguity.
‘Threshold’ begins before visitors enter the galleries proper. In the Grand Lobby, translucent acrylic I-beams are suspended above the museum’s glass entryway, which the source notes was designed by Coop Himmelb(l)au. The beams refract natural light and alter the lobby’s atmosphere as visitors pass beneath them, with time of day, season and weather becoming part of the work’s changing appearance. The installation is presented as a sculptural threshold to the rest of the exhibition.
Inside the Fred and Laura Bidwell Gallery, photographs and video from across Kasten’s career trace the arc of her engagement with the medium. Among the works highlighted are ‘Metaphase 5’ and ‘Construct 32’, both color photographs from 1986 and both recently acquired by the museum. The source says these works anchor the earlier part of the exhibition and exemplify Kasten’s approach to color, light and spatial construction during a pivotal period in her career.
The exhibition also includes more recent projects in which Kasten engages with significant modernist buildings, extending the concerns of the lobby installation into the gallery context. Akron Art Museum presents the show as a dialogue between the museum’s own architecture and Kasten’s interest in how art can activate space, perception and movement. The museum’s materials say the exhibition is shown across the Grand Lobby and the Bidwell Gallery as connected but distinct environments.
‘Barbara Kasten: Threshold’ is organized in celebration of Kasten’s selection as winner of the Akron Art Museum’s 2025 Knight Foundation Purchase Award for Photographic Media. The museum says the award was established in 1990 through a gift from the Knight Foundation and recognizes living artists’ achievements in photography while adding work to the permanent collection.
The museum’s announcement identifies support for the exhibition from John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, Mary and Dr. George L. Demetros Charitable Trust, Kenneth L. Calhoun Charitable Trust and the Ohio Arts Council. ‘Barbara Kasten: Threshold’ is on view at Akron Art Museum in Ohio from August 8, 2026, to January 31, 2027.
