Image: Jule Collins Smith Museum of Fine Art, Auburn
The Jule Collins Smith Museum of Fine Art at Auburn University will reopen its galleries on August 18, 2026 with a slate of exhibitions organized around the theme of color, including 'Jerry Walden: Spectrum' in the Corridor Gallery. The museum says the exhibition will run through December 6, 2026 and will be on view as part of the institution’s Fall 2026 program.
'Jerry Walden: Spectrum' brings together a later-career series of paintings on loan from the artist’s family. The museum describes the work as part of a larger body of paintings in which Walden explored Isaac Newton’s theory of color, as laid out in 'Opticks' (1704). In the exhibition text, Newton is presented as a physicist, mathematician and philosopher whose experiments with a glass prism showed that sunlight contains a spectrum of seven colors. Walden’s paintings translate that scientific framework into quilt-like patterns.
Walden was born in Langdale, Alabama, and earned his bachelor’s degree in fine art from Auburn University in 1968. Over more than 50 years, he taught art across the South before settling at Winthrop University in Rock Hill, South Carolina. The museum’s exhibition page also notes that his career moved repeatedly between abstraction and figuration and that his work was shaped in part by a lasting interest in Renaissance painting.
The exhibition arrives within a broader museum reopening that is explicitly centered on color as both a visual and conceptual subject. In an email announcing the fall season, The Jule said the new exhibitions would explore color as “one of the most basic yet complex elements of visual art,” with artists across media using it as a means of communication and emotion. The museum also said general admission and all programs are free.
Exhibition information on the museum’s website lists 'Jerry Walden: Spectrum' in the Corridor Gallery from August 18 to December 6, 2026. The exhibition page includes several selected works, among them 'Zoom #3' (2016), 'Hundred Sixty-Eight (Lesson More)' (2015–16), 'Zoom #1' (2016) and 'Hundred Sixty-Six (Glory Be)' (2015). One work shown in the email, 'Hundred Sixty Six (Glory Be),' is identified as an acrylic on canvas on loan from the artist’s family.
The reopening also includes related exhibitions and programs listed by the museum for the same season, but the Walden show sits at the center of the color theme. The Jule’s online guide through Bloomberg Connects also lists the 2026–27 academic year theme as Color and gives the exhibition dates as August 18 to December 6, 2026.
