Margie Hughto: New Ground
August 8 – December 6, 2026
James W. Mitchell, Jr., Gallery North

Time Changes Everything : Five Artists, Five Voices

Time Changes Everything brings together five artists whose work, across generations and media, contends with the one force none of us escapes: the passage of time. First conceived as an experimental group exhibition in 2019, Time Changes Everything has since grown into an ongoing educational project. Bringing together artists from all walks of life and engaging students at the academic museums where it has been shown, the project invites collaboration around a shared theme: how art registers our anxieties, revolutions, and evolving visual language across mediums. From the ruins of ancient civilizations to the fossils of our own consumption, from the immersive frontier of virtual space to the quiet renewal that follows loss, these five voices trace how time shapes, erodes, and remakes the world around us. The exhibition season finds its root in Esther Gentle—sculptor, painter, and printmaker, and a foundational figure in this museum’s own history—and extends outward to four contemporary artists whose practices carry her spirit of inquiry into the present moment. Together, Gentle, Beth Bischoff, Darcy Gerbarg, Margie Hughto and Babs Reingold remind us that art is itself a way of marking time: a means of holding, however briefly, what time is always carrying away.

Margie Hughto: New Ground

In New Ground, Margie Hughto’s Excavation Series takes the discarded objects of modern life: fragments of technology, the debris of consumption, and recasts them in ceramic as the fossils of our own era. Positioning the viewer sifting the strata of today, Hughto reflects on degradation, permanence, and the physical memory of time. The exhibition also debuts a new body of work made in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic: a more abstract turn in her clay paintings, oriented toward growth, renewal, and return. Together, the two series trace a movement from what time buries to what it brings back; decay and renewal, ruin and regrowth, suggesting that the same ground that holds the remnants of the past is also where new life takes root.

Margie Hughto is a ceramic artist and scholar whose work is held in the collections of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and the Everson Museum of Art, among many others. She is the Co-author of A Century of Ceramics in the United States, 1878–1978. In 2026, Hughto retired from her position as a full professor at Syracuse University for more than five decades, and completed major public commissions including murals for the Cortlandt Street subway station in New York, which is concurrently ongoing to be both expanded and renovated within the next year.

Image credit: Margie Hughto, What Lies Beneath; Discarded and Rediscovered (Installation), 2021. 125 Raku-fired elements, 8′ diameter. On loan from the artist