To support planning for The Tennessee River: A Journey through its Art, Biodiversity, Histories, and Lifeways (tentative title), a place-based, collaborative project that uniquely combines the McClung’s art, scientific, and material culture collections, bringing together Native experts, scholars, and community representatives to interpret the river in a long-term exhibition. The immersive exhibition showcases the rich flora and fauna of the river and celebrates its cultural significance, fostering a deeper understanding of its multifaceted history and lifeways.

To support planning, research, and development for the redesign of a new permanent exhibition, Honoring our Journey, 2.0 (HOJ 2.0). HOJ 1.0 dates to 2008, but today the museum exists in a different context—recovering from an economic downturn exacerbated by COVID, battling a rise in anti-Asian/anti-AANHPI/anti-immigrant hate, and accommodating for demographic shifts and rapid increases in AANHPIs in the region. HOJ 2.0 displays artworks, objects, photos, and archival items that reflect the new reality.

To support Scenic Vistas: Landscape as Culture in Early New York (working title), a collection-based exhibition that is the first to consider decorative arts as evidence of New York’s embrace of landscape as a cultural asset prior to the emergence of the Hudson River School. Presented in conversation with contemporary art works, the exhibition connects the traditions of Hudson Valley design and stewardship as well as highlighting Boscobel’s house, collection, and Hudson River setting.

To support Theresa Hak Kyung Cha: Multiple Offerings, a collection-based exhibition that is the first major retrospective in more than 20 years of the work of the underrecognized artist. Multiple Offerings provides audiences an unprecedented opportunity to see the entirety of Cha’s oeuvre through more than 100 objects drawn primarily from the collection and archives, along with select loans of works by other artists to contextualize Cha’s practice within larger cultural, social, and political narratives in American art and to show the lasting impact of her legacy. Orgranizers will bring together a diversity of voices that have been historically underrepresented and excluded from writing narratives of American art.

To support Emily Cole: Art & Artistry, a traveling collection-based exhibition that reclaims the successful 19th-century career of Emily Cole and positions her work within the trajectory of American art through new scholarship and the contemporary artwork of eight women from the Asian, Black, Caribbean diaspora, and Indigenous communities. The initiative aims to foreground 40 of her botanical paintings on paper and porcelain from the collection and to shift interpretative frameworks that persist around botanical and ceramic work from hobby to art.