Click on an exhibit below to explore it in a virtual version of the Clyfford Still Museum.

Stories We Tell: The Collection Two Ways

This exhibition presents this collection in two complementary but alternate ways to explore how artworks and their understanding can change based upon curatorial strategy. The Stories We Tell: The Collection Two Ways installation begins with a chronological presentation in the first five galleries. In the remaining rooms, artworks are grouped across time under specific thematic categories. The primary goal for both strategies is the same—to elucidate some of the main foundations that ground Still’s art, including his stylistic path from representation to abstraction; the role of figuration, color, machines, and doubling in his art; how an image can change across media; and finally, Still’s conception of artistic space.

Museums go to great lengths to organize their collections: by culture, maker, nationality, chronology, stylistic movement, theme, and even size. While thoughtful organization of artworks is essential, each strategy has its own strengths and shortcomings. This exercise proposes the importance of a multiplicity of approaches when presenting artworks to an audience, so people with different learning styles and varying art experiences can relate to and understand the work in more than one way.

The Late Works: Clyfford Still in Maryland

The Late Works: Clyfford Still in Maryland is the first exhibition devoted to the artwork Still created in the last two decades of his life, featuring objects dating from 1962 to the last works he made in 1979–80. One of our largest ever thematic presentations, the installation begins in the Museum's fourth gallery and features nearly 60 canvas and paper works, half of which have never been exhibited previously. The Museum's founding director, Dean Sobel, curated the exhibition.

The preceding three galleries highlight masterworks from the Museum's collection arranged in a chronological narrative to illustrate Clyfford Still's extraordinary artistic journey during the first four decades of his career. Works range in date from 1920 when Still was just sixteen years old to 1951, when the artist was living and working in New York City.

The Early Years: Clyfford Still in Canada, 1920–33

This exhibition is the third installment in an exhibition series featuring Still’s earliest works and curated by guest curator, Patricia Failing. Situated in the Museum’s first three galleries, The Early Years: Clyfford Still in Canada, 1920–33 illustrates the early development and legacy of Still’s artistic practices in two distinctive geographical settings, Bow Island (1920–25) and Killam, Alberta (1925–33).

The remaining six galleries highlight masterworks from the Museum's collection arranged in a chronological narrative to illustrate Clyfford Still's extraordinary artistic journey. This story is told through the unique instance of being able to draw from virtually all of Still’s body of work—the 3,200 objects now on deposit at this institution. The installation begins in the Museum's fourth gallery, with Still's Depression-era figure studies that transform into quasi-abstractions in the 1930s and early 1940s. These culminate with Still’s groundbreaking wartime abstractions and monumental late paintings from the 1950s–70s.