Fall Exhibit at /m at St. John’s College Asks the Question, 'Can Art Save Us?'
Lost at Sea (Ulysses) on view September 18-December 7
Exhibition is free and open to the public
ANNAPOLIS, Md. [September 10, 2025] – /m (the Elizabeth Myers Mitchell Art Museum at St. John’s College) is pleased to announce its fall exhibit, Lost at Sea (Ulysses), open from September 18 through December 7. The museum will also host educational events and tours.
“The exhibition unites the work of 10 artists working across generations in different geo-cultural spheres. Many of the artists are recycling ideas, words, images, or objects they’ve gleaned from others, and they have combined them anew,” says /m’s Director, Peter Nesbett. “Though inspired by Homer’s Odyssey, Lost at Sea (Ulysses) departs from the epic. That is one reason I chose to use the Latin Ulysses instead of the Greek Odysseus parenthetically in the title. Every subsequent generation finds new meaning in classic texts like this, rewriting them to suit their needs. I hope that after seeing this show, visitors will never look at a maritime painting quite the same again.”
About the Exhibit:
The sea can be a merciless foe. It is also a poignant metaphor for the human psyche. This exhibition tells the story of a subject set adrift in more ways than one. Lost at Sea (Ulysses) is a story of adventure, courage, tragedy, and unspeakable loss. It is a grappling for direction and meaning, a yearning for communication and connection, amidst the erosion of both language and logic. But most of all, it is the story of humans face-to-face with the great unknown. And Ulysses? In Homer’s Odyssey, the heroic king Ulysses, also known as Odysseus, set out by sea at the end of the Trojan War to return to Ithaka and his wife Penelope. Ten years later, having endured countless storms, wrathful mythic beings, and the loss of all his crewmates, he arrived home. When we face the ineffable, many turn to religion for solace and salvage; others, to art. For those who choose the latter, the inevitable question arises: Can art save us?
This exhibition features art by Marcel Broodthaers, Luis Camnitzer, Lenka Clayton and Phillip Andrew Lewis, Rose Finn-Kelcey, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Renée Green, Lonnie Holley, and Josef Strau, with sheet music by Charles Moody and a poem by Alice Oswald. It was co-curated by Peter Nesbett, Director of /m, and Shelly Bancroft, co-director of Triple Candie.
Events at the Museum:
Museum events are free and open to the public; please register by emailing .
Art Workshop by Exhibiting Artists, Lenka Clayton & Philip Andrew Lewis
Friday, October 24, 5:30-7 p.m.
Mellon Hall – Studio Theater
Clayton and Lewis, who work both collaboratively and individually, are displaying three artworks, including one newly commissioned by /m. Based in Pittsburgh, where they have built a full-sized working lighthouse inside an abandoned rowhouse, their art merges the philosophical, the poetic, and the absurd.
“Dante’s Ulysses & Art Rhetorical Tradition,” a Lecture by Gabriel Pihas
Wednesday, November 12, 5:30 p.m.
Mellon Hall – Conversation Room
Gabriel Pihas, Academic Director at the Rome Institute of Liberal Arts, is a former St. John’s College tutor, a Dante scholar, and the author of Nature and Imagination in Early Modern Roman Art (Routledge, 2022), which shows how modern art liberates us while leaving us feeling estranged from our grounding in the natural world.
Guided Discussion of Alice Oswald’s epic poem, Nobody: A Hymn to the Sea
Saturday, December 6, 2-4 p.m.
Mellon Hall – Hodson Conference Room
Oswald is the winner of the T.S. Eliot Prize, the Griffin Poetry Prize, and a former Professor of Poetry at Oxford University. The Peabody Institute Library writes, “Reading Nobody is like watching the ocean: a destabilizing experience that becomes mesmeric, almost hallucinatory, as we slip our earthly moorings and follow the circling shoal of sea voices into a mesh of sound and light and water.”
For more information on Mitchell Art Museum exhibits and programming, visit sjc.edu/mitchell or follow @sjcmitchell on Facebook and Instagram.
VISITING THE MITCHELL ART MUSEUM
The museum’s fall hours are Thursday, Saturday, and Sunday, from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m., and Friday from 2 p.m. to 7:30 p.m. Exhibitions are always free and wheelchair accessible. Parking is available on weekends in the Mellon Parking Lot (off St. John’s Street, north of Calvert Street) or in the Calvert Street Garage (one block away) at 19 St. John’s Street, and during the week at the Gott’s Court Garage (two-and-a-half blocks away) at 25 Calvert Street. The museum is located at the heart of campus in Mellon Hall, St. John’s College, 60 College Avenue, Annapolis, Maryland.
ABOUT THE MITCHELL ART MUSEUM (/m)
The only nationally accredited art museum in Anne Arundel County, the Elizabeth Myers Mitchell Art Museum at St. John’s College presents changing art exhibitions to the ever-curious. Our mission is to pose persistent and timely questions about the human experience through art and with extraordinary artists.
ABOUT ST. JOHN’S COLLEGE
In an age of political division and digital distraction, St. John’s College offers the education America needs. Through close reading of 200 great books across 3,000 years—from Plato to Toni Morrison, Augustine to Charles Darwin, Euclid to Albert Einstein—students wrestle with the deepest questions of law, justice, freedom, and human good. At a time when many institutions chase trends, St. John’s returns to first principles. The third-oldest college in America, with campuses in Annapolis, Maryland, and Santa Fe, New Mexico, St. John’s is a refuge for civic renewal, civil discourse, and intellectual courage. Learn more about our undergraduate, graduate, and lifelong learning programs at sjc.edu.
“St. John’s is a high-achieving angel hovering over the landscape of American higher education” —Los Angeles Times
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