At Water's Edge: Reflections on 200 years of the Erie Canal

2025 marks the 200th anniversary of the Erie Canal’s completion. The Canal transformed New York State in the 19th century. Today, eighty percent of the upstate population lives within twenty-five miles of the waterway, yet in much of the public’s imagination, the canal remains confined to the past. The 2024 Erie Canal Artists-in-Residence—Alon Koppel, Judit German-Heins, and Clara Riedlinger—each embarked on a year-long photographic exploration contemplating the Canal’s current condition, activating the landscape, and considering the waterway’s lasting impacts on present-day American culture. At Water’s Edge: Reflections on 200 Years of the Erie Canal highlights the culmination of these artists’ projects.

At Water’s Edge is organized by the Erie Canal Museum, Syracuse, New York. The Artist-in-Residence program was created through a partnership between the New York State Canal Corporation and the Erie Canal Museum in Syracuse.

Nucor Steel Innovation Station

Visit the newest installation in the MOST's Nucor Innovation Station! Open through June

Nucor Steel Auburn presents “Pioneering the Circular Economy,” an exhibit showcasing the endless possibilities of steel. Explore interactive stations that bring Nucor’s steel production process to life, and learn the vital role of recycling and how steel shapes our daily lives. Discover the remarkable journey of steel from start to finish and see how each of us contributes to building a more sustainable future.

Catherine Spencer: Alchemy of a Seed

A seed begins in darkness—buried, fragmented, waiting. In its stillness, it holds the potential for transformation, a quiet alchemy that unfolds when the time is right. Alchemy of a Seed explores this process of change, resilience, and emergence through biomorphic sculptures that blur the boundaries between organic and synthetic, natural and surreal.

Created from discarded memory foam, found materials, and textiles, Catherine Spencer’s sculptures take shape as she cuts, stitches, airbrushes, embroiders, and applies beadwork, to breathe life into her anthropomorphic creations. The sculptures embody both rupture and repair, echoing the physical and emotional labor of growth. Vibrant, plant-like organisms populate the exhibition, their textures and colors evoking the tension between attraction and defense, fragility and power.

Like seeds rising from the soil, these forms emerge from obscurity into color, embracing the light only when they are ready. Alchemy of a Seed is a meditation on transformation—not just as a cycle of life and death, but as an act of agency, play, and rebirth. The viewer is invited to consider what is planted in the unseen spaces of our lives and what it means to step fully into becoming.

Making American Artists: Stories from the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts

Making American Artists: Stories from the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, 1776-1976 presents more than 70 of the most acclaimed and recognizable works of American art, which have played a demonstrable role in shaping conversations about the nation’s history and identity. The exhibition explores new narratives of the history of American art, embracing stories about women artists, LGBTQ+ artists, and artists of color within a visual and thematic structure that also features iconic works traditionally associated with the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. Making American Artists presents PAFA’s formidable collection of well-known historic works alongside pieces by traditionally underrepresented artists to pose questions about what it meant to be an American artist from when the institution was founded to the late 20th century.

Painter and scientist Charles Willson Peale and sculptor William Rush founded PAFA in 1805 to champion American art and artists. Making American Artists features works from PAFA’s esteemed collection that helped define new chapters in the history of American art, including works by Mary Cassatt, Barkley L. Hendricks, Edward Hopper, Alice Neel, Georgia O’Keeffe, Gilbert Stuart, Henry O. Tanner, and Andrew Wyeth. The exhibition also features icons of PAFA’s history and collection, such as Stuart’s George Washington (Lansdowne Portrait) (1796) and Peale’s The Artist in His Museum (1822).