Join the Tufts Universities Art Galleries for an opening reception celebrating its two fall season group exhibitions: Expressions Unbound: American Outsider Art from the Andrew and Linda Safran Collection and States of Freedom: The Figure in Flux.

Expressions Unbound celebrates the recent gift of American outsider artworks from Tufts alumnus Andrew and Linda Safran and features works by some of the foremost self-taught artists of the 20th century, including Thornton Dial, Howard Finster, Bessie Harvey, William L. Hawkins, Mary T. Smith, Jimmy Lee Sudduth, and Purvis Young. The Safran Collection marks the the largest single-collection gift of works by African American artists received to date.

States of Freedom: The Figure in Flux offers a transhistorical glimpse into select practices, from the past to today, in which the body appears fragmented, flattened, or collaged in homage to the incomplete project of representing the human subject in total. Arriving on the heels of the bicentennial of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, this exhibition reminds us that the question “What is human?” has endured and will likely continue to do so for centuries to come.

States of Freedom features work from the university’s rare book and art collections alongside sculpture, video, and paintings by contemporary artists Derrick Adams, A. K. Burns, Kate Costello, Harry Dodge, Maria Lassnig, Anna K.E., Lucy Kim, Kiki Kogelnik, Karen Moss, Jeanine Oleson, Lorna Simpson, and Alexandria Smith.