Art Renewal Center^®

Painters, Ports, and Profits: Artists and the East India Company, 1750-1850 Published on 6 February, 2026

This exhibition tells the story of artists from India, Britain, and China who worked in the era of one of the most powerful corporations in history. The British East India Company began in 1600 as a private trading enterprise but grew into a military and political force during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It waged war to rule India and sell opium in China. To support its commercial and imperial goals, the Company encouraged its agents to commission art. Works of art depicted commodities, functioned as gifts to ease trade deals and build alliances, and visually recorded the places and societies where the Company traded and governed. 

The artists featured here trained in Indian courts, in art and military institutes in Britain, and in Chinese workshops. In their artistic exchanges, they combined regional methods with new materials and techniques. This exhibition, of more than one hundred objects, is mostly drawn from the YCBA’s rich collection of works from Asia, including rich opaque watercolors, large-scale oil portraits, evocative architectural drafts and a spectacular thirty-seven-foot-long scroll. It takes visitors on a journey through port cities and into the worlds of artists, showing how artists shaped, and were shaped by, the Company’s ruthless ventures while creating artworks of great beauty and innovation.

The exhibition runs from January 8 – June 21, 2026 at the Yale Center for British Art, 1080 Chapel Street, New Haven, CT.

To view more about this exhibition, click here.

For more events and exhibitions, visit the ARC Calendar.

Golden Hour - Charles Courtney Curran and the Romance of American Impressionism Published on 5 February, 2026

Golden Hour - Charles Courtney Curran and the Romance of American Impressionism, traces the celebrated American painter’s journey from his Ohio roots to New York, Paris, and the mountaintop artists’ colony of Cragsmoor, New York, where he spent four decades capturing sunlit gardens, breezy mountaintops, and moments of quiet grace. Blending the elegance of the Gilded Age with the airy brushwork of American Impressionism, Curran’s paintings, filled with women in flowing white dresses, playful children, and lush floral landscapes, offer a luminous vision of summer at its most poetic. Drawn from public and private collections, the exhibition includes rarely seen works, early portraits, and period fashions that bring his idyllic worlds to life.

The exhibition runs from February 10 – May 24, 2026 at the Flagler Museum, One Whitehall Way, Palm Beach, FL 33480.

For more information, please click here.  

Visit the ARC Calendar for more events and exhibitions.

People’s Choice Award Published on 29 January, 2026

Congratulations to Carla Grace, for winning People’s Choice Award!

“ ‘Pride’ is an oil painting created on linen in collaboration with the Kevin Richardson Foundation. During a trip to South Africa, Carla and Kevin walked alongside the lions depicted in this painting and photographed them using a drone over five days. In the studio, Carla combined seven different images, skillfully unifying them through the use of shadow and light. After three months of dedicated painting, the final artwork tells the story of six lions who have been rescued, fought for their survival, and been given a second chance. This painting aims to immortalize the lives of key iconic lions that have raised awareness among millions about the canned lion industry, the abuse of circus animals, and more.”

Click here to see the People’s Choice Award!  

Shadow Visionaries: French Artists Against the Current, 1840-70 Published on 21 January, 2026

The mid-1800s in France was a tumultuous era that witnessed dramatic political, social, and cultural change. The impact of those transformations on the art of the period has often been measured by the painting and sculpture shown at government-sponsored Salons, Universal Expositions, and other prominent exhibition venues, which tended to uphold official narratives of progress.

Yet a focus on more private media, such as printmaking and photography, tells a different story. In fact, many artists felt at odds with their era’s celebration of material advancement and modernization.

Rejecting the prevailing current, such figures—described as “Shadow Visionaries” for this exhibition—chose dark subject matter oriented toward the irrational, spiritual, and fantastical. They used the distinctive characteristics of black-and-white media to convey intense emotions, while producing works of unsparing directness and rare beauty. Although some of the Shadow Visionaries evoked nostalgia, others dreamed boldly toward an alternate future, anticipating later art movements such as Symbolism and Surrealism.

Running from December 20, 2025 – March 8, 2026, the exhibition will be on display at The Clark Art Institute, 225 South St., Williamstown, MA 01267.

Click here to learn more.  

Visit the ARC Calendar for more events and exhibitions.

Van Eyck: The Portraits Published on 20 January, 2026

For the first time in history, see all nine of Jan van Eyck’s portraits together. 

Portraiture as we know it begins with van Eyck. His vision and skill launched painting into a new era of unrivalled realism.

Breathing life into van Eyck’s world, the exhibition introduces the men and women he spent his life around. They are not kings, queens and aristocrats; they are successful craftsmen, merchants and the artist’s relatives. This is a story of people. This is the moment when access to art widened. 

Precious and fragile, van Eyck’s paintings rarely travel, including 'The Arnolfini Portrait'. This is one of the most popular paintings in our collection and has only ever left the Gallery once in over 100 years. The exhibition marks the first and only time these works can be brought together. 

The exhibition runs until April 11, 2027 at The National Gallery, Trafalgar Square, London, UK. 

To learn more, click here. 

For more events, visit the ARC Calendar.