Anderson Weaves Memory, Meaning Through 'Black Excellence'
ALBANY, N.Y. (Sept. 4, 2025) — The University Art Museum is opening its fall season with the largest solo exhibition to date by artist Noel W. Anderson, Black Excellence. The show, which runs from now through April 3, 2026, brings together more than 35 works — tapestries, video and works on paper — that challenge viewers to reconsider history, identity, and the stories embedded in images. Admission is free and open to the public.
For Anderson, who grew up in Louisville, Kentucky, and now lives and works in New York, the exhibition is more than a career milestone. It is a deeply personal exploration of the triumphs and burdens carried in the phrase “Black excellence.” Through his process of digital manipulation, weaving and physical alteration, Anderson reconceives found images of cultural icons, athletes, musicians and everyday figures.
“The tapestry is an open and expansive field of possibility,” Anderson explains.
From Anderson’s perspective, material carries its own history. For example, cotton is inseparable from American labor and the legacy of slavery, and Anderson’s dyeing, bleaching, scraping and picking of threads becomes a metaphor for how history itself can be disrupted.
Sound, Space and the Weight of Excellence
The exhibitions also debuts a 30-minute video piece, Echoes of the New World (2025), that Anderson created in collaboration with filmmaker and sound designer Solomon Bennett. The film mixes archival and cinema footage with sound — from Duke Ellington’s music to O.J. Simpson’s infamous car chase — to create a disorienting but poignant meditation on how race, performance and spectacle intersect in American life.
As Anderson sees it, “sound breaks the surface of the image” in a way that mirrors the physical interventions he makes in his textiles.
The University Art Museum’s two-story space also plays an important role in the exhibition. Suspended tapestries hang from the 30-foot ceilings, inviting viewers to experience the work from below and above.
The space becomes an arena, Anderson notes, “where you’re always aware of your position — as a witness, a participant or an observer.”
As Anderson explains, the title “Black Excellence” is deliberate. First popularized during the Civil Rights movement, the term is often used to celebrate achievement and resilience. Anderson asks viewers to look more closely.
What toll does “excellence” take on those expected to embody it? How do exhaustion and erasure intertwine with success?
“By manipulating images from Black visual history — sometimes distorting them, sometimes bringing them into high relief, sometimes nearly dissolving them — Anderson reopens these questions and places them squarely in front of us,” said Corinna Ripps Schaming, director and chief curator of the museum.
A Culmination and an Invitation
After earning his B.F.A. in painting and printmaking from Ohio Wesleyan University, Anderson pursued graduate studies in printmaking at Indiana University and sculpture at Yale. Along the way, he developed a practice that merges the meticulous craft of print and textile work with an experimental approach to media and performance.
Anderson’s exhibition at UAlbany represents a culmination — a chance to pull the threads of his career into a powerful statement.
The University Art Museum is open Monday through Friday, 11 a.m. to 4 p.m., with select Saturday hours. The show will briefly pause during the University’s winter break, but otherwise will anchor the museum’s programming across both semesters.
Ultimately, Anderson hopes viewers leave with more than admiration for his craft. He wants them to wrestle with what the images mean, with the loose threads he has deliberately left visible.
In Anderson’s words, “Loose threads and the natural warp of the material represent a glitch… an invitation to revisit memory and notions.”
That invitation is now extended to UAlbany.
For more information, visit the University Art Museum’s page on the exhibition: Noel W. Anderson: Black Excellence.