“Exquisite Corpse” Art Exhibit in Carrier Library’s Ground Floor Gallery
Posted September 4, 2026 in Carrier Renovation News, Exhibits, JMU Libraries News
Discover work by JMU students in SADAH‘s Studio Art program at “Exquisite Corpse” in the new Ground Floor Gallery in Carrier Library.
The Exquisite Corpse was a Surrealist method of art making where disparate images or words were combined through chance to form an unexpected whole. Often played as a collaborative drawing game, participants contributed sequentially to a single figure — head, torso, legs — while concealing each stage of the process. The final image was only revealed at the end, reflecting the Surrealists interest in the unconscious, surprise, and the uncanny.
Inspired by the Exquisite Corpse, this exhibition extends these ideas into contemporary art practices centered on hybridization, material exchange, and shared authorship. Here, the “body” is not singular but distributed and assembled through layered contributions across disciplines. Forms shift and merge as materials are passed between hands, translated across processes, and reconfigured into new relationships.
Although Surrealism emerged in the aftermath of World War I and is now over one hundred years old, its desire to go “sur,” or beyond, everyday reality remains deeply relevant.
Across the Studio Art Area, students engage this approach in varied ways. In Printmaking, an intaglio project unfolds into an accordion book and animation, building fragmented yet continuous narratives. In Photography, figures emerge through collage, digital layering, and film manipulation. Ceramics students exchange sculpted parts to create collaborative forms, while Metals and Sculpture students cast, combine, and mold disparate elements into hybrid structures. In Fibers, materials are woven, knotted, and interlaced, entangling their meanings as distinct elements are brought into tactile and conceptual relation.
Together, these works demonstrate how collaboration, chance, and material interplay generate new possibilities for making. The exhibition reimagines the Exquisite Corpse as an expanded, interdisciplinary method, one that embraces multiplicity, transformation, and the collective construction of meaning.
An exhibit opening event will be announced soon.