Take a long look

Attending a performance? Make time for The Art of Culture, an exhibition in the Lyric Opera House created in dialogue with the company’s spring offerings.

The final three works of Lyric’s mainstage opera season make for a true cultural journey — from the Japan of Madama Butterfly to the Mexico of El último sueño de Frida y Diego to the literal journey between the North and South regions of the United States in safronia. To supplement the audience experience, Lyric Unlimited, the company’s Learning and Civic Engagement division, has curated The Art of Culture, exhibiting artwork in the Daniel F. and Ada L. Rice Grand Foyer that dovetails with the worlds depicted in the operas.

The six-week exhibit showcases the work of three artists whose work celebrates the Japanese, Mexican, and African American cultural traditions illuminated on the stage.  Available for viewing before curtain and during intermission, the works can inspire reflection and conversation — and, in turn, enhance the operagoing experience. The exhibition features works curated by Meredith Stein of Floating World Gallery, inspired by geisha culture; multimedia works by Mexican American artist Carina Yepez; and selections from Vanessa Charlot’s Down in the Delta and Fire Next Time photography series.

Meet the talents behind this exhibition, and see samples of the works on display:

To accompany Madama Butterfly:
Works from Floating World Gallery curated by Meredith Stein

In Madama Butterfly, Cio-Cio-San is often misunderstood as simply a geisha, when in fact she is a deeply tragic figure whose role is shaped by Western fantasy as much as Japanese custom. This tension mirrors how geisha appear in Ukiyo-e and Shin Hanga woodblock prints, among the works in Floating World Gallery. Geisha are rarely shown as individuals, rather, carefully composed symbols of elegance, fashion, youth, and emotional restraint. Women are presented in quiet interiors, absorbed in intimate gestures such as applying makeup or adjusting hair. These images invite contemplation, but they also reinforce distance. Like Butterfly, the women are seen and admired, yet never fully known. 

To accompany El último sueño de Frida y Diego:

Carina Yepez is a Chicago-based artist and educator with family roots in Guanajuato, Mexico. Her work weaves together matriarchal traditions and the stories of immigrant communities through quilting, sewing, and photographic weaving. She explores ancestral healing and cultural lineage through the transformation of domestic techniques into a language of memory and resilience.  The floral motifs recurring throughout the work are drawn directly from embroidery patterns passed through generations — her grandmother's hands teaching hers what words could not.

To accompany safronia: 

Vanessa Charlot’s collections of photography, Down in the Delta and Fire Next Time, are meditations on return, reckoning, and the long memory carried in Black bodies and Black soil. These works listen for what lingers beneath the surface of land and lineage. They ask what it means to leave home, to survive elsewhere, and to come back carrying both inheritance and ache. Down in the Delta moves through Mississippi as a living archive. Fire Next Time turns toward the heat beneath the American story, confronting the tension of being claimed and cast aside, seen and surveilled, loved and endangered.

This exhibition will be on view during the entire runs of Madama Butterfly, El último sueño de Frida y Diego, and safronia — and also open during the 2026/27 Season Launch event on April 21st and Rising Stars in Concert on April 25th. Be sure to include some extra time in your planning to enjoy this enriching display.