October 24, 2024–March 09, 2025

In Art and Process: Drawings, Paintings, and Sculptures from the 19th-Century Collection, visitors can experience 60 works from the museum’s permanent collection, including 30 works on paper (pastel, graphite, charcoal, and watercolor) and 23 oil paintings, as well as works in bronze, porcelain, and terracotta, reminding us that when we view an artwork in a museum, what we’re really seeing is the endpoint in a dynamic process that may have been long, and involved many twists and turns.

Art and Process also affords visitors the opportunity to experience new acquisitions that have never before been on view at the Walters, including Two Students in the Life Room of the Heatherley School of Fine Art by Nellie Joshua (1877-1960).

December 18, 2024–August 05, 2025

The rich, jewel-like colors of manuscript illuminations can be dazzling—and dangerous. For centuries, highly toxic materials such as lead, arsenic, and mercury were used by scribes, artists, and bookbinders to create handmade books and to illuminate their pages. If Books Could Kill casts light on the hidden dangers of manuscripts within the Walters’ rich collection and reveals the delicate science behind recognizing those toxic materials and handling them safely today.

The exhibition will reveal how the toxic materials used to paint manuscript illuminations spanned cultures, geographies, and time periods. Vermillion—derived from mercury-rich cinnabar—produced a brilliant red pigment used to illuminate an Armenian gospel book in 1455. Arsenic-based orpiment provided pops of yellow for a Thai treatise on elephants in 1824.

Opens May 17, 2025–Ongoing

Latin American Art / Arte Latinoamericano (working title) presents over 200 artworks from the museum’s expansive collection of art from South, Central, and North America and the Caribbean in one contiguous space for the first time in the museum’s history. Encompassing works from 40 cultures, spanning more than four millennia, the beautifully reimagined North Court galleries—renovated for the first time in 40 years for this permanent exhibition—create a space for visitors to engage with the collection through bilingual materials.

The exhibition presents objects by geographic area and theme, diving deep into location, materials, and the natural world of the Americas. Visitors will encounter examples of ancient ceramic, earthenware, gold, paint, shell, silver, stone, textiles, and more. Collection highlights include dozens of gold and jade ornaments from Colombia and Central America; a large-scale Mexica (Aztec) statue of Macuilxochitl, patron god of music, dance, and gamblers; a colonial-era painting of Saint Rose of Lima; two Maya ceramic burial urns, colored with the special Maya blue colorant; and elaborately modeled Andean drinking vessels and ceramics ritually sprinkled with the red pigment cinnabar.