Chronostasia: Select Acquisitions 2020-2025

About the publication

Chronostasis is a perceptual illusion in which time appears to slow after shifting one’s attention. Chronostasia likewise extends and recirculates time. Comprising over sixty additions to the Loeb’s collection from 2020 through 2025, this exhibition approaches temporality through return, inheritance, motion, and seriality. Some works revisit the past—adapting its forms and disrupting its logics. Others offer ways of seeing that move beyond chronology: archives are brought to light, past to present, and time to scale.

The Loeb’s collection has not grown by linear design, but in intervals: through gifts, bequests, purchases, and recontextualizations. Chronostasia highlights acquisitions that broaden the museum’s holdings across media, histories, and geographies. Many of these works were acquired to expand representation and reshape the terms of inquiry, to rethink medium and narrative, and to reimagine what a collection holds. This brochure features writings from T. Barton Thurber, The Anne Hendricks Bass Director, and Alyx Raz, Assistant Curator. Chronostasia: Select Acquisitions 2020–2025 is organized by Alyx Raz and generously supported by the Evelyn B. Metzger Exhibition Fund.