The AARDT Foundation

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The AARDT Foundation

The Aardt Foundation is a nonprofit foundation operating out of a former industrial warehouse in Birmingham, Alabama.

The Foundation maintains a highly diverse art collection accessible both onsite and online for education, research, and exhibitions.

08/03/2026

This is the Aardt Foundation's latest acquisition and it joins a wide range of works by other artists associated with the California Light and Space Movement, of which Kauffman was an essential and pioneering member. Constantly experimenting with form, color and space, he availed himself of the light diffusing and reflecting properties of various plastics. This work seems to glow from within and the blues have a softness of graduated hue that holds you in place. Add to that something not as clearly visible in a mere image, which is the bubble-like shape, giving the work a presence in the room unsuspected from its relatively modest size. Plus, as the work's title suggests, the surface is reflective, allowing the convex sculpture to capture fleeting movements of the viewer along with the subtle imagery of other objects in the surrounding space. ⁠
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Craig Kauffman (1932-2010)⁠
Reflection (Aqua), 1990⁠
Acrylic lacquer on blow formed plastic⁠
23" x 23" x 6"

07/22/2026

This cast iron sculpture, barely movable by 3 big guys, is nevertheless an elegant presence in our gallery space, allowing one to sight through its tuning-fork lines (and yes, they are movable the way a tuning-fork's arms might be) to surrounding works. Pepper's title links the sculpture to the small town of Tarquina in central Italy, renowned for its unparalleled Etruscan burial grounds (necropoleis) dating to the -- wait for it -- Iron Age, a World Heritage Site containing some of the most important painted tombs of the ancient world. In forging this aspectually totemic work, one imagines the artist conjuring a form suitable to a timeless present.⁠
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Beverly Pepper (1922-2020)⁠
Tarquina (1981)⁠
Cast iron⁠
63" x 7" x 7"

06/18/2026

When you look in Ellen Harvey's mirror you see an impossible disaster – a peacefully overgrown ruin of a contemporary skyscraper superimposed in light over one's own face. Each mirror is composed of four Plexiglas mirrors hand-engraved and rear-illuminated to form a glowing line drawing of a recently constructed skyscraper that has now been improbably reduced to the kind of aestheticized ruin beloved of 18th and 19th century landscape painters.⁠
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And then wind the clock back not to an 18th century painter but Alessandro Broglio, a virtually unknown sculptor, to see what he did with ruins, in this case crafting a terracotta Nativity, with St Joseph, the Virgin and Child depicted entirely in the round and only the heads of the ox and of the donkey represented, the setting not a stable one might have found outside an inn in ancient Palestine, but one embedded of noble, yet crumbling Roman decór, the metaphor of an eclipsed empire laid bare. ⁠
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Hence in both cases, widely separated in time yet now together in one collection, the single message seems to be, sic transit gloria mundi.⁠
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Artwork details⁠
1. Ellen Harvey⁠
I am a disaster, 2006⁠
Hand-engraved Plexiglas mirrors and frames, LED lights⁠
32 x 24 1/4 x 4 in. (81.3 x 61.6 x 10.2 cm)⁠
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2. Alessandro Broglio⁠
Nativity, 1785⁠
Terracotta⁠
12 5/8 x 14 15/16 x 4 3/4 in. (32.1 x 37.9 x 12.1 cm)⁠
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Explore more unexpected conversations from the collection through the link in our bio.⁠
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06/10/2026

Take a closer look.⁠
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In 1949, photographer Gjon Mili invited Pablo Picasso to experiment with a small electric light in a darkened room. By leaving his camera shutter open, Mili captured the artist's fluid movements as he drew lines of light—drawings that neither Picasso nor Milo could see even as they were taking shape on the film. ⁠
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The images thus emerged in the photographic process of recoding and developing, this finished work of art being the result. ⁠
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Swipe to explore a few details that are easy to miss at first glance:⁠
• Picasso isn't drawing on paper—he's drawing in midair.⁠
• The photograph records both a finished image and the movements that created it.⁠
• What appears spontaneous was the result of a groundbreaking collaboration between artist and photographer.⁠
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⁠What detail did you notice first?⁠
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06/03/2026

The AARDT Foundation founder Dr. Michael Straus received the 2026 Arete Award from in recognition of his contributions to the field of classics — including published translations of Greek and Spanish texts and a monograph on translation theory.⁠
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We’re honored to celebrate this incredible achievement and proud to support the ongoing work of advancing the classical humanities.

06/01/2026

We loved visiting N. Dash: Geophilia — an exhibition of new and recent works by the Brooklyn-based artist, thoughtfully curated by Suzanne Hudson.⁠
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Geophilia centers N. Dash’s commitment to vital forms of materiality, where accumulations of time and force become emergent compositions. ⁠
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Alongside the Hill Art Foundation, the AARDT Foundation is honored to steward one of the most significant private collections of Dash’s work.⁠
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On view now through July 31, 2026⁠
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© Hill Art Foundation. Photos: Thomas Barratt

04/28/2026

On view now.⁠
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Pipilotti Rist has spent three decades making video works that dissolve the boundary between the body and the image — immersive, sensory, and difficult to stand in front of passively. Peeping Freedom Shutters for Dimitrana Ivanova is dedicated to Dimitrana Ivanova, a Bulgarian feminist writer and activist of the early 20th century, whose life and work Rist reframes through the language of light, movement, and color.⁠
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Artwork Details ⁠
Pipilotti Rist ⁠
Peeping Freedom Shutters for Dimitrana Ivanova, 2020/2023 ⁠
Video installation⁠
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Explore the collection at the link in bio.⁠
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04/25/2026

On view now.⁠
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Mel Bochner's Blah Blah Blah, 2018⁠
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Mel Bochner has been one of the defining figures of Conceptual art since the late 1960s, when he began interrogating the relationship between language, measurement, and meaning. Blah Blah Blah belongs to his Thesaurus paintings — works that take the vocabulary of contemporary discourse and push it to the point of collapse.⁠
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“I am thinking about the relationship between language and color. How color can relieve a text of its duty to meaning. At the root of all my work is the recognition that we tend to take most of our experience for granted.”⁠
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Artwork Details ⁠
Mel Bochner ⁠
Blah Blah Blah, 2018 ⁠
Oil and wax on velvet⁠
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Explore the collection at the link in bio.

04/23/2026

Dan Flavin's Untitled (for Fredericka and Ian) 3, 1987⁠
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Minimalism asked a deceptively simple question: what is the least an object can be and still function as art? In the 1960s, artists including Dan Flavin, Carl Andre, and Fred Sandback pushed that question to its limits — stripping sculpture of representation, symbolism, and compositional hierarchy until what remained was material, space, and the viewer's presence.⁠
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Flavin's fluorescent light works are among the most radical answers to that question. The lights are commercially available, unmodified, and deliberately ordinary. What they do to a room — the color, the hum, the way they dissolve a wall — is anything but.⁠
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Artwork Details ⁠

Dan Flavin ⁠
Untitled (for Fredericka and Ian) 3, 1987 ⁠
Pink, yellow, and blue fluorescent light⁠
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Explore the collection at the link in bio.⁠
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Address

Birmingham, AL

Website

https://aardtfoundation.org/

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