01/28/2026
The Delaware Art Museum, in partnership with the John William Gallery, presents the eighth installment of its Emerging Curatorial Platform: “Otherworlds: John Webb’s Imagined Realms,” curated by the 2025–2026 Emerging Curator, Charlotte Kelly.
John Webb invites viewers into a constellation of imagined environments, landscapes, and lifeforms that feel at once uncannily familiar and distinctly other. Drawing on visual traditions spanning fantastical illustration, epic fantasy, and speculative world-building, Webb constructs richly layered terrains that resonate with the atmospheric qualities of Tolkien’s imagined realms, the exploratory logics of contemporary gaming landscapes, and the moral architectures of classical fable. These references function less as direct references than as diffuse cultural frameworks, situating Webb’s imagery within a shared visual vocabulary of myth, geography, and storytelling.
Narrative tension is a persistent concern across Webb’s practice. His worlds often hover in moments of suspension, suggesting ethical, social, and imaginative stakes without resolving them. Rather than offering fixed meanings, Webb sustains a productive openness, inviting viewers to reflect on how contemporary concerns might be refracted through invented worlds, or simply to engage with the scale, intricacy, and visual richness of the images themselves.
Otherworlds approaches fantasy not as escapism, but as a critical mode of rethinking familiar structures, proposing imagination as a means of revealing, unsettling, and re-enchanting the present.
The exhibition opens Friday, February 6, 2026, from 5:30–8:00 PM, coinciding with February ArtLoop. A conversation with the artist and Emerging Curator will take place at 6:00 PM. Join us for an evening of discussion, imagination, and art.
