Custodians of archives wield great power and responsibility in considering who might be left out, disempowered or silenced in the creation of a specific narrative by those who use their records. Addenda centers interpretation and augmentation of past and present through the archive in an effort to construct a fuller future.
Alisa Sikelianos-Carter’s large-scale, mixed media paintings depict an other-worldly sphere “where Blackness is a manifestation of the divine.” Against atmospheric, cosmic skyscapes, Sikelianos-Carter places what she calls, “Future Ancestors,” deity-like and stoic figures, strong in both size and presence.
The Mandeville Gallery presents Sultana’s Dream, a portfolio of twenty-seven linocuts created in 2018 by contemporary artist, Chitra Ganesh, and published by Durham Press. The portfolio will be on exhibition in its entirety from January 23 to June 20, 2021.
The McIninch Art Gallery at Southern New Hampshire University is proud to present the virtual exhibition of EMBODY. This exhibition originated at the Mandeville Gallery, Union College, from August 24, 2019, to January 19, 2020. Support for this virtual exhibition and its accompanying digital catalog comes from the Samuel P. Hunt Foundation.
Jane Swavely studied at Boston University and the School of Visual Arts in New York and is the recipient of a Ford Foundation Fellowship. Her work is in numerous public and private collections, including the JP Morgan Chase Art Collection and the Allentown Art Museum in Pennsylvania.
EMBODY features contemporary diasporic artists, who use collage, both conceptually, and in some cases, literally, as a technique to construct identity and/or selfhood within the mode of portraiture or figuration in the visual arts.
Drawing from the hemispheric context of the Americas, and broad questions of civilization and culture, A Decolonial Atlas: Strategies in Contemporary Art of the Americas presents recent works by artists from the United States and Latin America grappling with continued questions of colonialism and post-colonialism in an effort to locate “place” in contemporary society.
Jenny Kemp has been exploring the possibilities of organic abstraction for more than a decade. This fertile territory has afforded her the visual language and conceptual means to examine a collection of ideas, including biology and histories of modern abstraction. In Kemp’s vibrant paintings, space and light are built through the placement of intricate parallel lines that shift slowly in hue and intensity.
As Union College embarked on the new building and renovation project for our Science and Engineering departments last year, the moment seemed well-suited to re-examine the historic scientific instruments held in the Union College Permanent Collection. This culminated with the exhibition Probability & Uncertainty, featuring more than 30 instruments, juxtaposed with the works of six contemporary female artists creating with scientific themes.
Artist Laini Nemett works with cardboard models, collage, and large-scale oil paintings to create architectural environments that explore the idea of home in the exhibition, When We Lived Here. Nemett describes her work as a response to, “personal histories as recalled by the buildings that house them…I collage and collapse planes to conjure the passing of time and the generations of lives lived between the aging walls.”