Art lovers are invited to take a trip to the campus Art Gallery and one might be compelled to discover their own ancestral past.
Eight artists, each from culturally rich and diverse backgrounds, are showing their work as part of an exhibition on Ancestral Memory now through March 7.
“This exhibition will encourage students to realize that we all have things in common, and deepen the experience of looking at themselves and at each other,” Susanna Meiers, curator, said.
The works are stationed throughout the gallery, tucked together and bound by the artists’ personal interpretations of their own past, using a combination of ancestral objects, videos, images, constructions and paintings that communicate personal histories and perhaps conflicts between time and place.
“I have become interested in my own family so it’s good to see other people’s family and past,” Larina Babers, journalism major, said.
Positioned on the left wall of the Art Gallery is Betty Lee’s piece, “5 + Infinity.” The piece portrays the images of eight women from both her mother and father’s lines of inheritance dating back to 1891.
“Lee is interested in exploring her own background and conveying what the experience was like to people, and I think that’s partly what everybody is doing in these works. (The artists) are celebrating and examining something about their own pasts, and through these personal examinations it’s an attempt to reach a more universal, human connection,” Meiers said.
A large trestle table draped with a blue, cotton tablecloth features an array of homemade cakes, baked from scratch and made to replicate his grandmother’s recipes. It’s well worth sampling some of this tasty art.
Michael Miller, co-director, showed his contributions to the exhibition.
“I really want to engage the observers. I wanted to incorporate touch and smell and taste. I think it gives the audience a different experience.,” Miller said.
Miller also presents a chest of drawers filled with old objects and photographs of himself and his family.
A sign on top of the chest invites observers to slide open the drawers, which creak when they open, and examine his family’s history.
“I had six or seven aunts cooking delicious, traditional meals for close to 30 or 40 people including neighbors, and this table is a memory of those days on the farm,” Miller said about the cakes on the trestle table.
Other artists participating in the exhibit include Doris Bittar, EC professor Joyce Dallal, Peter Liashkov, Kathy Mas-Gallegos, Dominique Moody and Marianne Sadowski.
Hours are Monday and Tuesday from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m., Wednesdays and Thursdays 10 a.m. to 8 p.m., and Fridays 10 a.m. to 2 p.m.
