Originally scheduled for September 2020, and postponed as a result of COVID-19, Hostile Terrain opened July 2021.
MCLA students and faculty, in partnership with Gallery 51, are honored to partake in this participatory art project sponsored and organized by the Undocumented Migration Project (UMP), a non-profit research-art-education-media collective. The G51 Hostile Terrain exhibition is composed of ~3,200 handwritten toe tags that represent migrants who have died trying to cross the Sonoran Desert of Arizona between the mid-1990s and 2019 as well as the work of three west coast artists who were invited to broaden the many-sided conversation, representation and understanding of immigration to the US.
View the Hostile Terrain Gallery Guide HERE.
This show was created by the young adults of the Arts in Recovery for Youth program to promote social justice and open community conversations. Through digital art, poetry and painting, the artists have chosen to express themes of racial injustice and political oppression, violence against women, bullying, rights of LGBTQIA+ persons, freedom of gender expression, body image and gender equality. The young adults showcase their art alongside the art of five mentoring social activists in the art world.
The AIRY young adult artists are Rachael Bentz, Kiara Bresett, Molly Harrington, Jack Kelly, and Jalencia Melendez. The mentoring guest artists are Katy Holt, Em Reim Ifrach, Caroline Kelley, Pops Peterson, and Marney Schorr.
Funding for the Art for Social Justice project was provided by New England Grassroots Environment Fund and the Berkshire Taconic Community Foundation.
Blindsight 2021 is MCLA's Senior Art Show. Each artist’s individual work encompasses a multitude of themes and mediums. Themes address a gamut of social issues and misconceptions, from mental illness, gender equality, race, and our impact on the environment. The artists’ chosen media platforms deal with comics, digital art, painting, sculpture, and performance art to deliver their message. The artists connect back to each other by revealing through their art social issues humanity has been blind to in the past but must see now for a brighter future. This is personified by the title ‘#Blindsight2021’.
Gallery 51 hosted Alex Younger's virtual show Trauma and Mending. Alex Younger is a multidisciplinary artist who was born in Oakland, California and raised in the Capital District of New York State. She graduated Magna Cum Laude from Swarthmore College in 2012 with an Honors Major in English Literature and a Course Major/Honors Minor in Studio Art. She became a sexual assault activist in 2015, after the college adjudication of her case resulted in a punishment of 10 days of probation. In 2018, she received her MFA in Fiber and Material Studies from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She is a Gold Złoty Medal Laureate from the 16 th International Tapestry Triennial and a Silver Medal winner from the 13 th International Scythia Biennial. Her work has been shown internationally and across the United States, including Chicago, New York City, St Louis, Portugal, Ukraine, and Poland. She has taught through the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and Columbia College Chicago and is currently a long-term resident with the Studios at MASS MoCA.
The work in Trauma and Mending focuses on the systems and structures that maintain and support sexual violence, examining the bureaucracy and routine revictimization that underpins our cultural handling of sexual violence to achieve poetics through didacticism. These pieces bear witness to traumatic histories, mediating the relation between the literal representation of the object and the pain they signify, but only indirectly portray. Hiding, erasing, or fracturing text through the intervention of image, material, or audience, the pieces highlight the construction and fragility of the narratives we build.
Video Still, Glass Tower, Tania Zaidi, 2020
“A Tourist In Your Own Home” is an online exhibition curated by artist Shasha Dothan.
Along with five artists Dothan invited, who are also immigrants to the United States,
they created video works about their 2020 experience. This exhibition looks at each
immigrant’s struggle and the notion of home. Is the new country you live in your home?
Is the country you were born in your home? Being confined at home for the last year
due to Covid 19, immigrant artists may struggle even more with the questions of displacement.
Many questions about home and feeling like you don’t belong become more difficult.
In this online video exhibition, the selected artists will represent different facets
of immigrating to the US. Each artist comes from a different country and culture.
Each has their own story. What they all have in common is living in the US in 2020,
trying to build a future for themselves. The show will ask, will you become a tourist
in the land you were born? And also, are you at home in the land you now live in?
Finally, is the realm of art an alternative home for immigrants?
The artists Jisoo Chung, Marton Robinson, Shirin Bolourchi and Ali Azhari, Tania Zaidi
and Shasha Dothan choose to look at this time in a different way, with a different
perspective and in a different language. All these stories are connected to an individual
experience but share a universal feeling of being lost in translation.
