Inheritance, Remembrance, Resilience:
Eileen Claveloux, Sandra Matthews, Delilah Montoya
Curated by Anne Seuthe
October 25 – December 5, 2023
Opening Reception: Wednesday, October 25th, 4 – 7 pm
Musical Performance: Wednesday, October 25th, 5 pm – 6 pm
Secret to Life, featuring Terry Jenoure & Angelica Sanchez
Amelie A. Wallace Gallery, SUNY Old Westbury
Inheritance, Remembrance, Resilience is an exhibition of photo-based works by artists Eileen Claveloux, Sandra Matthews, and Delilah Montoya. The artists draw on their individual cultural experiences, using family portraits to suggest how histories persist over generations. Each artist’s approach involves photographing immediate family members as well as wider circles of acquaintances. The processes employed include photographic composites, transparencies, transfers, digital manipulation, and DNA testing. The notion of diaspora weaves its way through the works of Inheritance, Remembrance, Resilience as the struggles, strength, and survival of these photographic subjects – who live in the US but represent multiple diasporic communities--are illuminated.
Claveloux’s work concerns itself with descendants of survivors of the Armenian Genocide, while Matthews’ subjects navigate a range of life’s challenges over time. Montoya’s portraits articulate the complex ancestry found in Chicano families, referencing eighteenth-century Spanish colonial casta paintings, which were commissioned to articulate an elaborate hierarchy of race and bloodlines that favored light skin. These artists’ unique vantage points expose truths that offer larger cultural resonance.
Eileen Claveloux’s Diasporan Portraits—transparent photographs mounted on acrylic panels— feature shadowy figures, the images of descendants of survivors of the Armenian Genocide which remind the viewer of a nearly hidden genocide that, while it occurred in plain sight, has been denied by its perpetrators and their descendants. It is believed that more than seventy members of Claveloux’s extended family perished in the massacres; her grandmother was a survivor. The shadow effect represents the inherited quality of inter-generational trauma, but is also meant to remind us of survival and hope during these dark days when so many other survivors seek safety.
In Sandra Matthews’ project Present Moments, layers of the past are made visible. The images shown here each combine two portraits, made years apart, into a single composite photograph, graphically portraying the effects of time and experience on faces and bodies. The subjects of Matthews’ photographs are her family, friends, and acquaintances. Many of the portraits utilize backdrops of collaged newspaper, representing the range of local, national, and global events amidst which their lives have unfolded. A full set of forty-two portraits can be seen in her 2020 photobook Present Moments, also on view in the gallery.
Delilah Montoya’s Contemporary Casta Portraiture: Nuestra Calidad gives voice to Chicano experiences through inventive and collaborative approaches to photography. Montoya uses the modern tools of digital imaging and DNA testing to prove the residual influence of the colonial caste system on present-day culture and to examine how personal identity is constructed and perceived. Her portraits reference eighteenth-century Spanish colonial casta paintings, commissioned to articulate an elaborate hierarchy of race and bloodlines that favored those with light-colored skin. For her contemporary castas, Montoya found families in Texas and New Mexico with a variety of ethno-racial ancestries and asked them to sit for a portrait and take a DNA test. By setting up the comparison with casta paintings, she asks us to examine the resulting photographs for clues about the race and class of the families (whom she doesn’t identify), hoping we will each catch ourselves in the act of the deeply rooted and unconscious practice of evaluating others by color and economic status. Below the portraits, the family’s DNA results are expressed with vials of colored sand representing the proportion of their ancestry from the geographic regions of the world. Between the vials, a global map charts 100,000 years of human migration. While Montoya’s main objective is for each of us to examine our embedded assumptions, she also reminds us that we are all members of the same human family.
Biographies of the Artists, Curator, and Performers
Eileen Claveloux grew up in New Jersey, and currently lives in Sunderland, Massachusetts, a small river town along the Connecticut. She holds an MFA from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, a BFA in painting from The University of the Arts, and an M.Ed. from Westfield State University. Her work often focuses on memory, history, family, the Armenian Genocide and the descendants of its survivors. Her work has been shown throughout the US and in Germany, Armenia, Cameroon, and Romania. In 2005, she completed a residency in Yerevan, Armenia where her work was shown at the Yerevan Museum of Modern Art; it is now held in their permanent collection.
Sandra Matthews was born in New Haven, Connecticut to immigrant parents from Europe and Asia. She received her BA from Harvard University and an MFA from the State University of New York at Buffalo. Her photographs are in numerous public collections, including the Addison Gallery of American Art, Portland Art Museum (Oregon), the Victoria and Albert Museum (London), and the Women in Photography International Archive at Yale. An emerita faculty member at Hampshire College, her most recent photobook is Occupying Massachusetts: Layers of History on Indigenous Land (George F. Thompson Publishing, 2022). Matthews has also co-authored a critical history entitled Pregnant Pictures(Routledge 2000), and is Founding Editor (2010-2020) of the international online journal Trans Asia Photography Review.
Delilah Montoya is a self-identified Chicana artist, works and lives in New Mexico. As an activist artist, she poses herself questions about identity, power, land, borders, gender, community, family. She is an investigator of histories and lives; her primary subject is the human condition through time and territory as expressed through the lens of being a mestiza, a Chicana, someone who claims a hybrid identity. Delilah’s work is in the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Los Angeles, CA; Houston Museum of Fine Art; Houston, TX; National Mexican Museum; Chicago, Ill.; The Bronx Museum, Bronx, NY; Albuquerque Museum and the Smithsonian Institute; Washington DC. Her awards include the USLAF Latinx Fellowship, Artadia Award and the Richard T. Castro Distinguished Professorship. She is a professor emerita from the University of Houston, College of the Arts.
Anne Seuthe (curator) holds an MFA from the University of Massachusetts. For the past twenty-two years, Seuthe has served as Gallery Director/Curator for Hampden Gallery at the University of Massachusetts,Amherst. During her tenure she curated over one-hundred solo and group exhibitions of emerging and established artists from throughout the US, Europe, and Asia.
Terry Jenoure, violinist and vocalist, is a 2023 Creative Capital awardee. Influences on her composing include her Puerto Rican and Jamaican heritage and numerous collaborations with Free Jazz pioneers of the Black Arts Movement. Her publications in the field of arts-based research have been referenced by more than fifty scholars internationally. She was on the graduate faculty of Lesley University for eighteen years, and concurrently was the director of Augusta Savage Art Gallery at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst for thirty years. Terry holds master’s and doctoral degrees in Education.
Angelica Sanchez, pianist, moved to New York from Arizona in 1994, and has collaborated with such notable artists as Wadada Leo Smith, Paul Motian, Richard Davis, and Nicole Mitchell. Sanchez leads groups ranging from duo to nonet, and her work has been recognized in national and international publications including Jazz Times, The New York Times, and the Chicago Tribune. Sanchez has a master’s in Jazz Arranging from William Paterson University. She is currently on the music faculty of Bard College.
During the opening reception at 5 pm, there will be a one-hour musical performance by Terry Jenoure and Angelica Sanchez. Jenoure (violinist/vocalist) embarks on an untraveled road with her dynamic collaborator, Sanchez (pianist). Jenoure’s adventurous project, Secret to Life, is a series of portraits painted with sound. For this performance, through their singular freestyle jazz and songwriting, the duo shares women’s often-unheard immigrant stories invoking a celebration of life. Sometimes playful, sometimes raucous, sometimes meditative, and at other times a war cry, Jenoure and Sanchez are a force that takes us by surprise and always land us where we need to be.
The performance program is sponsored by Panther Arts Collective (PAC), performing arts initiative fund and OWWR.
