Past Exhibitions (2019-2020)
Paradox of Constructed Nature: The Faculty Show 2020 (February 6 - March 12, 2020)
Liz Atz/ Chris Bors/ Jude Broughan / Ronnie Burrage / Michael Capobianco / Lizzy De Vita / Anthony Hamboussi / Hong Seon Jang / Maxine Montilus
“Paradox of Constructed Nature: The Faculty Show 2020” exhibited works by nine adjunct faculty members of the Visual Arts Department at SUNY Old Westbury. The title of the exhibition refers to the seeming contradictions and incongruities revealed in the constructed nature of these artists’ subjects and the materials. This impressive collection of works showcases the significant contribution these artists make to the Visual Arts Department and the role models they offer to our would-be artist students. Equally impressive is the diversity of these faculty members’ personal identities, as they represent multiple cultures, ethnicities, and countries of origin.
Sharp Objects (October 29 - November 27, 2019)
Jackie Branson / Pam J. Brown / Roxi Marsen / Timima Z.
Curated by Pam Brown and Stephen Lamia
“Sharp Objects” was an exhibition featuring works by four contemporary artists who blur the line between sculpture and assemblage. By their very nature, sharp objects are menacing, threatening, inherently violent, and potentially injurious. In other contexts, however, they can be interpreted as items of empowerment and protection. The artwork featured in this exhibition repurposes saw blades, sheet metal, cutlery, and other ready-mades into intricately assembled sculptures. Meticulously constructed, the works convey the duality of the sensual and the sinister, the nostalgic and the nuanced. The pieces—personal in nature and sexualized in form—reflect larger sociological, political, and historical issues. Strongly influenced by the Feminist Movement, these artists employ the traditions of craftivism alongside non-traditional methods of fabrication and construction.
The Here and Hereafter: Sa'dia Rehman (September 11 - October 16, 2019)
A solo exhibition of works by Sa’dia Rehman, a Queens-born queer Muslim artist who lives and works in New York City and Columbus, Ohio. Rehman employs multiple media that include assemblages, wall drawings, and works on paper to grapple with questions about her Muslim and queer identities as well as with larger societal issues, particularly injustice against minorities and migrants. She draws upon aspects of her Pakistani heritage as well as her personal history to reimagine “an alternate world” constructed through working methods such as manual repetition, erasing, cutting, stenciling, and spraying. In Bul Bul ka Bacha (Nightingale’s Child), A Rhyme (2016), a mural-size work on paper installed in grid format, the text of an Urdu lullaby the artist’s mother used to sing is traced repeatedly with graphite, spray paint, and charcoal through a hand-cut stencil. This rubbing and pushing through may be seen as deconstructing and reconstructing a gendered text that refers to a male bird.
Nicaragua 1978-2019: Susan Meiselas (March 25 - May 2, 2019)
“Nicaragua 1978–2018: Susan Meiselas,” an exhibition featuring works by U.S. documentary photographer Susan Meiselas, who arrived in Nicaragua in 1978 to cover the populist insurrection that overthrew the regime of Anastasio Somoza, the country’s longtime dictator. Meiselas’s photographs of the Nicaraguan revolution sparked by the assassination of Pedro Joaquin Chamorro, the editor of the opposition newspaper La Prensa, have become iconic images that epitomize the courage and resolve of ordinary people. Meiselas’s work forms an extraordinary narrative that begins with a powerful and chilling evocation of the Somoza regime, and then follows the course of the resistance that led to the insurrection culminating in the triumph of the Sandinista revolution of 1979. Meiselas’s book, Nicaragua June 1978– July 1979, originally published in 1981, became a contemporary classic that points to the potential of concerned photojournalism.