Ephemera Project, 2020-21, 16 photo printed magnets, 24 x 24 inches each, Courtesy of the artist. Ephemera from 10 students and Barry O’Meara, Nico Chin, Beatrice Appleton Mathis, Jessie Hallowell, Neil Shea and Susan Johnston.
Tanja Hollander’s (b. 1972, she/her) Ephemera (2020) show personal objects sent to the artist along with written descriptions of their significance by ten first-year UAlbany students and several other participants—a poignant work that grew out of the artist’s remote yet nonetheless tender relationship with the participants.
Well/Being: An Exhibition on Healing and Repair features 12 established and emerging artists and musicians presenting multi-disciplinary approaches to pandemic-related issues such as kinship, chronic illness, convalescence, intimacy, the emotional costs of caregiving, and various incarnations of love and community.
The exhibition was conceived before the Covid-19 outbreak and then postponed for one year. In the interim, many artists began addressing the complexities of daily life during this pandemic era, isolation and solitude, and the concurrent outcries against racist violence. This period underscored how structural racism was already, in the words of exhibiting artist Carrie Mae Weems, a “pre-existing condition”—a chronic pandemic exacerbated by the acute one.
Responding to the urgent need for social and cultural spaces in which to pause, reflect, and find solace, we encouraged artists to transform the Museum to serve those purposes. Half the exhibiting artists are presenting newly commissioned works for the exhibition. Well/Being also includes participatory workshops, performances, and conversations created to provide an environment in which visitors can experience forms of connection, resilience, action, and hope in turbulent times.
This exhibition poses questions about being and well-being. How do people—queer bodies, indigenous groups, Black and Brown bodies, bodies in pain, threatened bodies, vulnerable populations, students—interact with America’s cultural landscape and find space to thrive? How do we create meaning in the face of erasure, whether through ritual, reclaiming symbols, giving form to memories, or envisioning utopian fantasies? How do we resist cultural amnesia and engage with the past, that is, take on the work needed to move forward and heal? Responding to these questions, each in their own way, the artists in this exhibition create pathways to understand and reflect on healing.
On view August 4 through December 11, 2021.
Tuesday through Saturday 11am-4pm.
Closed Thanksgiving weekend.
https://www.albany.edu/museum/wellbeing/
Participating artists include Panteha Abareshi, Sanford Biggers, Diedrick Brackens, Jeffrey Gibson, Tanja Hollander, Scott Keightley, Michelle Young Lee, Glendalys Medina, Amaryllis DeJesus Moleski, Emily Daggett Smith, Odessa Straub, and Carrie Mae Weems.
