East Meets West Art Exhibit

Part One: Mystical Soundings of Inner Echoes

For Galaudet Gallery’s fourth installment of the My Medicine Art Series, East Meets West, both the judges for this juried show and its curators worked with diverse ideas to inform their selecting and curating of this ground breaking exhibit. Oscar Howe continued to be the foundational inspiration in his belief that art is medicine. It is with much respect for his works and their meanings that all involved express regard.

The second inspiration for East Meets West has been Mircea Eliade’s book Yoga: Immortality and Freedom. Judges and curators used Eliade’s research into the origin of yoga and its concepts as a spring board to investigate archaic philosophies. Eliade seeks out the original frontiers of yogic thought collecting its source material to find the characteristics which have been most effective in healing and transforming life. One of Eliade’s theses is that yoga has been the foundation of most Eastern spiritual practices.

The third inspirations flow from Fredrick Jackson Turner’s speech/book The Frontier in American History which states that the American frontier defined American identity as “the West”—free, open land with potential. This American identity creates individuals who change roles as the frontier changes eventually forming communities. When the U.S. Census closed the frontier in 1890, Turner asked “What happens next?” “How does the loss of frontier affect American identity?” Adrienne Kolb and Lillian Hoddeson answer Turner’s questions in their 1992 speech about Fermilab, A New Frontier in the Chicago Suburbs: Settling Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, 1963-1972 by. These authors utilized Turner’s frontier thesis in order to create a “frontier image” of the scientific exploration of particle physics as a new frontier for the mind.

Both Eliade’s yoga and Turner’s frontier create a new person, in effect liberating people into a new way of being. While yoga liberates from suffering and reincarnation by showing the illusionary state of physical reality which is foundational to Eastern spiritual pursuits; the frontier liberates from convention and poverty of space by creating an individual free to choose any life they want which is central to Western thinking. Seeing these ideas through the Fermilab speech informs the path of this essay since it is our thesis that frontiers are being made each time original ideas are brought into cultural consciousness. Open, free land is just one manifestation of frontier just as a single work of art may contain a frontier as well. The presence of such frontier artworks can liberate the frontier idea—making it break open into a new way of thinking about frontiers. Art genres, art collections, single pieces of art can be seen as the next frontiers which can create another dimension to the aesthetic experience—the experience of the frontier within a piece of art—the open, free exchange of ideas which can liberate.