From Sun to Cement - Recent Work by MFA Alumni from the UMassAmherst Department of Art

years

Herter Art Gallery 1969-2019

www.umass.edu/herterartgallery

RECENT WORK BY MFA ALUMNI

UMASS AMHERST DEPARTMENT OF ART March 5 - 26, 2020 HERTER ART GALLERY

acknowledgements An exhibition of this kind would not have come to fruition without the help and cooperation of several individuals. From idea to completion, we are deeply indebted to the Department Chair, Professor Shona Macdonald for her encouraging partnership and constant support. As always, the Department staff have played an indispensable role in this endeavor. We would particularly like to thank Sandy Hay, Lisa Furtek, Bob Woo, Dan Wessman, and Mikhael Petraccia for their kindness, problem solving, and immense patience against all odds of time and logistics. We are also grateful to Graduate Program Director, Professor Young Min Moon, who has generously agreed to join Professor Macdonald in moderating the Panel Discussion held in honor of the artists.

For the exceptional design of this catalog as well as all other publicity design, we owe our gratitude to Graduate Gallery Assistant, Cima Khademi.

Moreover, the gallery could not run its daily operations, much less meet the demands of an anniversary event, without the enthusiasm and energy of the gallery assistants: Sugandha Karmacharya, Paige Anderson, Shane Hancox, Jackson Dooley, Kelley Almada, and Maeve Noon-Price.

We are much obliged to Alumni (BFA 1970, MFA 1975) and retired Associate Professor, Ron Michaud (Chair of the Department 1998 - 2007), for his careful retelling of the department’s history.

The Open Call for this exhibition was juried by Laylah Ali, contemporary artist and Francis Christopher Oakley Third Century Professor of Art at Williams College; Emma Chubb, the inaugural Charlotte Feng Ford ’83 Curator of Contemporary Art at the Smith College Museum of Art in Northampton, MA; and Ajay Sinha, Professor and Chair of Art History at Mt. Holyoke College of Art. We would like to thank them for their time and participation.

Needless to say, we are profoundly grateful for the generous and continuous support from the UMass Amherst Arts Council and the College of Humanities and Fine Arts.

Finally, many thanks to the artists for participating in the show. We are thrilled to have you on board - Congratulations!

director’s comments The significance of the Herter Art Gallery to the Department of Art is profound. From the time of its inception in 1958, to the establishment of the Studio Arts Building in 2008, the Department operated through, and in spite of, a scattered physical presence that stretched to the farthest corners of campus and beyond. Over the years, studios and facilities emerged wherever space was available: Bartlett Hall, French Hall, Marshall Annex, Munson Annex, Clark, the Barn, eventually the Fine Arts Centre, old houses on North Pleasant Street, and for a brief period even a sheet metal trailer parked at the Tilson Power Plant. For the first ten years, the only exhibition space allocated to the Studio Arts program was the main hallway of the Student Union building. This soon proved problematic when in 1967, an exhibition of paintings by then faculty, Chuck Close, offended some of the public and was consequently removed by the administration. It is likely that the need for a Department-owned space peaked at that very moment.

It is against this backdrop that, in 1969, the Herter Art Gallery was founded in the newly built Languages and History building, Herter Hall. Starting with two converted language labs separated by an office (now the East and West gallery and center hallway respectively), the gallery grew to become an indispensable resource for the teaching mission of the Department. From bringing significant artists to campus to exhibiting faculty and student work, Herter Art Gallery remains committed to serve as a creative platform that facilitates department and community exchange and dialogue. Most notably, it continues to support that most significant landmark in a graduate career – the culminating MFA Thesis Exhibition. It seems fitting, then, to celebrate the gallery’s 50th year with an exhibition of work by the Department’s MFA Alumni – several of whom did indeed hold their thesis exhibitions at this location.

From Sun to Cement - named for the Jennifer Tibbets work included in the show - brings together fifteen MFA Alumni who work in a broad range of materials and languages including needlework, painting, sculpture, video, and collage. Like a Venn-diagram their diverse interests intersect at multiple points of critical and aesthetic inquiry. d’Ann de Simone and Ron-Wontae Kim explore the tension between nature, humanity, and global modernity through a process of accumulation and rearrangement of forms and patterns. Like de Simone, Marcia Reed and Jennifer Tibbets mine the natural world to form new ways of seeing line, shape, and color.

Vick Quezada and Karen Gustafson also draw from nature, but their conceptual concerns differ greatly.

Quezada investigates cultural hybridity and identity through an exploration of the natural world, indigenous practices and material history. On the other hand, Gustafson references the traditional craft of needlework samplers to explore the relationship between plants, medicine, and science.

Kelli Scott Kelley and Rebecca Graves also complicate the history of feminine domesticity by juxtaposing traditional needlework with urgent commentary on the intersection of the personal and political. Kelley’s work also blurs the boundaries between anxiety, suffering, absurdity, and play. This connection is uncannily echoed in Eben Kling’s work which grapples with the frenetic and unstable dispositions of the current cultural moment.

Renee Richard and Priya Nadkarni explore the relationship between materiality and spirituality. Richard’s 1

ceramic work comments on its own history while referencing specific spiritual practices and ritualistic art.

Nadkarni on the other hand reconstructs the art historical relationship between painting, light, and divinity in a contemporary context.

While Christy Patrick questions the irregularities of memory on an individual level, Amanda Tiller examines the production of collective cultural memory. Similarly, using video and performance, Nour Bishouty and Chelsea Sams investigate the development of shared value systems. For Sams this is demonstrated in her flashcard experiments with seagulls to test the possibility of a common aesthetic while Bishouty traces the complex contours of cultural icons and how they are imbued with meaning.

Like the vast array suggested by its name, From Sun to Cement presents not only a diversity of work but also a multiplicity of cultural, generational, and geographical positions. Responding appropriately to the retrospective call of an anniversary, it reiterates the profound range of art practices that the gallery has supported over the years.

Procheta Mukherjee Olson March, 2020

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Nour Bishouty www.nourbishouty.com ʿAḏrāʾ Samar considers iconography and the production of meaning. The work revisits moulds for objects commissioned by a souvenir shop in Amman during the 1990s and made by the artist’s father. By reconstructing and repositioning these objects, the video functions as an act of commemoration, while simultaneously rethinking the meanings inherent in them as sociopolitical and cultural icons.

Working in images, video, and text, Nour Bishouty’s multidisciplinary and often autobiographical practice draws upon familial and material narratives to explore and rethink the construction of popular identity in relation to narratives and histories of place.

Nour Bishouty ʿAḏrāʾ Samar, Video Still, HD Video, 14:33

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Rebecca Graves www.rgravesandcompany.com Armies of women quietly stitching Stitching out their sorrows Stitching out their deep concern about men Stitching out their love for men Stitching out their fears for the children and their futures.

And for anonymous years they sat quietly and stitched with very sharp needles.

So I began stitching after the election and I stitched through the inauguration and I stitched on the bus traveling to the Women’s March.

And the repetition of the stitches turned my fury, and my sorrow for my country, into action.

Photograph by: Stephanie Peterson

Rebecca Graves Ransom, Needlepoint on canvas, 14” x 16”

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Priya Nadkarni Green www.priyanadkarni.com Priya Nadkarni Green explores light and memory in her oil paintings by depicting moments that embody the human condition. Fascinated by the language and history of painting, Green uses observation and placement of juxtaposed images to create new meanings from inanimate objects. By its very nature, painting confronts the ideas of construction and illusionism. Green asserts that memory and experience are birthed from the same “stuff�. She plays with this idea in her work to capture the notion that we are more than mere flesh.

In Tether, the title itself describes the very thing that is omitted visually from the pictorial space. Interested in the relationship between death and light, Green refers to the figurative tether that connects the body and the light (spirit) beyond the two or three-dimensional planes. Ever the silver cord be loosed...then the spirit shall return unto God who gave it.

Priya Nadkarni Green Tether, Oil on linen, 36” x 84”

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Karen Gustafson www.karengustafsonstudios.com The immediacy of putting a mark on a surface, watching a work take form as individual marks accumulate, motivates me. My work weaves together my interests in art, science, textiles, plants, food, and health. I am driven by the research and discovery inherent in my process.

The Vienna Dioscorides series explores my interest in plants, their relationship to our health, and the importance of growing and consuming diverse crops and plant-based foods. Research into the historical role of plants’ medicinal and nutritional properties, brought me to the fountainhead of herbals; the Greek pharmacopoeia written by Dioscorides in c. 65 AD. The original Vienna Dioscorides herbal (512 AD) contains the oldest surviving complete manuscript of Dioscorides’ pharmacopoeia. Several of the nearly 400 paintings of plants depicted in the Vienna Dioscorides are still known to us today.

These plants create a connection to this ancient text, linking past to present.

This series recontextualizes the historic role of a needlework sampler. Rather than collect and preserve stitches and patterns, I preserve the ancient medicinal plants of Dioscorides. I use thread, translucent organza, and a sewing machine to create ethereal plant portraits. Floating away from the wall, they cast a secondary shadow drawing.

Karen Gustafson Rosemary, Thread & Organza, 14.25” x 10.5”

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Kelli Scott Kelley www.kelliscottkelley.com Through personal and universal icons my work explores multiple states of reality.

Figures, animals, and objects appear in metaphorical narratives which explore humankind’s connections, disconnections and impact upon the natural world.

In recent years, I have been painting on antique domestic linens. The textiles reference traditional women’s handicrafts, and an ecologically conscious art making practice. In addition, the pretty feminine cloths serve to juxtapose the sometimes-dark imagery.

My pieces are inspired by the things I see, feel and experience; both the personal and the sociopolitical. I am moved by the exquisite beauty in the world, as well as the absurdity and ugliness. Floating Cottage is about the opioid addiction epidemic in our country, and how it affects generations. It also addresses addiction in a more personal way, since my family has been affected by it. I am interested in seeing how meanings arise and change when “the ordinary” is taken out of context; when recognizable things are juxtaposed or depicted in unexpected ways. My hope is that the work will be experienced in a poetic way, that viewers will have an intuitive response based on their own experiences and ways of seeing.

Kelli Scott Kelley Floating Cottage, Acrylic on repurposed linens, 55” x 55”

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Eben Kling www.ebenkling.com These paintings do not attempt to drive into the bedrock of any political or social proclivity, but instead struggle to confuse and depict our current state of mania and cultural instability.

Eben Kling Awaiting the Results, Flashe on Canvas, 32” x 32”

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RonWontae Kim The Monument is a work from an on-going series NEITHER THIS, NOR THAT. The series explores the notion of “shaky identities� which, I believe, is one of the quintessential characteristics of our time. The daily routines of 21st century could force upon individuals with its own set of huddles via ever-accelerating speed of connectivity, migration, globalization, communication, information gathering, etc. The image shown in this particular work is a combination of household items such as furniture or a beachball combined with elements of other daily encounters, e.g. fragments of architecture, garden-trimmings, construction remnants and left-over pieces from a carpentry project. The elements are deliberately jumbled to simulate the blending of familiars and not-so-familiars so the identity of the final assembled object becomes trickier to pin down.

Ron-Wontae Kim Neither This Nor That/ Monument, Oil on canvas, 20.5” x 16.5”

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Christy Patrick www.thepatrickart.com As I begin a drawing, a burst of emotion is what I throw down on the paper. In many instances, it has no structure or physical representation of what I am truly seeing and thinking in my head. I like the raw energy that it has and rely on that to hold the rest of the drawing together as I proceed. I try to maintain the purity of that energy, even as I build over and through the materials I lay down. All mark making, intended or not, then becomes an important part to the whole. I often develop images based on my attempts to recollect and reconstruct childhood memories. I have discovered that I can not rely on my memories, as they are tainted with narratives from relatives or marred with negative experiences. As a result, I tend to obliterate what I have developed, only to try to correct, or even change, the “memory�. In that process there is residue left from the initial or underlying layer(s) that I try to transform into a new, specific image. For me this works in two ways: 1) the reworking of the residue helps me see and depict more than one entity and 2) it also aids in keeping the structure and integrity of the composition together. As a result, there are many layers developed in my drawings, both technically and psychologically. This then serves as the record of my attempts at deciphering my past and building my future.

Christy Patrick Mechanic Street, Mix media on printmaking paper, 21� x 30�

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Vick Quezada www.vickquezada.com My projects explore the material histories and consciousness of Indigenous-Latinx hybridity within Western culture. My approach is multidisciplinary and based in botany, historical archives, ancestral knowledge, and lived experience.

I identify as nonbinary transgender Indigenous-Latinx. My practice calls into question structures that fragment Indigenous identity and queer bodies. I use a variety of mediums, video performance, photography, sculpture, and ceramics. I experiment with the materiality of objects and the meanings and cultural significance they produce. My sculptural “artifacts” also incorporate natural elements, such as soil and flora, making reference to Nanuan Indigenous beliefs that affirm the interconnectivity of earth, spirit, and cosmology (Sigal, 2011).

Maize, as material and theme, is present in almost all works. Maize is native to Mexico and is a monoecious plant that has both masculine and feminine reproductive organs.

Ironically, historical Aztec ethnographies document that the ancient female and mail maize deity Chicomecōātl/Centeōtl displayed gender duality and ambiguity, which were mirrored in pre-Columbian Mesoamerican societal beliefs on gender (Milbrath 2015).

The essence of my projects specifically honors Indigenous cultural practice. In queering the archaeological, I desire to offer an understanding of gender and sexuality outside of the dominant heteropatriarchal narratives.

Vick Quezada The Precarity of a Myth, Ceramic, bricks, cactus, 24” x 36”

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Marcia Reed In 1983 I decided to get an MFA in painting. Although I was teaching full time as a painting instructor at a western MA boarding school, it was important to me that I receive this MFA as I have always taken my painting very seriously. Three intense years later I received this degree in 1986.

I have painted a lifetime to finally arrive at what I have been chasing and striving for in my work. I pushed through making images and landscapes over the decades and now I see a continuum throughout all my work beginning in the seventies up to the present.

What remains strong is my intuitive line energy, the movement, and surface tensions, pattern and color in my work.

I know what keeps me engaged with painting. It is the ambiguity, exploration and the challenge of responding to all of nature and its shapes around me. It is the continuous complex interchange between expressing movement, shape, and line in nature and the tensions between them all. The natural shapes outdoors are my jumping off point. I find it exciting to interpret all these shapes in an expressive way.

It is about showing up and just painting!

Marcia Reed Night Bloom, Acrylic, 32” x 24”

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Renee Richard I am interested in shifting the perception of thrown ceramics as an outlet for only the functional vessel. My sculptures are created on a potter’s wheel, so they are generally reminiscent of a vase with foot, body, shoulder, and neck, but altered and enclosed to defy function. In some ways, I feel my work still pays homage to traditional ceramics through form, balance and proportion, as well as the firing process. The surfaces of my pieces are created through the unpredictable interface of smoke and clay in primitive firings using sawdust. I am inspired by the ceramic works of Lucie Rie and Hans Coper and influenced by Native American pottery and ritualistic African art.

Renee Richard Totem Series # 2, Ceramic - thrown; burnished; pit fire, 10.5” x 4”

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Chelsea Sams www.chelsealynnsams.com Pairs of art historical images on flashcards are presented to seagulls. A Cheeto is placed on each. Whichever flashcard is pecked first advances to a second round, then a third, and finally, only two remain. This interaction is intended to explore the aesthetic preferences of seagulls, but many abortive attempts are also documented in the work.

Intriguingly, one population of gulls selected the same image as their top pick twice. Chelsea Sams explores the results and ramifications of scientific study through embedded practice, collaboration, and independent investigation. Of particular interest at the moment is the question of a common aesthetic: we share much of our sensory apparatus with other organisms, yet little is known about the perceptions and preferences of animals.

Through interventions with vertebrate and invertebrate animals, video, iPad applications, performance lecture, and constructed objects, she grapples with the implications of an evolutionary basis for art, as well as the historical and contemporary narratives that foster scientific enquiry.

Chelsea Sams Experiments in Seagull Aesthetic Perception, Video still from two channel video installation

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d’Ann de Simone www.danndesimone.com My mixed media collages deal with the failings and perils of industrial and digital civilization. Pervading the art is a focus on the impact of humans on our planet and upon its other species.

My studio practice is grounded in feminism: building on the first wave in which craft is positioned in opposition to modernist value systems, the collages are tied to more expansive global and social issues. Traditional Eastern images are paired with Western, which in turn are paired with traditional media and the mechanically produced.

The work conflates throw-away images gleaned from the web along with bits of trash, recycled art, actual pieces of nature (bark, butterflies) and images of nature (maps, magnified cellular structures).

As our daily lives are shaped by the constant bombardment of images and snatches of information, the work, too, is frenetic, difficult to pull into focus or hierarchize.

In the work Scrapbook, I ponder the degradation of the earth – the water and the land.

Animal and plant species struggle to endure, left on the brink of extinction or already gone. Ultimately, if we survive, will we be left with schematic representations and memories of what the planet once was?

d’Ann de Simone Scrapbook, mixed media collage on 1115 lb. Arches and birch bark from Western Massachusetts, archival inkjet print, woodcut, gouache, tape, colored film, embroidered elements, handmade paper, scrapbook cover, gouache, Tyvek tape, dye, ink, 22” x 46” 30

Jennifer Tibbetts www.jennytibbetts.com Though I am inspired by the visual world, I express through paint my inner vision of that world. I tend to work in series, and draw equally from rural and urban landscapes. The subtle colors of concrete and cement in city buildings are as inspirational to me as the natural world. The goal is to capture the essence of a subject as it relates to my own personal vision, and adjust composition, light, and color as needed. I also play with shape and color to explore images that are purely non-representational.

I take my initial color cues from nature—color has its own beauty and expressive power—but my final color choices are intuitive. I enjoy organizing my compositions to reflect my interest in contemporary art. I often flatten pictorial space, and evolve and devolve geometric shapes within the composition. I enjoy being spontaneous in making marks and truly appreciate the dynamic process of painting. Though I begin with an initial idea or direction, each painting emerges and takes on a life of its own. Ultimately, the painting stands alone.

Jennifer Tibbetts Sun and Cement, Oil on canvas, 24” x 20”

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Amanda Tiller www.amandatiller.com I am interested in culture and communication – how individuals form bonds over shared experience and knowledge. Through my work I present my own knowledge, primarily recalled from memory, and invite the viewer to “compare notes.” I strive to stick to the facts, or at least what I perceive to be factual, leaving the viewer to sort through the data for themselves. The resulting images and objects often function as graphs or diagrams – visualizing the quantification and categorization of information that comprises a personality.

Amanda Tiller Labyrinth, movie poster scratch-off, 39.625” x 26.625”

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