20 Years of the Gallery

The Institute for the Humanities

20 YEARS OF THE GALLERY

The Institute for the Humanities

20 YEARS OF THE GALLERY

To celebrate the University of Michigan Bicentennial and the twentieth anniversary of the gallery, this publication presents images documenting many of our most memorable exhibitions and projects, along with the original curatorial essays that accompanied them, written

by Institute for the Humanities Arts Curator Amanda Krugliak.

Table of CONTENTS

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Introduction..........................................5 Richard Barnes.....................................6 Alison Bechdel......................................8 Sonya Clark........................................10 Jen Davis............................................12 Mark Dion.........................................14 Ramiro Gomez...................................16 Doug Hall............................................18 Scott Hocking....................................20 Jennifer Karady...................................22 Joanne Leonard..................................24 Joan Linder........................................26 Walter Martin and Paloma MuĂąoz............................28 Mary Mattingly..................................30 Kent Monkman..................................32 Shani Peters........................................34 Mary Sibande.....................................36 Tracey Snelling...................................38 State of Exception..............................40 Canan Tolon......................................42 Artist and Curator Bios......................44

Introduction

By Jillian Steinhauer

Universities are funny places.

At their best, they teach students how to engage with the world, but often they do so in a bubble, treating “the world” as an intellectual concept. I still remember the first class I took at the University of Michigan in which a professor impelled us to look beyond the bubble. It was a senior seminar, and it set me on the path I’ve been following my entire adult life.

De León and photographer Richard Barnes to show images of and artifacts from the US-Mexico border, she was taking a chance; much of the exhibition wasn’t “art,” per se, and could have been attacked for being too partisan or political. But the result, titled State of Exception, was a uniquely stunning and necessary exhibit, and it’s a testament to its power that it has traveled to venues from Arizona to New York.

Art institutions also tend to be bubbles. For them, “the world” is raw material, something to mold and make work with. What’s outside informs what goes on display inside, but always in a carefully controlled and managed way. Both art and academia afford their practitioners a real kind of freedom, but often at the expense of putting it to wider use.

The Institute for the Humanities has an incredible knack for bringing to the institute artists who are curious about the world. A small sample speaks volumes: Scott Hocking, who excavated pieces of Detroit’s history; Sonya Clark, who invited U-M students to tell the stories of their hair; Ramiro Gomez, whose cardboard cutouts reminded everyone on campus of the hidden workers who keep it pristine; Mary Mattingly, who tracked the production and distribution of cobalt in the area. These artists use their work to shine light on the overlooked corners of society and to question the systems undergirding it, which so many of us take for granted.

What’s remarkable about the program that curator Amanda Krugliak has cultivated at the University of Michigan’s Institute for the Humanities is that, despite existing in both academic and artistic contexts, it’s not afraid to engage with the world. In fact, it invites the world into the gallery and pushes the gallery out into the world, in a way that many art institutions in larger cities still don’t. In 2012, when Krugliak teamed up with anthropologist Jason

It’s equally important to note that the Institute for the Humanities doesn’t simply present preexisting work. Rather, it generously hosts two

or more artists a year in fellowships that offer them the time and space to undertake new projects. Given that the art world runs on artists’ labor but undervalues it all the same, a residency like this one is incredibly valuable.

And the impact the residents have extends beyond themselves. These artists interact with students while they’re working on campus: they teach classes, hold workshops, give lectures. They pose their questions anew and make art that challenges its viewers to consider what lies beyond the boundaries of campus, past the borders of Ann Arbor. I wish such a program had existed during my time at U-M. It would have helped me understand the possibilities of what contemporary art can be and do.

Jillian Steinhauer is a freelance writer and editor living in Brooklyn. She won the 2014 Best Art Reporting Award from the U.S. chapter of the International Association of Art Critics for her work at Hyperallergic, where she was formerly the senior editor. Her writing has also appeared in the Guardian US, The New Republic, The Atlantic, and the book Cat Is Art Spelled Wrong, among other publications. She writes mainly about art and politics, but also sometimes about cats.

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Richard BARNES Richard Barnes has the sensibility of a nineteenth-century naturalist, combined with a twenty-first-century sensibility, and he asks us, “How did we ever get to this place?� He seems to move freely between two undeniably hinged worlds: a more ordered and reassuring past and a tenuous and uncertain future.

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Molds used for skeletal replication morph into mounds of flesh and bone. Styrofoam armatures used in the casting process resemble strange sculptures the color of day-glo confections. We are no longer sure of where we are, what we are looking at, what we know. Inside turns out, and in this way, his work is transcendent.

But perhaps what is most remarkable about Barnes’s photographs is that in the mix of it all, in this extensive visual conversation around museum practice and method, authenticity and replication, we are disarmed and moved by a profound undercurrent of longing, the longing of life for itself.

This exhibition is the culmination of hours of reconnaissance and ruminations in the collections of the U-M Museums of Paleontology and Archeology, informed by the invaluable stories and experiences of Professors Philip Gingerich and Carla Sinopoli, and Assistant Research Scientist William Sanders.

A collaborative exploration, it is steeped in conversations more conceptual in nature between Barnes and myself, conversations considering the lumbering or frenetic gestures towards extinction and the poems of Czeslaw Milosz. It encompasses the unexpectedness of a prehistoric whale cast in armatures wheeled across campus to the gallery at the end of a summer, and the mercurial nature of a gray wall.

Plaster casts of stone tools from the U-M archeology collections about to be de-accessioned now connect and disconnect to the Barnes photograph of a recently discovered

skeletal whale hanging above them.

Historic images printed by Barnes in 2009 from nearly discarded glass negatives from the U-M paleontology collections reveal the ephemeral details of the past in the margins and are a new layer in the process of their existence and documentation.

Past Perfect/Future Tense attempts to achieve some measure of authenticity in representing the extraordinary creative endeavor of Richard Barnes over many months. In the end, perhaps it is as simple as a matter of proof, that in the passage of time ongoing, a simple gesture or imprint, a finding, will be discovered, and valued towards understanding.

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Whale + Armature, from Past Perfect/Future Tense (2009). Photo: Richard Barnes.

Alison BECHDEL Long-time cartoonist Alison Bechdel is an internationally recognized graphic memoirist. She received a MacArthur fellowship “genius grant” in 2014, and her memoir Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic (2006) was re-created as a musical, originating at the Public Theater and opening on Broadway in spring 2015.

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Among contemporary graphic memoirists, Bechdel stands out for her achievement, and for the attention she has garnered from students, scholars of graphic memoir, feminist and queer scholars in the humanities, and an even more extensive non-academic public. She has been known for over twenty years for her bi weekly comic strip Dykes to Watch Out For, which developed a loyal and diverse following. However, it was really the command of the long-form memoir that inevitably extended her reach and readership beyond those limits.

Bechdel’s work explores the intricacies of family relationships and notions of home through push and pull, and the tandem of words and images.

The immediacy of the hybrid art form of graphic memoir allows for an immersive and active engagement with the material, shifting from verbal accounts to picture stories, past external and internal roadblocks.

To our benefit, Bechdel’s works completely overrides any carefully laid system of defense in place.

The overlap of interpretation and the ongoing translation of form and content produce shifting and replicating versions of self. The graphic memoir allows for narratives to delve into highly personal matters as well as the political and social issues of the day. There is something uncanny and surprising that results from the synthesis of the comic book format and challenging, often difficult material. Bechdel’s narratives are fearless, uncensored, and innovative.

The installation in the Institute for the Humanities gallery represents the first comprehensive curated exhibition of Alison Bechdel’s work. It includes original drawings, prints, posters, and relevant historic marginalia from Bechdel’s archives, all housed in a parlor-like setting.

Conceptually, the space intends to broadly reference the Victorian interiors of Bechdel’s childhood environs, not as a re-creation, but as a mise-en-scène for memory and the present, intimacy and facade, pattern and subversion, and their imperfect co-existence in time.

The gallery offers containment for the anxiety-producing vigilance required in tending to our stories, longing for home.

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Dykes, Dads, and Moms to Watch out For (2015). Photo: Sarah Nesbitt.

Sonya CLARK First, Sonya Clark is an artist with integrity in regards to craft‌.to the making. Whether working with beads, cloth, combs, metal, or hair, we understand fully the finished work as the continuation of the human gesture, the meticulousness of the effort, the toil, the commitment, a testimony to the making and the maker, one and of many, then and now.

And then there is the continuity of vision, the authentic and intuitive way that one thing circuitously leads to another in her process as an artist, her pondering, and her measured questions.

It is the questioning, that offers the greatest potential for the reach.

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That her work becomes figuratively and literally about the emergent threads, once lost and then found, like a myriad of thin blue veins that, when mined, reveals a pulse.

Triangle Trade, from Sonya Clark: An Exhibition of New and Existing Work (2015).

That her work is as much about the proverbial ties that bind us, connect us, the strands and tendrils of DNA as the loose ends and hems undone, the staunch resolve in the painstaking raveling and unraveling of it all.

Because in all that, there is hope‌ hope of being re-purposed, mended, revised, and converted, a truth closer than before.

Sonya Clark is an extraordinary teacher, whose work and words about work offer both an immediacy and opportunity for further inquiry. In her residency at U-M, Clark engaged with students from the Department of Afroamerican and African Studies, as well as the Stamps School of Art & Design—the student group Stamps in Color.

Clark collected their personal stories about hair, which were then incorporated into an installation for this exhibition. She gave each student the instruction to write a prompt, “My hair is like…” then to pass that first line to a fellow student who would write their own story using that gift of a line to begin.

When talking to them later, it was clear how affected they were by Clark’s visit.

It connected them. They remarked that the project allowed them to understand other students and know them in a way they would have never thought about without that engagement, even though they sat next to them every day. Each of their stories led way to new stories they crafted together.

Clark’s seminal works de-constructing the Confederate flag coincided historically with the 150th anniversary of the end of the Civil War. And when a racist white male youth murdered

innocent black people in a church, and that flag came down outside of the South Carolina capital, Clark’s work became a zeitgeist…cited in Time Magazine, Mother Jones, NPR. And troubled deeply about what it meant to continue the work in the face of such tragedy, she was reassured by her friends that the work was a place where people can put their sentiments about that. “Our work becomes the place where people can put their narratives,”1 a container, a vessel.

I can remark as an arts curator upon the work of Sonya Clark and cite her many accomplishments. But what I want to tell you about most is three women in a car: Sonya, Maria, and me.

We were headed to Cranbrook, where Sonya went to graduate school, to see the work of her mentor and friend Nick Cave. We shared a passion, too, we discovered, for vintage clothes.

And in that car we talked about our lives, we talked about our families, we talked about our hair, and between that and Nick Cave, the sky opened up for us beyond the traffic of I-96 and the Midwest cloud cover.

We each shared our stories and became part of a new one.

My friend Maria said despite the “threat of reverting to an afro when wet,” she loved swimming. Sonya talked about braids like art on her head as a young girl, and I said I think I went blonde because it reminds me of my mother.

And we said to ourselves, where does it end, at what point? Do you color it, do you cut it off, should you iron it, curl it, should you wear glasses, or lower your voice or raise it at the end of sentences…expunge yourself of any inflection at all, where you are from, your roots…at what point would you be seen, would you be taken seriously, finally, when would it end, when is enough enough?

Sonya said that there are those people you just don’t want at the table, but then there are people that are worth the investment, because of relationships. So, we make the effort towards some, helping them understand how we feel, how to say that…how they would feel if they were us.

Sonya Clark, as quoted by U-M Professor Meg Sweeney, from a transcript of an interview with Sonya Clark, 9/28/15.

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Jen DAVIS Arriving at Jen Davis’s studio in Brooklyn, double-checking the address scrawled on a piece of paper in my pocket, then ringing the bell, I was an expectant guest awaiting the privilege. Front steps to a door, an opening, then a welcome…entering her room, I was reminded of her photographs.

I was privy to a private place.

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It was the same place where the light cast triangular shadows against a wall, where a bluish hue felt like a poem, and where a section of orange unpeeling, or the brushing of hair, or a buttoning of pants became a punctuation mark.

First off, there is the undeniable light—the way that light makes us first think of what we know to be true— the same light of skies in childhood, or kitchen windows. It warms us.

Soon, it becomes the light that is illuminating, the light that changes, the light of cathedrals and Vermeers. It takes off the roof. It dispels every myth,

every given, re-configuring our distorted sense of our own bodies in space, and our assumptions about everyone else. It leads us towards new realms.

In many of Jen Davis’s self-portraits created over an eleven year period, she is alone at the onset, seemingly self-contained. Yet, she is asking like Nora in A Doll’s House asks, or like every Mary in A Room of One’s Own, like Emily Dickinson with each verse, like Mabel in Cassavetes’ A Woman Under the Influence. She asks us in, she asks us to notice, and seeks acknowledgement. This character Davis creates from versions of herself takes her stage, commands the attention of her audience and their company, so that they might know her.

Through the artifice of intimacy comes a genuine closeness and understanding that would otherwise be squelched by the impossibility of things on the outside. Jen Davis’s photographs are about the longing

and desire for a connection, an awakening, and, ultimately, for a view.

And although her work serves to examine our culture of collective prejudices and judgments as they relate to weight and desirability in our society, especially for women, it takes us even further into our own deeply embedded self-scrutiny.

Davis’s work requires our own complete candidness as participants. That is the reveal—our discomfort in our own skin on display. When was the last time that any of us weren’t consumed by the Goldilocks dilemma—too big, too small, “just right” out of reach— unable to vanquish loneliness in our warranted distrust of house guests?

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Pressure Point, from Eleven Years (2014-2015).

Mark DION

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Waiting for the Extraordinary (2011). Photo: Sharad Patel.

In 2017, as part of the Institute for the Humanities Year of Archives and Futures, and in celebration of the U-M Bicentennial, the institute gallery presents a new iteration of Mark Dion’s Waiting for the Extraordinary. This exhibition serves as an archive of the original, a glance back moving forward.

The original site-specific installation was commissioned and first exhibited by the Institute for the Humanities in 2011. In it, Mark Dion focuses his inquiry on Michigan Chief Justice Augustus Woodward’s territorial act of 1817, establishing a “Catholepistemiad, or University of Michigania.”

Woodward harbored a dream of classifying all human knowledge and had discussed this with his friend and mentor Thomas Jefferson.

Woodward’s handwritten list from the period outlined thirteen different professorships, or “diaadaxiim,” which followed an idiosyncratic system of classifications. He invented outlandish words for these, mixing Greek and Latin, resulting in alliterative designations such as Anthropoglossica (literature), Physiosophica (natural philosophy), and Iatrica (medicine), to name a few.

Mark Dion imagines what objects would best represent these classifications and sets out to find them in the many departments and collections within the university. The result is as much an expedition as a scavenger hunt, in part Aristotle as well as Don Quixote. In a week’s time, he locates a magpie, a meteorite, a celestial globe, a flask, a bugle, and then a heart. Each artifact is reproduced using 3D rapid imaging technology at the U-M Duderstadt Center, coated with phosphorescent paint, and then exhibited in a manner suggestive of post-nuclear hallowed halls.

In the first installation, visitors to the gallery take a number, are seated in a waiting room, a carbon copy in itself. It is the familiar experience encountered in every institution, at the dentist’s office, or the DMV. We are waiting for something extraordinary to happen, transform us, alleviate the banality. And with the passing of time, we feel affixed to our chairs, immovable objects in our right, not entirely sure what we are waiting for.

In the 2017 exhibition, Dion presents the new iteration as a self-enclosed room. The ephemera from the initial waiting room hang on its exterior walls like notations, clues—moldings in

place, a coat, a shirt, clocks charting different time zones inhabited by the artist. The viewer is faced with doors locked, no entrance or exit in reality. There is merely the suggestion of, the facade. One peers through the glass at the glowing objects, now unreachable, an endgame.

Dion’s room within a room now catalogues the materiality of the original human experience as if in a shadow box. It suggests containment rather than the expanse, alludes to posterity rather than future. One wonders if some magic elixir or love potion number 9 might bring us back to life.

Waiting for the Extraordinary is reinstalled at the University of Michigan just as wooden cabinets and handwritten fieldnotes are offloaded, as our own university material collections are moving to state-of-the-art, off-site facilities. In this shift, as romanticism gives way to modernity, one cannot help but ask somewhat wistfully, do we lose identity and meaning in the translation...our connection to the natural world, the trappings of our histories now at arm’s length? Or does the heartbreak fade in time as we adjust, revealing new promises?

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Ramiro GOMEZ

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Ramiro Gomez (2015). Photo by Donald Harrison, from a video still.

Artist Ramiro Gomez’s life-sized cardboard cutouts, paintings, and constructions bring attention to those who toil behind the familiar scenes of luxury and affluence in America. LA based, he often focuses on the Hispanic work force in Beverly Hills—the nannies, gardeners, housekeepers, and pool cleaners.

In 2014, Gomez spent several weeks as an artist in residence with the U-M Institute for the Humanities, mounting his works across the Diag, changing our everyday landscape on campus.

One installation depicted migrant workers in the field, incorporating cardboard vegetable boxes foraged from the dumpsters behind dorm cafeterias.

Another illustrated a groundskeeper tending to fall leaves.

For his exhibition, Gomez creates a room-sized installation of his cutouts in the Institute for the Humanities gallery, his subjects in domestic captivity.

Although his works contemplate issues of race and cultural identity, they more philosophically explore delineations and disconnects between people, the haves and have-nots, the visible and invisible.

His articulated figures are performative, capturing the rhythm and gesture of the service industry, their endless repetitions that keep things running.

Almost naïve in materiality and process, his constructions are measured and deliberate actions of inclusion.

Seeing a Gomez figure propped on a manicured lawn—or in a Hockney painting, or pasted in a luxury goods magazine ad—permanently changes the picture, and our narratives about wealth and prosperity in our society.

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Chrysopholae (2015).

Doug HALL

Doug Hall’s Chrysopholae, or “Golden Gate,” was originally commissioned to commemorate the 75th anniversary of the Golden Gate Bridge as part of the International Orange exhibition at Fort Point in San Francisco in 2012. It was later curated by Kathleen Ford and Rudolf Frieling, for West Coast Visions at the Borusan Contemporary, Istanbul in 2015.

The Golden Gate Bridge is an iconic symbol of the American West, an immediately recognizable architectural monolith, postcard perfect, engraved in our collective memory. We know it.

But on a more philosophical level, this bridge and its unique history suggests a gateway to beginnings and ends, an unfolding, the entry point for upheaval then reinvention, bare life on the edge.

Ever present, it inhabits the Bay Area landscape. In addition to being a hub for tourism and international cargo transport, it is a touchstone for place and time where identity intertwines with environment. It defines an exact location, undeniable, where individuals embark upon self-discovery.

The fog rolls in and rolls out, and it clears your head. The bridge is

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swathed in bands of light, the sky never hovering, but rather like a window.

Doug Hall’s intimate double portrait of the Golden Gate Bridge offers unbelievable vistas, visual records of its comings and goings and inner workings in a way that completely changes our perceptions and understanding of it and the space in which it engages.

Hall, a force in his own right in the San Francisco art scene, filmed container ship traffic through the Golden Gate using twin video cameras mounted side by side on a tripod.

For this unique project, he filmed

both from the bridge span itself, as well as while riding out with bar pilot boats to shoot ships from the water.

The overall video composition created

by Hall incorporating these tandem projections is sublime, suggestive of a full day in the life of the bridge, but compressed. We become intensely immersed in the work, a heightened state, alert and imaginative, aware of every visual cue. We cease to become onlookers but rather full participants.

Offering both continuity and counterpoint, Doug Hall’s Chrysopholae challenges us in its constant back and forth, materially and conceptually.

Joan Didion once wrote “We tell ourselves stories in order to live,” to make sense of the whys and why nots, the way the cards fall, the streaks of luck and the staggering losses.

And yet perhaps, what is most notable beyond what we think we know, any certainty or explanation, is our capacity for change…the conversion, the flip, the about face, the surprise, the new day.

Scott HOCKING

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Scott Hocking: New Work (2010). Photo: Scott Hocking.

Scott Hocking explores the abandoned buildings and sites of Detroit like a newfangled scientist. He gathers raw data in his excavations, and records his findings using a wholly unique and modern process and method that he intuitively formulates as he goes along. In his ongoing study of a city so rooted in a dense past, and the emotional attachments that accompany it, Hocking is uncompromising and unflinching, and refuses to buy into the hype. These visual essays chronicling urban markings of modern day ruin are not the stuff of tragedy or fodder for magazine centerfolds, but proof of a renaissance in real time. Hockings work is fully alive, and honors the world going past and us moving forward along with it, exhilarated by industrial parks returning to fallow land, and strawberry bushes growing in the cracked concrete.

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Jennifer KARADY

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Soldiers’ Stories from Iraq and Afghanistan (2014). Photo: Patrick Young.

Jennifer Karady’s work isn’t calm or quiet.

It waits insistently, on a precipice between memory and real time. Karady articulates each soldier’s vision with such exactness it is startling, arresting, and leaves us suspended, as if waking— still within a dream, sleepwalking through the house at night. Everything is acute, wired, and deliberate, so convincing we begin to wonder if this is the new normal. We just never noticed the shift before now.

Karady’s dual residency and crosscampus exhibition with the Institute for the Humanities and the Stamps School of Art and Design brings attention to a new generation of veterans within the university population and our extended communities that are returning from military service and re-entering civilian life. The unique challenges veterans face negotiating the fissure between

these two worlds are ongoing, with no clear resolution. The remnants of the psychological impact of war serve as markers in their daily comings and goings, yet go unnoticed from the outside of things.

For our exhibition at the Institute for the Humanities, the Soldiers’ Stories photographs are accompanied by sound stories edited by Karady from her interviews with veterans, whereby images in combination with these original voices create an intimacy with the material. The exhibition also debuts new works based upon the personal accounts of U-M student veterans.

Jennifer Karady’s work both recognizes the imprint of the individual under ordinary and extraordinary circumstances, as well as exposes our shared vulnerabilities.

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Joanne LEONARD

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Music and Boys on Bars, from Newspaper Diary: Trompe-l’Oeil Photography (2012).

Joanne Leonard is an artist who has always offered a glimpse into the room, cataloguing the small details, the countertop, toys strewn about the floor, a lover asleep on the bed, the dream of a window, and the house not quite ready for company. Both the act of photographing and the resulting images of this inner world serve as record of the human trace and the value of our own human experiences. Her photographs are profoundly personal and conversely startling in their entirety.

I first met Joanne Leonard in the 1980s.

I was her student at the University of Michigan, just beginning to explore my own voice as a young woman and an artist. She was perhaps the first person I’d ever known and the only art professor at the time (most were men) that spoke of empowerment, feminism, the strength and potential impact of our own stories, ideas, and imaginations. It wasn’t until years later that I recognized her tremendous influence on my own artistic practice. I had carried her with me. She taught me that value is inherent in one’s life and work, but it is also dependent on a constant vigil and endurance…a commitment to the process of becoming.

Joanne Leonard’s work has never been static or complacent, rather in a state of response. Her own narratives and the reign of the world’s events are in overlay, deeply relevant to the collective shifts of society.

Leonard’s use of collage reiterates this back and forth between public and private, past and present, real and imagined. The materiality of her photographic collages juxtaposes the flat, two-dimensional surface with the luridness of unexpected combinations.

A hint of color, texture, pattern, a passage of text ignites the images, alluding to that place of seismic instability, where all breaks away.

In Newspaper Diary, her exhibition at the Institute for the Humanities, Leonard continues the conversation.

The significance of our books and correspondence, our histories, our love letters, our rituals are in doubt.

These brave new works initially reside in the present. They are modern and unaffected, somehow reassuring. We can almost picture the artist herself drinking her coffee, reading the Times, placing cuttings of the newspaper against the pages of her favorite art book.

Before long, through a carefully considered sleight of hand, these trompe-l’oeil photographs defy all presumptions and constructs of time, upending any notion we have about history and our place in it, or some record left for posterity’s sake.

These compositions exist only in the photographs; they are props, mis-enscènes. And in this discovery comes the wrenching acceptance of what we desperately try to save, and what we inevitably lose in the midst of it all.

The works in Newspaper Diary are highly complex conceptually. Each photograph captures the translation from idea to volition. The gravity of the book, the image, and the paper succumb to the impermanence of things. As a final record, the photographs themselves become object.

The uncanny relationship between visual representations decades apart suggests that our uniqueness is more likely and predictable than we think, like a roll of sixes in a game of dice, or the Jack of Spades in a deck of cards… noteworthy, but not beyond replication.

We live in a world full of black holes, tweets and texts, and the big bang.

Perhaps, in some alternate universe there exists another version of us, with a different end.

Newspaper Diary offered no absolutes but some measure alluding to continuity… what came before, “it is what it is” and a life after this one.

Joanne Leonard matter-of-factly catalogs this timeline, capturing for a moment the poignant immediacy of the everyday, the harsh realities of the times in which we live, and the inevitability of a tomorrow that may not remember what mattered. Yet, in the deliberateness of these photographs that are already recollections, Leonard also embraces humanity and a certain resilience.

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Joan LINDER High Season, from Atomic Highways and Byways (2017).

Toxic—our relationships to the environment, our communities, and one another rest on a hidden pivot.

Like a seesaw, our everyday lives hang in the balance, left in the lurch, unless we are constantly vigilant. There is what we think we know to be true, what they tell us, so we sleep soundly.

And then, there is the underbelly of it. Silent yet pervasive as silt, the cumulative baggage follows us around, with the shelf life of 4.5 billion years, just like uranium. We think we’ve put

it behind us, cleaned it up, buried it, shrank it and we are on top of it.

Until, carelessly coasting down the park hill, we hit the big swerve, and the handlebars knock the wind out of us—the big wipe out.

Joan Linder’s exhibition Atomic Highways and Byways looks at three toxic landscapes—two in Niagara Falls, New York, and the third in Belleville, Michigan. Instrumental in the

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assembling of the first atomic weapons, Buffalo and Niagara Falls are strewn with radioactive hot spots. Wayne Disposal, in Belleville, Michigan, is a commercial waste landfill, where other states dump their hazardous waste. It is one of nineteen active hazardous waste sites in the country.

For the past three-and-a-half years, Linder has been exploring these American landscapes, attempting to uncover their toxic history. As part

of her project, she draws facsimiles of official documents that trace this dark past just below the surface.

The act of drawing itself becomes a means of excavation, finding proof, following the spiral.

Linder also catalogues her observations of these sites with intimate drawings made sitting in her car for hours, bearing witness at a safer distance. The drawings of the Belleville site were created on location during Linder’s

2016 Institute for the Humanities residency. Large scale charcoal rubbings of the grounds also serve as visual artifacts. Through the meticulous handdrawn network of her marks, Linder investigates the imprints and trappings of both human and manufactured experience, how each place and piece of information is connected, overlapping, and interwoven.

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The Search, from White Nights (2011).

Walter MARTIN

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Paloma MUÑOZ

In the winter of 2001, artists Walter Martin and Paloma Muñoz moved from their loft in Brooklyn into an old house in the Delaware Highlands of Pennsylvania. Isolated by harsh winters and an entirely different cultural landscape, Martin and Muñoz channeled the strangeness of this shifting reality into a body of work that began around a series of snow globes.

Martin and Muñoz’s is a collaborative process, one informing the other, each adding something new to the overall composition, together determining how to achieve a common end. This same duality continues in the tragicyet-comedic themes of their narratives and the intimacy of the snow globes juxtaposed with the sprawling pastoral nature of their large-scale photographs.

We are immersed, but also observers, witnesses at a somewhat safer distance.

Martin and Muñoz’s modern travelers are wary, plagued with uncertainty and anxiety, subjected to strip searches, and accompanied by the pervasive worstcase-scenario mindset. Their stories allude to the paranoia of a potential police state and hidden surveillance.

The contemporary dioramas encapsulate social constructs gone amok, freak weather. Luckily, we find reassurance in their containment and the artists’ prevailing sense of humor.

At first the scenes resemble postcards and keepsakes from a too-bright gleaming paradise. They are armored with heavy plex or just beyond reach in the refractions of glass domes, and we covet them. We want to take them home, like gift shop memorabilia from the vacation spot we couldn’t afford in the first place. They evoke memories of the dollhouses and train sets of our childhood, and the epic masterpieces above illusory living room fireplaces we never owned. Yet in an unexpected turnabout, a tarantella, a theater in the round, the world of dreams we thought we knew turns upside down.

Perhaps it is this tenuousness throughout that elevates the creations of Martin and Muñoz beyond object or kitsch, novelty or cleverness. The work spirals from light to dark, two-sided, conveying the existential dilemma of being human.

In a turn, we are both hopeful and completely terrified, shocked and amused by the sinister, enthusiastic to make the trip and full of trepidation.

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Mary MATTINGLY

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Objects Unveiled: Boxing, Rolling, Stretching, and Cutting (2016). Photo: Mary Mattingly.

The work of Mary Mattingly suggests a suspension of disbelief, a leap of some brand of faith, but with eyes open.

Collectively, her projects speak to both volition, and burden, and a surprising acknowledgement of that conundrum.

Her binds and bundles emphasize the mess we are in…but her performances, assemblages and installations are in no way brooding, or wallowing. Instead, as she traces a path from origin to use, to dump, her gaze is futuristic, what can be ultimately imagined beyond all that, finding solutions.

Mary Mattingly’s work and ideas are striking, and precipitate a change in consciousness…to foresee a place that doesn’t pretend to be utopia, but instead offers an alternative way of being, of thinking, understanding that is dependent on the steps we take and the stark reality of our choices, unadorned.

What are we willing to sacrifice in the process to ultimately secure a sustainable way of life and respectful co-existence?

During her residency, Mattingly travelled to the Upper Peninsula, exploring its terrain and cobalt mines.

She thrifted for glassware and other goods, visited trash sites, met with metal workers and airplane mechanics. The artist engaged with students at U-M from diverse departments collecting personal objects for a sacred burial and ceremony on the Diag, a related project to her installation in the gallery.

Each workshop included the ritual of tea and cake, storytelling, drawing, but also 3D imaging which became part of Mattingly’s digital archives. There was never any sense that she placed more value on one object or another. All became part of a bundle. This aggregate of our stuff, a slew of democracy, appeared as if washed up on a shore, or unintentionally caught in a net.

In preparation for her gallery installation, Mattingly’s studio displayed the cumulative cobalt

hue of her forgings. Blue glass, blue powder, blue fabrics, blue pipes were infatuating and intoxicating.

Scales and diagrams, photographs taken on location, and a series of carefully orchestrated suspensions and pulleys all seem to potentially lead us to some peculiar and certain destination, a eureka moment of an exalted explorer.

Perhaps the true brilliance is the way everything in the room seemingly converges, only to reveal loose ends, connections and disconnections, a network of tangents, a mesh of turns, the various routes of mazes. And perhaps it is this gesture en masse of tethering and untethered, that overtakes hard fast gravity in the end.

The work Mary Mattingly creates can only exist because, although she fully recognizes the impossibility of things, she insists on residing in the realm of still possible.

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Kent MONKMAN

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Scent of a Beaver (2016). Photo: Patrick Young.

Kent Monkman is a Canadian First Nations artist of Cree and Irish ancestry whose work wreaks havoc with traditions and reinvents the historical tropes presented in eighteenthand nineteenth-century Western landscape paintings and dioramas.

With a potent mix of art history, pop culture, sexuality, kitsch, and indignation, Monkman sets out to emancipate his characters and their stories. He acknowledges the queerness of past romanticism while at the same time constructing new tableaus, lurid and gloriously queer, rewriting the proverbial handbook entirely.

His who’s who of causalities at the hands of modernity is many tiered.

Monkman’s constructs offer a tour of the history of art through the ages, as well as being figurative stand-ins for the exploitation of nations at the hands of white western expansion and progress.

What is particularly notable is the uncanny way the stories transcend our delineations of time. Although rooted in past and future, Monkman’s narratives include the viewer in the moment and are transformative.

What is true amidst a past littered with merely convenient truths?

His work is irreverent, subversive, wry, amorous, picturesque, charged and bawdy, built on foundations of virtuosic painting and highly complex concepts of order and empowerment.

The installation Scent of a Beaver is based on the rococo masterpiece The Swing by Jean-Honoré Fragonard. It features Monkman’s alter ego Miss Chief Eagle Testickle dangling on a swing between a French and English general. With Miss Chief dressed in the opulence of silk and fur, the work functions as a metaphor for the power relationships between

the major players that shaped the social fabric, political structures, and economies of North America.

Monkman changes everything in one fell swoop…how we think about cultural identity, gender identity, appropriation, and falsehoods as they relate to the displacement of peoples and the agency and culpability behind it.

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Shani PETERS

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The Crown: Contemporary Construction of Self in America (2015). Photo: Patrick Young.

Shani Peters’s installations are driven by community in regards to questions of identity, but also as it pertains to action…the “act” of individuals coming together…the time, the place, the exchange. Consistently, in works like The Obama Skirt Project, 2009; The People’s Laundromat Theater, 2013; and at U-M The Crown Project, 2014-15; it is community that really ignites the project.

Ironically, although her work offers a definitive contemporary voice, it harkens back, bringing into question the stories we are taught to guide us, and the stories that others would lead us to believe. Perhaps it is this relationship between present day and history, and all of us in the mire of it that offers the greatest opportunity for reflection, and subsequently to effect change. Her straightforward and direct approach reminds us that in actuality, it’s all complicated.

The visual elements of her projects are also presented in the active voice. Sewing, cutting, pasting, and constructing are as critical to the work as her more conceptual ideas. Bold graphic posters and pamphlets become

visual tools to reach out to her audience.

Both the conceptual and the visual strengthen and reinforce one another.

Regardless of format, Peters emphasizes the handmade. Her videos collage together cut-outs, comic-book-like captions, and drawings, and often include the working hands of the artist herself. She pastes together narratives crossing timelines, as seen in her Battles for the Hearts and Minds and ReProgrammed: the Evan’s Huxtables.

Peters interchanges reality and TV, personal stories and the stuff from books, legends, and hip-hop stars.

This ongoing assemblage of disparate characters and elements mirrors the mix of history, story, and conflicting self-image as it relates to questions of identity and race in America.

The installation at U-M, as part of The Crown Project and in collaboration with the Department of Afroamerican and African Studies (DAAS), incorporates straightforward symbols, pop iconography, and the immediacy of hip-hop music and video to prompt social engagement.

An MTV-worthy red carpet speaks further to one’s examination of self and position in our society.

Peters suspends hundreds of crowns from the ceiling, based upon hand drawn patterns. Some are primitive, reminiscent of those in Jean Paul Basquiat’s paintings. Others suggest elaborate tribal head dresses of African and indigenous American cultures. The constructions immediately bring to mind the crowns made in childhood, to first announce one’s self, or serve as party hats for dolls. Yet their reflective vinyl suggest a different, more problematic narrative. They are shiny and seductive, but flat, artifice, illusory, casting shadows. All intend to celebrate and explore autonomy and the concept of self-determination.

The Crown: Contemporary Construction of Self in America is a go cart: simple in construction, yet offering an extended opportunity for students to directly engage with the materiality of the exhibition, and in turn, with one another. The institute’s collaborative partnership with DAAS extends our own notions of community past the well-worn paths as well as our inquiries in the consideration of black identity and pride as it relates to success within the institutional environment.

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Mary SIBANDE

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Sibande on Campus (2013). Photo: Sarah Nesbitt.

South African artist Mary Sibande was born in 1982, inheriting the weight of a family history defined by domestic servitude for three generations.

and class. Her immense costumed sculptural figures representative of the women in her family and herself seem to hold court, enveloping the room.

Growing up in Barberton, Mpumalanga, she entered adulthood in the long and lingering post shadow of Apartheid, and graduated with a B.Tech degree in visual art from the University of Johannesburg in 2007.

In their yards of pleats and folds, billowing skirts, they suggest some kind of magic, as if through alchemy, they’ve grown to three times their original size. They are emergent, empowered, and at the same time, dwarfing us. Her figures change from maid to queen to gladiator before our eyes. In her photographs, taking on the personas of her sculptures, Sibande morphs from human form to statue, like a modern day Pygmalion reversal.

Within this wide wake of post colonialism, Sibande boldly sets out to craft a vision of all that had come before with the future self ahead.

Like other artists of her generation, Sibande resides in the past, present, and future, understanding the complexity of these profound seismic cultural shifts. It is less about a clear trajectory than what remains to be seen, manifested, or realized.

Sibande constructs her fantastical visual narratives offering a stage for inquiry and the further examination of ongoing questions about race, gender,

In contrast to this magical realism, Sibande intentionally exaggerates the flat painted blackness of the molded mannequin skin. It is immersive and embodies the daunting gravity of cultural heritage and how it inevitably continues to define one’s identity regardless of awareness, resilience or resolve.

And yet, from the extraordinary expanse of Sibande’s imagination, her characters and stories seem to rise above it all, in some revelatory dream state. One has the impression that these solidly anchored figures might take flight, become airborne, and this offers perhaps the greatest momentary relief or even ecstasy.

Still, Sibande doesn’t leave us with easy answers or resolution. Instead, her work transports us to a place somewhere between mortal and the superhero to ponder. Sibande frees the conscious and unconscious simultaneously, leaving the viewer in the balance.

Well aware of the burden carried by a post-traumatic culture, she confronts ghosts of the past head on, and in doing so alludes to possibilities and new ways for a nation to envision itself.

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One Thousand Shacks, from Here and There (2017).

To meet artist Tracey Snelling evokes the sensation of a strong-willed breeze determined to open a backyard door.

As an artist and person, she is down to earth, direct, contemporary, and moving through it all with volition.

Snelling’s artistic practice originally focused on photography as a medium, but soon evolved to include her construction of sculptures based upon cities and towns, strip malls and urban housing.

She refers to her three-dimensional work as sculptural rather than diorama or model making because she isn’t particularly interested in the exact rendering of location, or the contextualization of place.

Instead, she taps into the energy of community and its humanness— restless, frenetic, din, a choir, extending beyond the confines of walls.

Tracey SNELLING

Snelling’s representations are neither judgmental nor opportunistic. They unaffectedly and objectively offer a multidimensional sketch of a place in time, how we occupy space.

Her signature piece One Thousand Shacks (included in the exhibition along with new work created during her residency here) pushes up against the challenges of economic inequalities, racial biases, and imposed class divisions that often limit the options available to so many people.

Concurrently, the installation embraces our everyday existence expressed through Snelling’s exuberant palette, bold graphics, video and neon.

Conceptually, Snelling’s stacking method first creates an exalted “big picture” with a myriad of colors, image, text, sound and light. The counterpoint in scale soon immerses the viewer into each small world. With this shift, the onlooker becomes the active participant, the occupant in situ, adding the trappings of their own experiences to each tableau. It is this shift that forces the viewer into a new way of seeing from varying perspectives.

On the one hand, the artist’s sculptures allude to our desire for refuge, a private domain that allows us to be ourselves.

On the other, the overall composition reaffirms it is imperative that we coexist with one another respectfully, forge relationships, understanding our marked differences. It is diversity—the unique and often disparate combination of things, the cacophony of it all—that activates communities and public space.

Snelling’s constructions literally build a way out, one on top of another, charged with the undercurrent of the way we live. They emphasize our universal longing to find a place called home, and be accepted, built on the foundation of one and of many.

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State of EXCEPTION State of Exception/Estado de Excepción presents traces of the human experience of migration. At its heart are the objects left behind in the desert by unauthorized border crossers on their journeys into the United States.

Together, with other forms of related material, they were collected as part of the research of University of Michigan anthropologist Jason De León’s Undocumented Migration Project.

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Created by artist/photographer Richard Barnes and artist/curator Amanda Krugliak in collaboration with De León, the exhibition includes an installation of hundreds of backpacks left behind by migrants crossing the Sonora Desert of southern Arizona, numerous pieces of clothing and ephemera, and photographs and videos created on location along the U.S./Mexico border by Barnes. The installation also features excerpts of original recordings of audio interviews with migrants as part of De León’s work.

The exhibition was launched at Institute for the Humanities at the University of Michigan and has travelled to Detroit and Grand Rapids, Michigan as well as Phoenix, Arizona prior to

its most recent presentation in New York City. At each venue, it has been updated to include new material from ongoing research, reflecting and responding to the ongoing public debate around immigration, as well as the continuous efforts towards immigration reform in the United States and its inevitable backlash. The fifth features new objects: tires used by U.S. Border Patrol to clear the ground and make footprints more visible, and photographs taken by migrants themselves on their perilous journeys.

Now, more than ever, in the aftermath of a presidential campaign that fed off anti-immigrant and xenophobic rhetoric, it is absolutely critical to look deeper into the migrant experience and raise questions as to what the future may hold for the thousands of people fleeing dire poverty, drug cartel violence, and political instability to the south.

State of Exception/Estado de Excepción honors the sheer materiality of the migrant experience: these objects are fragments of a history of both suffering and resiliency, and the images and voices reveal the desolation, hope, and trials of their odysseys.

There isn’t a line‌no crossing, No checkpoint, No cop.

No running fence between us, No floodlight, No God. Just a place for the asking, A small space, An exception.

A lean-to, Makeshift, A shelter, A wash.

State of Exception installation, Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit (2014).

Photo: Corine Vermeulen. Essay from exhibition at Parsons, New York.

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Canon TOLON

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Time After Time (2012). Photo: Peter Smith.

Canan Tolon’s paintings and installations serve as visual records of the passing of time. Each swipe captures the gesture as well as the memory of the gesture, now already in the past. Each panel appears to duplicate itself beyond any final tally, proliferating in the room.

Upon first glance, Tolon’s constructs evoke a sense of freedom in their repetition. They appear infinite, suggestive of vast open spaces, like the modern landscapes viewed out of a train window, or the film reels from the mid-twentieth century. They draw us in, inviting our dreams and interpretations.

In this momentary introspection, we contemplate our own histories.

With a more prolonged gaze, Tolon’s graphic marks soon appear kinetic, vibrating and rippling, like the curious wake of water from the cast of a small stone. These same rhythmic notations continue in space with the interplay of salvage and mirrors.

Then, like the first day of any highly anticipated tomorrow, after the proverbial summer full of expectation… expecting things to change, to be different, to be new again, we are struck with a profound disillusionment, stranded in a place full of promise that never delivers. In a turn, the world of photographic familiarity she has created collapses in on itself.

And then in metronomic time, the whole process repeats, expanding, then contracting, and so on.

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Artist and Curator BIOS Richard Barnes (2009 Paula and Edwin Sidman Fellow in the Arts) is a photographer whose work has been shown at such institutions as the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh and the Carpenter Center at Harvard University. His work can be found in numerous collections, including the Museum of Modern Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The recipient of the 2005-6 Rome Prize, his photographs of the cabin of Ted Kaczynski were featured in the 2006 Whitney Biennial and awarded the Alfred Eisenstadt Award for Photography.

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Alison Bechdel is a cartoonist and graphic memoirist. She self-syndicated her award-winning comic strip Dykes to Watch Out For from 1983 to 2008. She is the author of Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic, named by Time magazine the Best Book of 2006, and the memoir Are you my Mother? Fun Home was later turned into a Tony-award-winning Broadway musical. Her comics have appeared in The New Yorker and Granta, among many others. The recipient of a 2014 MacArthur Fellowship, she is a Marsh Professor at Large at the University of Vermont.

Sonya Clark is a distinguished research fellow in the School of the Arts at Virginia Commonwealth University. In 2016, she was awarded a university-wide Distinguished Scholars Award. She earned her MFA from Cranbrook Academy of Art and was honored with their Distinguished Alumni Award in 2011. Her work has

been exhibited in over 350 museums around the world. She is the recipient of the US Artist Fellowship and the Art Prize Grand Jurors Award, among others.

Jen Davis (2014 Kidder Resident in the Arts) is a New York-based photographer. For the past 14 years she has been working on a series of self-portraits dealing with issues about beauty, identity, and body images. Her first monograph, Eleven Years, was published

by Kehrer Verlag (Germany) in 2014. She received her MFA from Yale University School of Art in 2008. She is represented in numerous collections including the Art Institute of Chicago and the Museum of Fine Arts Boston. She is represented

by Lee Marks Fine Art and ClampArt. Jason De León is an associate professor of anthropology at the University of Michigan.

He directs the Undocumented Migration Project, a long-term anthropological study of clandestine migration between Mexico and the United States. He was named a National Geographic Emerging Explorer in 2013 and in 2017 was awarded a Macarthur “genius grant.”

Mark Dion (2011 Paula and Edwin Sidman Fellow in the Arts) holds a BFA and an honorary doctorate from the University of Hartford School of Art. His work examines how dominant ideologies and public institution shape our understanding of history, knowledge, and the natural world.

He has received numerous awards and has had major exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art, New York and the Guggenheim Bilbao, among others. He is represented

by Tanya Bonakder Gallery, New York.

Ramiro Gomez was born in 1986 in San Bernardino, California to undocumented Mexican immigrants who have since become US citizens. He briefly attended the California Institute for the Arts

before working as a live-in nanny in West Hollywood, an experience that has informed his artistic practice. He has exhibited widely, and his work has been featured in The New York Times and the Washington Post, among others. He is represented by Charlie James Gallery, Los Angeles.

Doug Hall is a San Francisco-based artist who has worked in a wide range of media including performance, video, and large format photography. His work has been exhibited in the US and Europe and is included in numerous collections including the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Hall is the recipient of numerous grants and awards, and in 1995 he received the American Academy in Rome’s Rome Prize. He is a professor emeritus at the San Francisco Art Institute.

Scott Hocking has lived and worked in Detroit proper since 1996. He creates site-specific sculptural installation and photography projects, often using found materials and vacant locations. His work has been exhibited widely, including the Detroit Institute of Arts, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Kunst-Werke Institute.

He has received multiple awards, including a Kresge Artist Fellowship and an Efroymson Contemporary Arts Fellowship, with residential grants internationally and throughout the US. He is represented

by David Klein Gallery, Detroit.

Jennifer Karady received her MFA from Rutgers University and her BA from Brown University. Her ongoing project Soldiers’ Stories from Iraq and Afghanistan has been exhibited widely including at SF Camerawork, San Francisco and Palm Springs Art Museum, California. She has been a recipient of numerous grants such as the 2017 Greenburger Fellowship for

Mitigating Ethnic and Religious Conflict.

Her work is represented in the collections of the San Francisco Museum of Art and the Palm Springs Art Museum, among others.

Amanda Krugliak is an artist and curator best known for solo performance and conceptual experiential installations. She has served as curator at the Institute for the Humanities since 2007. Most recently, her essay about the work of Richard Barnes was included in Object Lessons & the Formation of Knowledge (University of Michigan Press, 2017). The installation State of Exception, which she co-created with artist Richard Barnes and anthropologist Jason De Leòn, opened at Parsons New School Sheila C. Johnson Design Center and received national and international recognition.

Joanne Leonard is a photographer, photo-collage artist, teacher, writer, and feminist whose work has contributed to a wide variety of fields from fine art to autobiography studies. Her work has been included in the San Francisco Museum of Art’s Women of Photography (1975) and Graphic Subjects (2011), among others. In 2008, her visual memoir Being in Pictures: An Intimate Photo Memoir, was published by University of Michigan Press. She is a Distinguished University Professor Emeritus at the University of Michigan where she taught for 31 years.

Joan Linder is best known for her laborintensive drawings that transform mundane subjects into conceptually rich images. Life size representations of figures and objects explore themes such as the banality of mass produced domestic artifacts, the politics of war, sexual identity and power. She is department chair and associate professor in the Department of Art at the University of Buffalo. She has shown her work throughout the United States and internationally.

Martin and Muñoz are best known for their sculptures and photographs of sculptures contrasting pristine settings with foreboding or grisly scenes. Their work is in the collections of many prominent museums, including the Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma in Helsinki and the Museum of Arts and Design, New York. They are represented in private collections of other prominent institutions including the Progressive Art Collection, Bloomberg L.P. and 21c Museum Hotel in Louisville, KT. Mary Mattingly (2016 Kidder Resident in the Arts) is a New York-based artist who creates sculptural ecosystems in urban spaces around considerations such as accessibility, predatory economics, cycles of input and output, the violence inherent in consumption, and alternative ways to coexist. Her recent work “Swale” is a floating food forest in New York City, an edible garden created on a steel barge that offers its food for free, and has been featured in the Huffington Post, the Wall Street Journal, and The New York Times, among others.

Kent Monkman explores the complexities of historic and contemporary Native American experience in his work. He has been awarded the Egale Leadership Award, the Indspire Award, and the Hnatyshyn Foundation Visual Arts Award. His work has been exhibited internationally and is widely represented in collections in Canada and the US. He is represented by Pierre-François Ouellette Art Contemporain, Montreal and Toronto, and Trèpanier Baer, Calgary.

Shani Peters is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice encompasses histories, community building, and activism. She has exhibited and presented her work in the US and abroad, including the Schomburg Center for Black Culture and Research, New York, and the National Gallery of Zimbabwe. She has received many awards

and support from institutions such as the Foundation for Contemporary Arts and the Joan Mitchell Foundation.

Mary Sibande (2013 Kidder Resident in the Arts) is a South African artist who obtained her Diploma in fine arts at the Witwatersrand Technikon, and a B-Tech degree from the University of Johannesburg.

Through her practice she explores the construction of identity in post-colonial South African context, and critiques stereotypical depictions of women. Her work was included in the 2010 South African pavilion at the Venice Biennale, and she received the Standard Bank Young Artist Award in 2013. She is represented in numerous collections public and private.

Tracey Snelling uses sculpture, photography, video, and installation to give her impression of place, its people and their experience, from the cinematic to the mundane. She has shown work in museums such as Germeentemuseum Helmon, The Netherlands and the Museum of Arts and Design, New York. She has had solo exhibitions throughout the US as well as internationally, and has been awarded residencies in Beijing and Shanghai. Her most recent installation was commissioned for exhibit at the Negev Museum, Israel.

Canan Tolon (2012 Kidder Resident in the Arts) was born in Turkey and has lived and maintained a studio in the San Francisco Bay Area for over 20 years, where she is a working architect and designer. She earned her Master of Architecture from University of California, Berkeley. Her residencies and awards include Bemis Foundation and the MacDowell Colony. Tolon’s work is in the collections of the British Museum, London, as well as the Istanbul Modern, most notably. She is represented by Anglim Gilbert Gallery, San Francisco.

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Over the last decade, the gallery at the Institute for the Humanities has evolved into one of the nation’s most innovative artist residency and exhibition programs. What started modestly as a space in a hallway has become a more fully realized vision beyond four walls, with exhibitions at multiple venues across campus, and exhibitions travelling nationwide. It also serves as an act of disruption, crossing the familiar paths of faculty and students in their daily comings and goings, offering new ways to see things.

The gallery is a veritable hub for emerging artists, new work, groundbreaking collaborations, and provocative conversations on a wide range of topics across the arts and humanities. It also serves as an invaluable resource for faculty, offering ongoing curatorial consultation, and transforming the gallery into an interactive classroom. Defined by passionate commitment to artists and the arts within the academic

sphere, the gallery recognizes both the critical role of creative voices in cross-disciplinary exchange within a research university and the animating role of creative voices in public activism in the world. Undergraduate students, student interns, faculty, artists, and members of the public meet and mix to explore the intersections of the arts, sciences, technology, aesthetics, activism, and humanistic scholarship.

Central to the gallery is the artist residency program. Each highly complex and ambitious residency, guided by the institute’s arts curator, offers emerging and mid-career artists unique opportunities to make work, meet U-M faculty and students, and benefit from the vast resources and networks on campus. The relationships cultivated during these residencies extend far beyond the measure of the artist’s physical time here. It is ultimately these deeply affecting human connections that continue to energize and sustain this unique program.

Copyright @2017 The Regents of the University of Michigan.