2024 Fall – 2025 Spring Exhibit

Opening Reception Wednesday, August 28, 5 – 7pm
Featuring Kevin Gilmore, Nicole Howland, Alice Lambert, Darrell Matsumoto, Ross Normandin, Kyle Petty, Cynthia Schilling, Chad Amos Self, Jason Travers, Jillian Vaccaro, David Wackell, and Matthew C. Waite

Art Center Lobby
Opening Reception Wednesday, August 28th from 5-7pm
Recent Work by Professor Chad Amos Self, Lecturer in Art

Opening Reception, Wednesday, October 16th from 5:00-7:00pm
Conversation with Artist and Gallery Director, Darrell Matsumoto, 5:30pm
Sharlin’s Way of Seeing
It is with great pleasure we present Jonathan Sharlin: Letters from the Middle East 1998/2024. The work in this exhibition is from an installation first exhibited in 1998. Due to the volume of the original installation, we are only able to exhibit a portion of the work in 2024. However, the immensity of the experience echoes in its humanity despite the truncated version of this 2024 exhibition. This catalogue contains detailed documentation from Letters from the Middle East tracing its antecedents and
contextual development.
This exhibition/installation is not unlike attending an avant-garde performance. In entering Letters from the Middle East, we step into the gallery transformed into a chamber; we are immediately engulfed by enormous portrait heads and the sound of letters recited aloud. We are instantly transported to a metaphoric moment in time, over a quarter of a century ago, at a dinner table, or seated around a campfire, listening to stories, hearing personal histories. This human story, its intimacies, anguish, and truth, tells of the complexity of people, history, and geography.
For nearly 40 years, Sharlin—a photographer of Jewish descent—has explored through his work—the post-Holocaust, modern historicity as its contextual core. His 1987 series, Portrait Narratives, sets the foundational visual queue, which carries through later work, culminating in Letters from the Middle East: Israelis and Palestinians, 1998.
“Portrait Narratives, which began as a personal journey towards understanding the past, ultimately became a conduit for the passing on of memories; a transformative experience for myself and my audience. Israel seemed the logical next step in my quest to understand my own Jewish identity and the history of the Jewish people. My father's father originally came from Palestine, my grandfather emigrating to the United States at the turn of the century."
Sharlin is intensely aware of the connection of past and present, exploring through personal discovery and research, focusing on contextual humanity. His photographs are empathetic documents of individuals, depicting their personal truth through conversations and recording their stories. History has pitted Israelis and Palestinians as opposing groups. His intention is to illuminate the personal experience of both, presenting their realities, with hope, in seeming hopelessness to re-start conversations. The modern history of the Middle East is fraught with tensions, disagreements, and of course, disappointments from its inception. His work asks us to look, and more
importantly see the humanity.
Sharlin is the consummate observer, he sees with clarity and conviction. He deploys a mixture of documentary strategies to present to us what he sees. He seeks to document and elucidate as he explores the world we inhabit.

Zoom Awards Presentation:
Featuring Professor Chad Amos Self
Wednesday, February 26, 2025 at 7:00 p.m.

Opening Reception: Wednesday, January 22nd from 5-7 p.m.
Celebrate our students!
To kick off 2025 Spring, we invite the entire community to the Opening Reception.
The Department of Art and Design is pleased to present the All Student Art Show.
Student Art and Design works, selected from all Studio courses from Fall 2024 Term.

Opening Reception, Wednesday February 5, from 5:00-700pm
Conversation with Artist and Gallery Director, Darrell Matsumoto, 5:30pm
Inner Goddess in Balance
It is with great pleasure we present the large-scale work of MJ Viano Crowe entitled, Body & Soul. The exhibition is a glimpse of her expansive creative output over the past twenty years. Her work is part of her journey as an artist, woman, and human.
In entering the exhibition Body & Soul, we are immediately transported into a sacred space, embarking on a spiritual journey, full of the fury of life. We are asked to jettison normal consciousness and imagine our anima/animus1 within each of us.
Viano Crowe’s work is intricately detailed, pattern-filled, visually full, expressing
passionate feeling and transformation. It is clear that the work is her labor of love, shown in the intricate cutting, slicing, and polychroming techniques required to complete each paper piece. Her process is consistent no matter the material at hand. In her photographically-based work, she colors, tones, tears, cuts, glues, and laminates to collage elements. The parti or design plan for each piece is essential as she fuses and melds to mete out its meaning.
Viano Crowe’s journey is her quest. She is unafraid, undaunted, and steadfast. She owns a principled feminist and humanist foundation. She and her work move continually forward with conviction, promise, and optimism. It is a “Gaia-ean”2 task she has set for herself, to tend the earth. Her practice as an artist and gardener is
intertwined, becoming a seamless process. Metaphorically, her “hands-on” approach, not unlike “healing touch therapy,”3 aptly describes her process, as she sews, glues, snips, and slices; placing and securing images to assemble works that are intended to heal the earth and humanity. Similarly, her toil in her gardens, enduring the cuts and thorn pricks, mud-caked hands, and bruised knees, Viano Crowe refreshes, replenishes the land, to produce riches for the spirit.
Viano Crowe’s work owns an extraordinary quality, it is unyielding and passionate—she, like her work, is immersed in life.