Messages from the Studio Art Program Director and the Gallery Director
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Daniela Rivera
Studio Art Program Director, Associate Professor of Art
HERETHERE compiles the works of many artists and their year of working together in a critical and creative community. The Studio Art Program at Wellesley College organizes annually a senior and thesis exhibition showcasing the work of advanced students associated with the Art Department. This exhibition is highly anticipated and carefully planned, and this year was no different. The works we planned to present were a demonstration of a year's worth of research, acute social awareness, creative problem solving, ingenuity, generosity, and most importantly empathy. But this abruptly changed as the COVID-19 pandemic spread confusion, unpredictability, and a sense of fragility in its most crude and unapologetic way. All of the artists represented on this website had to abandon their studios, leaving behind, in many instances, unfinished yearlong projects.
After the initial shock, each artist chose to respond to their new locations and circumstances. Using other avenues for communication they kept a strong sense of community that facilitated critical discussion and creative support. This group of graduating seniors demonstrated that in all its messiness, care and human connection create an understanding where words don't exist. Each of them faced with courage the need to reframe, adapt, or completely transform their projects, giving form to a moment in time that resists control and confronts us with the fragility of structures we take for granted.
As students abandoned campus and were faced with the unequal distribution of resources and access to basic needs, the pursuit of equity in the creation, distribution, and production of art became a central preoccupation for everyone. This website represents a number of different insights into the experienece of transiting between the predictable reality we had fabricated as a society and its insignificance in the face of life's uncertainty.
As the director of the Studio Art Program at Wellesley College, I am pleased and honored to present this website representing the students making advanced art projects in the 2019-20 academic year. Even though fear, uncertainty, and anxiety became familiar parts of our daily life, you all kept working together using equity and community as guiding principles.
Congratulations Class of 2020 and thank you so very, very much!
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Samara Pearlstein
Gallery Director, Art Department Program Coordinator
The senior exhibition is always chaos. Every year students are finishing their work and figuring out how to install it at the same time they are wrapping up their classes and navigating all the other stresses that come at the end of their senior year. Nobody ever has the right extension cord. There's always someone doing their entire installation in the middle of the night. There's always a painting that ends up on the wall before it's completely dry. There's always someone pushing a pedestal down the hallway at the last possible moment, while everyone is gathering for the opening reception.
That's not a bad thing, really. The art is always as varied, weird, and wonderful as the Wellesley College students who have spent all year making it. Every year's show is distinctive. And every year the show has something to tell us about the students who made it happen.
This year, the chaos is just a little bit different.
When the coronavirus pandemic cut short our time on campus, the seniors were sent out into the world with unfinished projects of every kind. A few people were able to pivot to a different format relatively easily, but for many, this is not what they originally imagined for their work. Whether the resulting work is any "good" or not is actually kind of beside the point. This class has created a collection of artistic responses to a year of thinking and making, emerging in this present, especially historic moment. Nobody particularly wanted to be a part of history in precisely this way; nobody in this graduating class ever asked to make work in a state of global crisis. But global crisis is the state that we are in, and so the work is all happening within that context, whether we like it or not.
These pieces, existing as they do within this moment, have a message for us. It's not a message about politics or sociology or epidemiology, although those things may appear in the work of some of these artists. It's a message about the artists and makers of Wellesley College. It tells of their triumphs and struggles, their interests and obsessions and stresses and delights, the priorities that shifted and the priorities that only grew ever more vital.
The best art (and the worst art, and even the most mediocre art) tells us something about the artist who made it, and our reactions to it tell us something about ourselves. For all that we may think of ourselves as a verbal species, there are still some things that we cannot express through language alone. The work in this exhibition has a lot to tell us about the people who made it. It also has a lot to tell us about ourselves and about the world in which we all live.
It says that human connection is hard, and strange, and can happen in the most unexpected ways, but these graduating seniors can do it. It says that making art is hard-- but these artists can do it.
It says a lot of other things too. But we'll leave that up to you.
Congratulations, and thank you, to the Wellesley College Class of 2020.
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A special message from Art History Professor Heping Liu!
The poem Prof. Liu is reading may be found here, in Chinese and in English.
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