A three-week section called Pandemic and Protest: Responses to Now will begin the fall 2020 course. Each class explores artwork made during the pandemic and focuses on new acquisitions and commissions by the Tang Museum.
September 2
Pandemic and Protest: Responses to Now Part I
Interview with artist Isaac Scott
September 9
Pandemic and Protest: Responses to Now Part II
Interview with artist Danielle St. Laurent
September 16
Pandemic and Protest: Responses to Now Part III
Interview with artists Nicole Cherubini and Laleh Khorramian
Isaac Scott is an artist whose recent work includes photographs that capture protests in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and a monumental public sculpture in Madison, Wisconsin. The Tang has commissioned Scott to produce a set of prints that will become part of the Museum’s collection.
Photographer Danielle St. Laurent’s new series Family Portraits in Time Of COVID-19 was made in her neighborhood of Maplewood, New Jersey, during the current quarantine. The portfolio includes stories of each family’s experience and will become part of the Tang’s collection.
MASKS4PEOPLE was cofounded by Kristen Dodge and Laleh Khorramian on March 12, 2020 in response to the developing crisis of COVID-19. The Tang Museum commissioned the group to create new masks in collaboration with artist Nicole Cherubini and her current mezzanine exhibition. Working with a team of artists based in the Hudson Valley, the project reflects both pandemic and protest.
Nine weeks of student-led interviews with women artists—all included in the exhibition Never Done: 100 Years of Women in Politics and Beyond.
September 23
Interview 1 with artist Stephanie Syjuco
Aki Davis ’23 and Evan Little ’22
September 30
Interview 2 with artist Alisa Sikelianos-Carter
Naima Nigh ’23 and Maria Staack ’22
October 7
Interview 3 with artist Diane Burko
Taylor Jaskula ’21 and Ciara McDonald ’23
October 14
Interview 4 with artist Sonya Clark
Jane Cole ’21 and Lily Warshaw ’21
October 21
Interview 5 with artist Saya Woolfalk
Paige Meade ’22 and Chloe Walker ’21
October 28
Interview 6 with artist Barbara Takenaga
Malchijah Hoskins ’22 and Reva Preven ’21
November 4
Interview 7 with artist Rina Banerjee
Sofie Benson ’22 and Nathan Bloom ’21
November 11
Interview 8 with artist Marie Watt
Lydia Doban ’21 and Renaldo Payne ’22
November 18
Interview 9 with artist Tschabalala Self
Malchijah Hoskins ’22 and KeAnna Nelson ’22
Stephanie Syjuco is an artist who uses photography, textiles, and material culture to create works that interrogate national belonging, civic engagement, and radical responsibility. Syjuco was born in Manila, Philippines, in 1974 and lives and works in San Francisco.
Alisa Sikelianos-Carter is a mixed-media artist based in upstate New York. Her collages and paintings incorporate concepts of Black divinity and Afro-futurism.
Diane Burko, a Skidmore College graduate of the class of 1966, is an artist and environmental activist based in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Her work is a collaboration of aesthetics and information in order to raise awareness about the detrimental effects of human created climate change in the world.
Sonya Clark is a fiber artist who employs craft and everyday objects to explore meaning, value, and stories assigned to material belongings through culture. She was born in Washington, D.C. and is of Afro-Caribbean descent. She often references these components of her identity in her work, along with the social issues we are facing as a country and a community. Clark is currently a professor of art at Amherst College.
Saya Woolfalk is a mixed-media artist based in New York City. She uses science fiction and fantasy to create the multidimensional world of the Empathics, an imagined society of human-plant hybrids. Her work explores the utopian possibilities of multiculturalism, intersectionality, and transsexual societies.
Barbara Takenaga is a contemporary painter whose abstract works evoke imagined cosmic landscapes and microscopic views.
Rina Banerjee was born in 1963 in Kolkata, India and now lives and works in New York City. Pulling from her multinational and immigrant background she creates works focused on ethnicity, race and history. She uses globally sourced materials, textiles and domestic objects to create sculptures. Her drawings use representational imagery and cultural styles to tell stories of anthropology, mythology, and shared histories.
Marie Watt, an American artist and citizen of the Seneca Nation creates work inspired by community, protofeminism, and indigenous principles. Her practice often involves collaboration where storytelling and fellowship becomes intertwined with language and symbolism pulled from Indigenious knowledge. Watt holds an MFA in painting and printmaking from Yale University, attended Willamette University and the Institute of American Indian Arts, and in 2016 was awarded an Honorary Doctorate from Willamette University.
Tschabalala Self was born in Harlem, New York in 1990. She creates large-scale figurative paintings that integrate hand-printed and found textiles, drawing, printmaking, sewing, and collage techniques to tell stories of urban life, the body, and humanity.