Ithaca College

The Handwerker Gallery is pleased to announce the upcoming exhibition calendar for the Spring 2015 semester.  Ithaca College faculty and staff will receive a newsletter in their mailboxes regarding these exhibitions and the gallery events calendar this week. Additional calendars will be available at the Handwerker Gallery and the Deans Office of the School of the Humanities & Sciences. Faculty with interest in scheduling class visits to the gallery may email requests to gallery director Mara Baldwin at mbaldwin@ithaca.edu, or call 607-274-3548.

ORIGIN STORIES: Alien Apostles

Work by Katie Dorame

January 21—March 6, 2015

Opening Reception: Thursday, January 22, 5-7 p.m.

Alien Apostles is an exhibition of work fusing together imagery from the troubled legacy of American colonialism. Artist Katie Dorame re-contextualizes familiar characters and storylines from the false legacies of Hollywood and history books into a personal lexicon of otherworldly hybrids. Dorame's process attempts to untangle the complexity of a troubled and fictionalized history by borrowing symbols from sources as varied as the romanticized "golden era" of the west coast religious missions to Hollywood B-film science fiction. Her work adopts traditional mediums (oil painting, pen and ink), but injects the Western art historical canon with the unheard voice of time-traveling reptilian colonizers, morphing converts and exasperating locals.  

Katie Dorame, a visual artist from Oakland, CA, received her Master of Fine Arts degree from the California College of the Arts and her Bachelor of Arts from the University of California- Santa Cruz. Her work has been featured in a solo show at the Galería de la Raza in San Francisco, and was included in "Bay Area Currents" at Pro Arts Gallery in Oakland. She is a member of the Gabrielino/Tongva tribe of California and was recently awarded a Native American Arts & Cultural Traditions Grant from the San Francisco Arts Commission. 

ORIGIN STORIES: Altar Apparitions

Work by Mercedes Dorame

January 21—March 6, 2015

Opening Reception: Thursday, January 22, 5-7 p.m.

Filling in the cracks with mud, yarn, and cinnamon, Mercedes Dorame's photographs capture staged interventions of ceremony in the Los Angeles landscape, re-opening portals of memory and mourning of the land. A member of the federally unrecognized Gabrielino/Tongva tribe in Los Angeles, Dorame investigates the critical importance of access to space for gathering to build and sustain community, identity, and proof of authenticity.  By creating new narratives that incorporate her own personal history with her cultural ancestry, Dorame walks the fence between fact and fiction in an exploration of public and private space, ownership, and visibility.

Mercedes Dorame, born in Los Angeles, California, is a member of the Gabrielino/Tongva Indians of California tribe. Dorame received her Master of Fine Arts degree from the San Francisco Art Institute and her undergraduate degree from University of California- Los Angeles in American Literature and Culture with an emphasis in Native American Studies. Her work was recently acquired by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Phoebe A. Hearst Museum in Berkeley, California. She is the recipient of grants and fellowships from En Foco’s New Works Photography Fellowship Program, Galería de la Raza, the Harpo Foundation, among others. Her writing and photographs have been featured in publications such as 580 Split and News From Native California.

TAXING TIMES

Work by Elise Engler

March 18—April 17, 2015

Opening Reception: Thursday, March 19, 5-7 p.m.

Elise Engler makes lists, chronicling particular experiences by drawing and painting all of their components. Subject matter ranges from the personal and intimate to the political and expansive. Having once drawn everything she owned, Engler continues to depict the contents of her luggage whenever she travels. Other work is more anthropologically documentarian: all the chairs in a NYC public school classroom, the contents of over sixty women’s handbags, everything used to maintain Riverside Park. Drawing from several different projects, the works selected for Taxing Times share two concerns-- the passage of time and the expenditure of American tax dollars. The work ranges from drawings of the weapons and casualties of the Iraq War to Engler’s recent experience during her federally sponsored time in Antarctica through the National Science Foundation.  

Engler lives and works in New York City. She received her Master of Fine Arts from Bennington College, and her Bachelors of Fine Arts from Hunter College, City University of New York. In October of 2014, Engler visited Ithaca College during Family Weekend to facilitate a drawing event for which students and their families drew missing objects sold from the college's permanent collection during the 1970's. Those drawings will be included in this exhibition along with Engler's drawn response.

AS THEY SAW IT: The Easby Collection of Pre-Columbian Art

Curated by Professor Jennifer Jolly (Department of Art History), Gabriella Jorio ('16), Sarah McHugh ('15), Kenneth Robertson ('15)

March 18—April 17, 2015

Opening Reception: Thursday, March 19, 5-7 p.m.

Today, many accept that the ancient peoples of the Americas created art: fine art museums display collections of exquisite objects, courses on Pre-Columbian art and scholarly studies present their cultural significance, and the art market assigns them monetary value.  However, the ancients did not make objects for those contexts—it was only through the labor of scholars, museum professionals, dealers, and collectors that they became “art.” When Dudley T. Easby, Jr. and Elizabeth Kennedy Easby looked at Pre-Columbian objects, they saw works of art, and their life work involved translating their shared appreciation for Pre-Columbian art to a broader audience. Mr. Easby (1906-73), a lawyer who served as the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s legal secretary, was a self-trained expert in Pre-Columbian metalwork who worked tirelessly to bring Pre-Columbian art back to the Met. Mrs. Easby (1928-1993) had a Master’s in Pre-Columbian art, worked as a curator at the Metropolitan and Brooklyn Museums, and researched jade. Their romantic and academic collaboration brought them around the world to pursue scholarship, plan exhibits, and engage in cultural diplomacy throughout the pivotal decades of the mid-20th century.  In the process, they assembled a modest collection of Pre-Columbian Art, which was given to Ithaca College in 2008.  Curated by students, this exhibit makes visible the process of transforming artifacts into art, from the mechanisms of expatriation, to the labor of scholarship and the recontextualization of objects in museums.  It both honors the Easbys’ labors, and perpetuates their goal of presenting Pre-Columbian art to new eyes.

TIME CAPSULE: 2015 Senior Student Show

Curated by Danica Kelley '16

April 23—May 17, 2015

Opening Reception: Thursday, April 23, 5-7 p.m.

The annual Ithaca College senior student show is a faculty-juried showcase of work made by undergraduate students from the Department of Art and the Department of Cinema, Photography, and Media Arts.  This year's exhibition is student-curated and will prominently feature the work of Senior Projects by BFA candidates Julia Dubin, Jihad Ford, Carolyn Hoffman, and Natalie Lazo. Interested students graduating in May or December of 2015 may submit work by Monday, March 18 and juried results will be announced in late March. Following the opening reception the exhibition runs through Commencement Day.

All exhibitions and events at the Handwerker Gallery are free and open to the public.  The Handwerker Gallery is open Monday, Wednesday, & Friday from 10am-6pm; Thursdays from 10am-9pm; and Saturday & Sunday from 12pm-5pm. Individuals with disabilities requiring accommodations should contact Mara Baldwin at mbaldwin@ithaca.edu or (607) 274-3548. We ask that requests for accommodations be made as soon as possible.