Ithaca College

The Handwerker Gallery is pleased to reopen our doors this week with two new exhibitions: Get Real, a student-curated exhibition of works from Africa; and The Protest Banner Lending Library, by Aram Han Sifuentes. The exhibitions open on Wednesday, March 20th, with an opening reception and public celebration pon Thursday, March 21, from 5-7 p.m..

THE PROTEST BANNER LENDING LIBRARY

work by Aram Han Sifuentes

March 20–April 19, 2019

Chicago-based artist Aram Han Sifuentes uses needle and thread as tools to examine immigration, citizenship, race, and craft, drawing on both personal experience and shared cultural identity. Opening in March, Han Sifuentes’ project Protest Banner Lending Library, will transform the gallery into a space for visitors to learn skills needed to make their own banners, a communal sewing space celebrating and supporting each other’s voices, and a place where people can check out handmade banners to use in protests outside of gallery walls. Throughout the exhibition the banners can be made, used in a protest, returned to the library, and then taken by someone else to a different protest—in turn, carrying the histories of the hands that made and held them, and the spaces they activate and travel between. Throughout the run of the exhibition, visitors can view the growing library of completed and in-progress handmade banners during open hours. At the close of the exhibition banners made on campus will be accessioned into the collection of the Ithaca College Library.

Sifuentes’s work has been exhibited and performed at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago; Jane Addams Hull-House Museum, Chicago; Chung Young Yang Embroidery Museum, Seoul, South Korea; Asian Arts Initiative, Philadelphia; and the Design Museum, London, U.K., among others.

GET REAL: Seeking Authenticity in African Art

Curated by Professor Risham Majeed, Department of Art History,

Yarra Berger (’19), Anna Gardner (’19), & Suzanne Tang (’19)

March 20–April 19, 2019

What makes African art “authentic”? How do we know when an object is the real thing and not a fake? For decades, there has been a consensus around authenticity for African art: a genuine object is one that was made by a “traditional” artist for a “traditional” use and was used to fulfill its intended purpose. But who decides when this “tradition” begins and if it ends?

Is this understanding of authenticity anything more than a spurious and imposed notion? Such a definition of real African art emerged from the demands and desires of anthropologists, dealers, auction houses, collectors, art historians, and museums. Many of the traits they seek, including originality and age, are of subsidiary relevance to the objects’ primary audiences. The authentic piece is imagined to sustain residual ties to its users and makers, because it was once danced or kept in a shrine. These connections, though often severed through the physical removal of historical arts from their communities by colonial powers and commercial agents (and others), are recreated as “context” in the market and the museum.

Conferring authenticity on African art has long been a uniquely Euro-American preoccupation. Once an object that was spiritually or practically useful leaves its milieu, it enters other alien realms, including the market. An object that is viable as a commodity to sell, is accompanied by a parallel, entrepreneurial urge to fool through fakery. The market and the fake go hand in hand.

GET REAL seeks to unpack our associations of truth with originality as they relate to Africa and the art world as a whole. Ithaca College’s collection of African art will be shown with key loans to explore the tensions that arise in the bestowal of authenticity by questioning the real vs the fake and/or the copy, at different moments in an object’s biography. We examine artworks from the perspective of African patrons and artists, anthropologists, dealers, collectors, artists, art historians, and museums. In so doing, we hope to expose the elasticity of authenticity, and understand that getting real, is mostly about ourselves.

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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.

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