Midterms have been making my week CRAZY but there’s still a lot of awesome stuff going on over here! There’s a new show up in our gallery by our new gallery director, Deborah Davidson! It is a NESAD Alumni show, described as follows:
At New England School of Art & Design, faculty are deeply engaged with their students. The connection between students and their teachers works in both directions, and often remains long after the academic experience ends – as a professional relationship, or as a philosophical or creative influence. Nurtured here, this group of alumni carries with them a passion for their chosen field, the skills to express themselves and their ideas, and the discipline to realize them. They have the all-important ability to communicate and connect with the larger world through relevant art and design. The exhibition represents all areas of study at New England School of Art & Design, including Illustration, Graphic Design, Interior Design, Interior Architecture and Fine Art.
The opening for NESAD Grads: Out in the World was on Thursday as well as a student/alumni discussion panel. The show will be up until November 14th, so come by NESAD soon to check it out!
As for me, my group wrapped up our two week project in Contemporary Trends on Thursday. The assignment was to, in some way, alter an environment. Our group went through a pretty lengthy thought process: we started out thinking about using the body as an environment and thinking about how we could alter that. I made a cast of my chest to bring to class after the first week to talk to my group and class about our idea, and we came up with our new idea: using multiple casts of our bodies to alter environments, particularly around our school. We made a bunch of casts with plaster tape of different body parts, and hung them with more plaster tape onto a few places where the architecture matched the body part. Afterwards, we used spackling paste to smooth it down to the wall, then sanded and painted it. The result is a sort of surreal image of a wall either coming alive or someone breaking out of the architecture.
My favorite part of this week, however, was after our critique in Contemporary Trends. Tatyana Fazlaliadeh, a Brooklyn-based artist, came to speak with us in class! She created a movement called Stop Telling Women To Smile, which focuses on gender-based street harassment and how it affects individual women. I’ve seen images of her work before so I was so excited to meet her and hear her speak! She talked about how the campaign started as a portrait of herself and the phrase “Stop Telling Women to Smile”, which is one part of street harassment she feels strongly about. After that, she began doing portraits of close friends and branching out to other women, always asking them to talk about their experiences with street harassment and using their words under their images to put a face to these words and hopefully make people think more about gender-based street harassment. Tatyana also spoke about her work process, how typically she’ll use wheat paste to post these images around her neighborhood, but now after using a wildly successful Kickstarter, she has the funds to travel to different cities to make larger scale legal pieces in new communities. Tatyana been interviewing women in Boston and will be putting up a piece in Cambridge this week, then heading to Chicago for the next stop on her tour!
