Nicole Bearden

In late 2016, Smith Alumna Elinor Lander Horwitz (class of 1950) donated her extensive personal collection of Islamic art objects (the majority being ceramics and manuscript miniature paintings) to the Smith College Museum of Art. Professor Alex Dika Seggerman, at the time a Post-Doctoral Fellow in Smith College Department of Art, developed a class working directly with the objects in Smith College Museum of Art for the Spring 2017 semester.

For a complete view of the exhibition, please visit About Face: People, Animals, and Mythic Beings in Islamic Art

Most of the class was comprised of students who had taken Professor Seggerman’s lecture course in Fall 2016 on Islamic Art and Architecture, so aside from brief reviews, we had a basic grasp of the history of what is considered the Islamic world in Art History (modern day Iran, Iraq, Turkey, Afghanistan, Syria, Jordan, Pakistan, India, etc., otherwise known as the MENA region). Instead of focusing solely on cultural history, the class also covered methodologies for the artistic and material processes in which these objects were created. For example, what different methods of ceramic craft were used over the course of time, or how styles of painting varied regionally and temporally. We studied how to determine the age of a manuscript by the type of paper used, certain characters, language (if script was included), and the significance of certain stylistic designs and narrative themes.

The opportunity to create an exhibition for a museum, coupled with my interest in global art drew me to this class initially. It was an audacious undertaking which showcased the dull and dreary sides to exhibition-making as well as the excitement many think of when they picture the museum exhibition process.

Working with 12 “curators” was an informative experience. We each took on certain roles, but made decisions as a group. There was a democratic process to choose a focus for our show, the pieces to include (there were hundreds of works in the Horwitz collection - so many that we could not even examine them all), a title, and the arrangement of our pieces. We worked individually to write, then group-edited our individual extended labels before sending them off to the museum to be looked over and edited according to curatorial and education standards, and then re-edited until they were acceptable to everyone. This took many visits to the display space, measuring both space and objects, and drawing mockups back in the classroom. We spent a lot of time with the objects themselves, examining them under lights, and even calling in Persian Painting expert Professor Yael Rice from Amherst College to help identify the age and region of some of the paintings we chose.

The object on which I chose to focus was a miniature manuscript painting of the Mi’raj (The Night Journey of the Prophet Muhammed). This painting was determined to be from the 16th-18th centuries CE, and most likely from the region that is modern-day Iran. The process of studying the painting’s physical and thematic attributes, during which time I corresponded with two well-known academic Islamacists, Professor Christiane Gruber and Professor Yael Rice was highly rewarding. The more time I spent with my object, the more interested I became in the larger history surrounding it, and how that history informs and/or fits into the current global narrative. The issue of portraying the Prophet and how both the laws and actual portrayals have shifted over time were especially compelling research topics.

This class was a tiny taste of what object and exhibition-oriented research in a museum setting feels like, and though my primary area of interest is contemporary art, one of the reasons for my focus, is that contemporary art is informed by all periods of art which have come before. The class provided excellent practical experience, a wonderful opportunity for sustained research into both Islam and MENA region arts over a large period of time, and finally solidified my desire to work with art objects in a professional capacity.

Student Picks is a program in which Smith students are chosen to curate a one-day exhibition in the museum, utilizing works from the collection. In April 2018, I curated Abstractions in No Man’s Land: A Future Without Us

Curatorial Statement:

What would a future world without humans be? Would (as some have predicted) the Earth begin to heal itself of all the harm we have inflicted? Would the marks of our brief time here be washed away, or remain an incongruous reminder? What does it mean that visual interpretations of “Paradise” are often without human subjects? What is a utopia, and for whom can it exist? Is an apocalypse for humanity a possible saving grace for the world around us? What populations have the most impact on the world around us?

The ways in which artists have portrayed ideas of paradise and future, often border on two central themes:

One is Post-Apocalyptic. Due to some massive error on the part of humanity, most or all of the human race is removed. What is left is often shown as a once-inhabited, but hastily abandoned space.

The second interpretation embraces an Arcadian ideal--a newfound paradise of Edenic proportions, where nature comes forth and renews itself as if humankind has never been.

The works included in this exhibition showcase a variety of possibilities. Some portray the prospect of our present as an archaeological foray. Others abstract ideas of nature, and subtract the human element altogether. Whether explicit or symbolic, these works provide the opportunity to consider a world without us, how some populations are already being erased by our ways of life, and our current relationships to the land.

Nicole Bearden AC ‘19

Since 1997, the Anchor House of Artists subsidizes the studio lives of and represents the work of artists living with mental illnesses, fights the social stigma that they face, and brings new art to Western Massachusetts and beyond. Anchor House partnered with Smith College to bring the work of over a dozen artists, including Ben Hotchkiss, Dulle Griet, John Landino, Genevieve Mae Burnett, James Brown, M.D. Tillyer, Peter Mishkin, Kevin Bouricius, Andrew Magee, Danny Gayder, Molly Rupp, and James Coburn to Nolen Art Lounge in October 2017. More information about the artists with whom they work, and how to get involved in their mission can be found at anchorhouseartists.org

”We believe that creativity comes from genius, not illness. Creativity is not madness, creativity springs from health. Illness is incidental, creativity has purpose. Yet some artists are interrupted by illnesses or other events. Mental Illness or hard events are not life defining, they are part of a life lived with valor. Anchor House of Artists invites its creatives into the experiment of self-redefinition because they should be known for the truest part of who they are. We place human value on the products of creative people. We respect self-expression. We give room for launching new ideas and unique works. We invite collaboration with the larger creative community to build parity and economic justice in the professional world of art."

BIBIANA is a current Studio MFA candidate at University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Their work is multi-disciplinary and utilizes technology including sound and video installation. Contact info and more of their work can be found at bibiana.co

Ghosted / Erased is a site-specific multimedia project drawing heavily from Smith College’s oral tradition of telling ghost stories. Smith College has at least nine residential houses with recurring manifestations of about a dozen dissimilar repeating patterns, most of which can be traced and named after particular residents. These stories are used as a starting point for a playful video that is a pastiche of recent and archival official Smith College materials and found images from students’ Instagram feeds.

Ghosted / Erased transgresses the gallery walls and simultaneously inhibits multiple spaces — the gallery, interior of Campus Center, and the outside. Thus, site becomes simply ‘space’ — but not architectural space, rather dimensional space, an intergalactic space through which travelers morph between dimensions superhero style.

The use of color is a mischievous device that defies traditional notions of ghost stories. In Ghosted / Erased resident ghosts become colorful phantoms, or color photocopies, of their playful and sinister selves. They exist in a realm where green screen is a tool of appropriation, both narrative and pictorial. The audience through casting its shadows become a part of this work, blending the fictive dimensions. Congruently the phantoms multiply through various layers of Smith’s ‘space’, crawling on any surface within the light’s reach.

The soundtrack is generated through human voice so as to mimic the oral tradition of Smith.

(Note: Ideal exhibition viewing times after sundown)

Address: Nolen Art Lounge at Smith College
100 Elm St, Campus Center Room 105, Northampton, MA

Exhibition dates: March 21 - April 6
Opening reception: Friday March 23rd 7-9p

Credits:
Callum LaFrance - performer
Darius Taylor - performer
Dave Hannon - performer
Gabriel CiFuentes - performer
Lucas La Guardia - performer
Tori Lovallo - performer
Troy David Mercier - performer
Xuan Pham - fabric screens

Installation details:
Video running time: 48 minutes
2 channel video, 2 channel sound

Zoë Dong graduated from Smith College as a Studio Art major and Film and Media Studies minor. A native of Akron, Ohio, she has primarily worked as a printmaker and painter in the past but has of late ventured into sculpture and other practices. Her personal and artistic interests include dichotomies of the self, bodies, mapmaking, anger, liminal identities, and love of all kinds. Current projects include numerous attempts to lucid dream and practicing radical self-honesty. More information can be found on the artist’s webpage at: zoedong.weebly.com

Marrow is a collection of work centered around concepts of memory, time, and the body. Using a diverse range of materials including plaster, fake blood, and hair, the works in the show examine and aestheticize these ideas.

The materials used echo the body and abstract its forms. The colors of pinks, reds, and blues are taken from the colors of blood, arteries, and organs, while the paper and plaster speak to the simultaneous strength and fragility of the body and spirit. Some works, like Face Trace, use plaster as a method to stop and preserve ephemeral moments in time. Others, like Prayer I and II, use plaster as an organic form to build on as an unorthodox “painting” ground. Many of the works in the show contain direct references to the artist’s body, as in the Untitled (Mask) which is a cast of the artist’s face, and Witch Flag, which incorporates the artist’s hair as a material. Other works like Memory Map Suite speak to the experience of living in a body more conceptually, describing memories of walking through a deceased grandparent’s house, but still deal with the passage of time in context with the body.

Temar France is a graduate of Smith College, with a degree in Africana Studies. They are co-host of Marginalia podcast, a former co-host of The Rap Scholars, a staff contributor at Bloom Magazine, and is currently working on curating a visual essay of the erotic history of black women entitled Analog Erotic. For more information, please visit their website: temarfrance.com

In Living Color, a photographic and narrative project by Temar France, explores the personal, social and cultural constructs of identity shaped by the everyday lives of students of color at Smith College. This exhibition will challenge the viewer to consider ways that identities are constructed through the subjective experience of living. Bringing together portraiture by Temar France and student interviews focusing on identity and wellness, viewers are asked to consider the conjectural illusions between what is seen and surely known.

Nolan Art Lounge, Smith Campus Center
Opening Reception with Artist Talk and Q&A
Saturday, April 7th, 2018 3 - 7 pm.

Janell Lin has a wide spectrum of interest across disciplines and mediums. Currently pursuing a career creating medical illustrations, she specializes in painting and drawing, and studied digital media and computer science. Janell Lin graduated from Smith College with a degree as a Studio Art major and Biology minor, and currently attends the University of Toronto. In her artworks, Janell explores and documents the unexpected and random findings in everyday life. Strongly influenced by painters Luc Tuymans, Antonio Lopez Garcia, and Josephine Halvorson, she is attracted to moments of quietness and intimacy, emptiness and oddness in mundane surroundings. To contact Janell, please view her video resume.

About Poems and Memories is a a two-series photographic exhibition that describes human living environments with the oddly minimal presence of human beings. Both series present fleeting moments and visual fragments framed and captured through the camera.

Series I. Living At Smith: This series records the everyday communal life at Smith College. The images present anecdotal corners and moments of the college living environment. It is an exploration within the interior spaces at Smith College which interrogates the relationship between objects and people. How objects are traces and reflection of human inhabitant. How we perceive, understand, and experience our surroundings through objects.

Series II. Bus Ride: The camera captures a moment and frames a space. The isolation of time and space creates new connections and stories. The combination of these interior and exterior images narrates a muted journey of looking. Each image is a fragment of a specific time and space that is ambiguous and mysterious, while giving a vague sense of familiarity and nostalgia. It documents a wandering mind during a bus ride, when one drifts into a strange, abstract, and dreamlike world.

Vick Quezada is a multimedia artist born on the US/Mexican border of El Paso, Texas, whose work deals with the philosophic intricacies of race, class, gender, nationality, and materiality. They are a current Studio MFA candidate at University of Massachusetts, Amherst. For more information, please visit their website: vickquezada.com

La Cultura: A Currency Converter (a statement from the artist):

Bridges span liminal (threshold) spaces between worlds, spaces I call nepantla, a Nahuatl word meaning tierra entre medio. Transformations occur in this in-between space, an unstable, unpredictable, precarious, always-in-transition space lacking clear boundaries. Nepantla es tierra desconocida, and living in this liminal zone means being in a constant state of displacement--an uncomfortable, even alarming feeling. Most of us dwell in nepantla so much of the time it’s become a sort of “home.”  ~Gloria Anzaldua

Vick Quezada’s production of these cultural objects works to interrogate the histories and the contemporary experience of Mestizaje through various angles including language, queer identity, memory and strategies for survival.

Using traditional photographic portraiture, video installation, sculpture, and performance, Quezada in La Cultura: A Currency Converter examines how Mestizaje consciousness translates and interacts with the dominant class and its cultural value system within the United States.  

If the internal competition for the monopoly of legitimate representation of the group is not to threaten the conservation and accumulation of the capital which is the basis of the group, the members of the group must regulate the conditions of access to the right to declare oneself a member of the group…~Pierre Bordieu.

Tara Sacerdote (Prairie Band Potawatomi and Choctaw) is a girl from Kansas who thinks deeply about land, memory, and belonging. kde domov můj came to be during her time in Prague, Czech Republic. She hadn’t made anything before and hasn’t since.

kde domov můj confronts the status of a national historical moment — in this case, the latter half of the 20th century in Czechoslovakia — as a culmination of many smaller personal memories. This video installation treats land as a vessel for memory and considers the ways in which knowledge might be inscribed onto a place. The work incorporates primary source material, namely selections of audio recordings of interviews with four individual Czech women — Vladena Rattayová, Lída Holá, Kateřina Ebelová, and Rut Kolínská — concerning their relationships to land and the ways in which these connections were and continue to be shaped by legacies of Communism. Their distinct perspectives complicate notions of History writ large, shifting away from a generalized story and towards human-sized, personal narratives. kde domov můj is derived from the lyrics of the Czech national anthem of the same name. It translates to ask, “where is my home?”

Significant Play: Exploring the Possibilities of Human Connection and Gameplay

Using prompts written by Nolen Art Lounge curator, program manager, and producer Nicole Bearden, teams work to design games which explore technology, emotion, and human connection.

Designers: Arabia Simeon, Raven Gomez, Faith Kim, Jasmine Olivarez, Zoe Riell, Kelly Weng, and Claire Robertson.

Project development included:

* a public lecture by James Portnow of Extra Credits

* a two-day workshop for student designers by James Portnow

* a public exhibition to display and experience the games designed by students in Nolen Art Lounge

Which resulted in two games:

In Memoriam and Everything’s Fine

This project was sponsored by:

Smith College Art Department, Professors Joseph O’Rourke and Nicholas Howe in Computer Science, Film and Media Studies with the support of Professors Jen Malkowski and Alex Keller, Professor Kevin Rozario in American Studies, a grant from the Student Government Association’s Sawyer Fund, a grant from The Lecture Committee Fund with the assistance of Professor Fraser Stables, Tammy Lockett of The Knowledge Lab, Joce Kofke and Reese Julian of Smith Gaming Archives Project, Jacy Birdsong of Education Technology Services, Sandy Bycenski of Information Technology Services (formerly CMP), The Office of Student Engagement, Student Events Committee, and Nolen Art Lounge.

Reception Apr 21, 6-8. Exhibition April 21-May 3, 2018.

In Spring 2018, I was asked by Emma Chubb, the Charlotte Feng Ford ’83 Curator of Contemporary Art at the Smith College Museum of Art to write wall labels for three works (Excerpts from the Flood I by Nicola Lopez, Double Portrait by Lorna Simpson, and Second Born by Wangechi Mutu) in the contemporary art exhibition To trace for to carry. I wrote the initial drafts, then worked with both the museum education and curatorial departments to refine the text for display.