Two spring-semester exhibitions at the Syracuse University Art Museum will feature works curated by three faculty members.
“Faculty Fellows Curate” features the work of 2024-25 Syracuse University Art Museum Faculty Fellows Lyndsay Michalik Gratch, associate professor of communication and rhetorical studies in the College of Visual and Performing Arts, and Elizabeth Wimer, assistant teaching professor of management in the Martin J. Whitman School of Management. Another exhibit, “Joiri Minaya: Unseeing the Tropics at the Museum,” is curated by Cristina E. Pardo Porto, assistant professor of Latinx literatures and cultures in the College of Arts and Sciences.
The works will be on display in the Joe and Emily Lowe Galleries at the Art Museum from Tuesday, Jan. 21, through Saturday, May 10.
The Syracuse University Art Museum Faculty Fellows program supports innovative curriculum development and experiential learning and aims to more fully integrate the museum’s collection into the University’s academic life, says Emily Dittman, museum director.
Gestures Study
Gratch’s exhibition, “Performance, Gesture and Reflection,” mirrors her performance studies course CRS 314, which explores the social, cultural and political dimensions of performance in various forms, including theater, dance, rituals, everyday life and media. The display features 23 objects that examine the social, cultural and political dimensions of performance, including how human gestures shape identity, power, memory and social relations.
This screen print by Robert Rauschenberg is one of the central pieces in Lyndsay Gratch’s exhibition, “Performance, Gesture and Reflection.”
Gratch says the portrayals “show gestures as more than isolated movements in a single time and place. Gestures are dynamic, culturally loaded and ever-changing symbols which have a wide range of social, political and historical meanings based on when, where, how, by whom and why a gesture is made and also interpreted.” Gratch says the course and the exhibition illustrate how performance “is not necessarily something that’s theatrical or fake or put on, but actions we do as part of everyday life.”
Culture as Economy
Wimer’s exhibition consists of a dozen different artistic works that express key ideas regarding the global economy from an African perspective. These include viewing culture as an economic component; how culture is represented by proverbs and sayings passed from generation to generation; and how climate change and health care infrastructure affect people very differently depending on whether they live in the global south versus the global north.
The exhibition was created to complement Whitman’s required core class for all sophomores, Managing in a Global Setting, to bring a different perspective on key course concepts such as infrastructure, human capital and globalization.
A custom pet portrait by a Kenyan artist involved in Elizabeth Wimer’s immersion course is an example of using artwork to create an economic revenue stream.
As an extension of that course, Wimer and students who have applied for and been accepted to Whitman’s Kenya Immersion Experience undertake a 10-day business immersion trip to Kenya. There, they can see firsthand how creative and artistic works provide paths to financial opportunity for people who live in limited economic situations, while also sometimes meeting the Kenyan artists.
“[They see that] artist creations are not solely artistic expression as a work of art but as works that help them sustain a living. Both have beauty, but the inspiration behind the beauty is very different,” she says.
Tropical Images
Pardo Porto’s exhibition is a collection of work by acclaimed New York City-based Dominican artist Joiri Minaya in conversation with selected works from the Syracuse University Art Museum collection. It examines the visual culture of tropicality through stereotypical depictions of landscapes like pristine beaches and sunny skies, as well as racist portrayals of women as exoticized figures, Pardo Porto says.
A work by Joiri Minaya represents the visual culture of tropicality through combined stereotypes of an exoticized woman who is wearing tropical-themed swimwear.
The exhibition consists of objects including postcards, tourist brochure images, fabric from Hawaiian shirts, posters and photographs, and video and sound performances ranging from the late 19th century to the present. “This emphasizes part of my research into how the images surrounding us shape our perception, our thinking and our feelings about places like the Caribbean and how we relate to images in our daily lives,” Pardo Porto says.
The exhibit is being incorporated into two of Pardo Porto’s courses. An undergraduate course on contemporary Latinx art, conducted entirely in Spanish, uses the Spanish-language artwork labels and tags in the exhibit as part of class lessons. A graduate seminar focuses on theorizing race and diaspora and how an artist like Minaya, who was born in New York City but has Dominican heritage, examines how diasporic identities are constructed and how being separated from community can complicate identity. Pardo Porto says Minaya will visit campus to give a talk, work with students and share interpretations of her art with the community.
