Through Friday, Nov. 6, Biggin Gallery will be holding artworks that express reactions from the recent social movements.
“Time Change/Change Time” is a group art exhibit by Natalie Baxter, Laura Brown, T.J. Dedeaux, Helina Metaferia and Antoine Williams held by the Auburn University Department of Art and Art History.
The exhibit features issues such as gun violence, complexities of contemporary Black life, protests and voting.
The exhibit includes sculptures, paintings, quilts, collages and printmaking installations.
The artwork captures reactions from current movements in the national conversation, said Sarah Odens, coordinator of exhibitions and lectures and curator for Biggin Gallery exhibitions.
“Art is close observation,” she said. “Contemporary artists make work about their experiences and the times in which they live.”
Creating these types of works is about expressing thought processes in a visual form, Odens said.
“This exhibition provides examples of how established contemporary artists make work about timely ideas,” she said.
Laura Brown, one of the artists in the exhibit, said her inspiration for her piece came from Dazzle Ships used in World War II.
“I believe art is an invaluable avenue for self-expression and communication,” Brown said.
Helina Metaferia, another artist in the exhibit, said her collage work, “By Way of Revolution,” was created for means of powerful conversation.
“[It creates] communion amongst women of color, who have historically served as overlooked yet vital assets within care politics and activist labor,” she said.
Metaferia said it reflects on the impact of the civil rights movements and how they impacted modern social justice. She did research on the history of different social movements to create her collage.
“I also spend extensive time conducting library research within Black diaspora liberation archives, including Black Panther newspapers and South African anti-apartheid movement posters,” she said.
Metaferia said authors like Milagros Phillips, Resmaa Menakem, Adrienne Maree Brown and Christina Sharpe inspired her to explore the mind-body connection in social movements.
This type of research urged her to promote workshops for women of color at a variety of different venues.
“The workshops deconstruct historic protest gestures in an effort to heal generational trauma stored in the body,” Metaferia said.
The women participate in discussions, meditations, visualization, writing and performance exercises based on images from the research.
“The workshops are intimate settings for women to take up space in places where they may typically feel unsupported,” she said.
Using inspiration the workshops channeled for her, Metaferia said she used layers of research from different backgrounds to entwine into artwork.
“In mixed media collages, images of historical activism are transformed into crowns of adornment on images of contemporary women, all of whom have participated in the workshops,” she said. “To me, the entire process is just as or even more significant as the art objects themselves, which serve as a relic from the experience.”
For more insight on the exhibit, artist talks are being hosted on Facebook Live and may shift to Zoom.
More information or any changes will be posted on the Department of Art and Art History’s website and social media.
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Becca Benner, senior in public relations with a minor inmarketing, is a culture writer at The Auburn Plainsman.
