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Great Northern Festival Features New Augsburg Gallery Exhibition

On January 21, the Augsburg Art Galleries will open a new exhibition featuring nine local, Black women and femme designers. TO ILLUMINATE ABUNDANCE, curated by Olivia House ’20 and Silent Fox ’18 of 13.4 Collective, explores what it means to live a life full of love, freedom, and light.

TO ILLUMINATE ABUNDANCE brings together nine Black designers at various stages in their careers. House and Fox invited contributing graphic designers to reflect on and illuminate a text, quote, or lyric that helps imagine what it could look like to move forward and towards more; to help envision what life is like when it feels full. The exhibition features work by Ashley Koudou, Kelsi Sharp, Leeya Rose Jackson, Marcia Rowe ’22, Olivia Anizor, Sabrina Peitz, and Terresa Moses, as well as House and Fox.

“This show is meant to express what our world should be: a world in which Black femmes are able to live a life without pain or suffering; a life full of light,” said House.

An opening reception for TO ILLUMINATE ABUNDANCE will take place on Saturday, January 21. The curators and artists of the show will gather for an artist talk on Thursday, February 2 at the Hagfors Center to contextualize their work and their view of the exhibition within a broader landscape of making, community, politics, and futurism. This event is featured as part of The Great Northern festival, happening January 25–February 5 around the Twin Cities metro area. The Great Northern celebrates Minnesota’s cold, creative winters through 10 days of diverse programming that invigorate mind and body.

The exhibition runs through March 24 in Augsburg’s Gage and Christensen galleries.

Minnesota Women’s Press profiles Tina Tavera

Minnesota Womens Press - logoThe Minnesota Women’s Press recently featured a profile of Maria Cristina “Tina” Tavera, director of the McNair Scholars Program at Augsburg College, and her daughter Paloma Giossi. Tavera is an artist and activist whose work often focuses on the relationships between womanhood and culture. “My artistic mission is to create pieces that inspire conversations about topics, about how gender and cultural issues are viewed. I want to create access to arts for women,” Tavera said in the article.

The article also examines how Tavera’s own cultural heritage has impacted her work; she has dual-citizenship with the U.S. and Mexico. “Art has the capacity to teach non-Latinos about our Latino culture,” Tavera said. “To create a sense of community for Latinos, and to create places for conversation.”

Tavera’s work will be featured in “Reconfiguring Casta,” an exhibit in Augsburg College’s Christensen Center art gallery from February 29 to March 31. A reception will be held at the gallery on March 2 from 4 to 7 p.m. Additionally, Tavera has curated a collection titled, “Sus Voces: Female Printmakers from Mexico” that will be displayed at the Highpoint Center for Printmaking from February 5 to March 27 with a reception on March 4 from 6:30 to 9 p.m.

Read: Visualizing women’s stories on the Minnesota Women’s Press site for further exhibition and event details.

Design installation illuminates the dark truth about chocolate

chocolateBy Kacie Lucchini ’14 and Wendi Wheeler ’06

You might have noticed something different in the Christensen Center recently. It’s not the hundreds of feet of orange air compressor hose nailed to the wall or an empty office space behind the welcome desk. It’s a series of facts and figures in an art installation that may encourage you to think differently about your next candy purchase.

The current show in the Christensen Center student art gallery, The Dark Truth about Chocolate, has something a little different to offer than the usual art installation provides. Augsburg design and graphic design students took part in organizing an art show around the trafficking and child labor in the chocolate industry. Under the direction of professor Chris Houltberg, a new addition to Augsburg faculty this fall, the students were challenged to make an art show that stood for something. Continue reading “Design installation illuminates the dark truth about chocolate”

Two new exhibits open in the Augsburg art galleries

art_galleriesAt the Gage Family Art Gallery, now until Feb.15, is a collection by local artists Carolyn Anderson, Frank Big Bear, Julie Buffalohead, Star Wallowing Bull, Andrea Carlson, Jim Denomie, and Carl Gawboy.

These seven Minnesota artists, though at different stages in their individual careers and representing a variety of artistic styles, all use the pen, pencil, or brush to delve into issues of cultural identity. Without a title to their show they refuse to be labeled; each asks to be considered on the merits of his or her talent, message, and medium.

Todd Bockley, owner of Bockley Gallery in Minneapolis, has graciously served as curator for this exhibition. Continue reading “Two new exhibits open in the Augsburg art galleries”

New Art Gallery Exhibits and Events

galleryThe two most recent exhibitions in the Augsburg Art Galleries opened in the beginning of November and will be here until Dec. 16. The Gage Family Art Gallery in the Oren Gateway Center is showing “Journey Toward Healing,” collages by Janette Haley and photographs by Arthur Hand. The Christensen Center Art Gallery is showing “Threads of Community/Dunta Bulshada iskuxirta.”

The Christensen Center exhibition, “Threads of Community,” which in Somali is translated “Dunta Bulshada iskuxirta,” features colorful yarn weavings made by Somali elder women.  These weavers, who are refugees from the war in Somalia, are re-creating an art they learned from their mothers and grandmothers as teenagers. The women were not able to weave during the years spent in camps because they did not have materials. Continue reading “New Art Gallery Exhibits and Events”