Faculty and staff show off their art
November 3, 2014
Wooden sculptures and clay ceramics, watercolor paintings and video installations, mixed media collages and inkjet photograph; You can see all this and more at the Foothill-De Anza faculty art show in the Euphrat Museum until Dec. 4.
Each piece was made using different techniques and from different materials, but all works in the show have something in common: they were made by teachers from either Foothill or De Anza.
Art department faculty and staff were invited to bring any art piece they wanted, no matter the theme or age to display in the show. Even though most pieces on the exhibition are recent, there are also some that are quite old, including two of Barbara Allie’s mono prints titled Peru I and Peru II which are dated from 1989.
Aaron Tolliver, criminal justice major, said he “likes this art show more than others because of the great variety in the art pieces.”
His favorite piece is the Jerome Project which, as an exception, was made by artist-in-residence, Titus Kaphar, De Anza students and members of Black Leadership Collective rather than the staff.
This special project includes a group of artworks addressing issues related to the U.S. prison industrial complex.
One of them, Obsolete, 2014, is a collaborative piece done by Titus with the help of current De Anza students.
It consists of a silhouette of a black man surrounded by fragments of history book pages. Inside the silhouette, authors placed tools that refer to black people’s employment.
One of the messages Titus portrays in his art is the disappearing of industry and — therefore — jobs, leads to higher incarceration rates.
Inspired by this work, Khadija Silva created “Convicted,” a piece that consists of silhouettes of children. “Convicted” speaks to disturbing statistics; private prison systems are calculating how many beds they will need based on third grade
reading skills.
Other art pieces from the Jerome Project are a series of mixed media portraits titled “Women in Prison” by Karla X. Navarro, a mixed media work titled “Inside/Outside” by Amy Bam and Karla Vargas as well as many others.
Another work in the show, Rocky Lewycky’s installation “Is it Necessary?” consists of whole ceramic sculptures of animals and their broken pieces. Above the installation, a video is playing showing Lewycky, a ceramics teacher, smashing these sculptures in his show in the Santa Cruz Museum of Art and History.
This exhibit inside of the exhibition is bringing attention to the cruelty of farming organization in the U.S.
Diana Argabrite, the director of the Arts and Schools program, presented her work “Cute Enough?” which attracts the audience by its glittery outside, but reveals a deep message upon a closer look. The piece is made up of Hello Kitty figures which symbolize femininity that is being suppressed by stereotype standards.
The works presented in the art show have a unique story behind them. Students can come to a reception with the artists on Nov. 5 at 5:30 p.m. to ask questions and watch a performance or to get to know these stories better.
