Last Wednesday, the Women's Studies Research Center held a closing ceremony for its exhibition titled "Convergence: 10 Years of Artistic Excellence at the WSRC." The exhibit featured artwork from the past 10 years by affiliates of the WSRC, including past WSRC scholars, staff and board members.
The curator and jury of the exhibit, Michele L'Heureux, facilitated the selection of artwork. L'Heureux reached out to affiliates of the WSRC and received submissions from over 90 scholars. A variety of works, ranging from oil paintings and photographs to sculptures and handicrafts, were selected by two faculty members in the Fine Arts department.
"This is an interesting moment," the WSRC Director Shulamit Reinharz said to Emily Corbat?? about her photograph during the closing ceremony. The picture, taken in traditional black and white, shows a woman walking by several men. The men are standing on the corner, watching the girl passing by, not whistling. Corbat?? noticed this scene when she was with her camera, trying to catch some filmographies.
"She caught my attention ... She's different. She looks confident, with emboldened spirit," explained Corbat??. She believed that the girls in her photographs are "glorious women" who are "comfortable within themselves and not afraid to be 'out there.'" Corbat?? focuses on women in her photographs who are strong, powerful and sometimes humorous.
Another photographer, Karin Rosenthal, was interested in photographing nudes because of her fascination with tide pools. She believed that there is something about tide pools that made her contemplate human existence and the cycle of life. In one of her images presented in the show, the models, a stone, a shell and a feather, were lit by the sun.
Rosenthal wrote in the introduction of her book about her works, "I used my camera to push vision to the unseen ... A reflected nude results in multiple bodies seen from different angles tucked into shells, wrapped around edges, morphing into a dolphin.
Disruptions of the surface tension create numerous mirrors as shells and seaweed breaks the water, reflecting and distorting the body reflection in different ways simultaneously."
The buyer of this photograph was also at the closing ceremony. While listening to Rosenthal explain her works to others, she explained in an interview with the Justice that the reason she and her husband decided to buy this image was that she likes "the movement of inviting me into the unknown ... I really enjoyed it. I keep looking at it and keep seeing different textures."
Art in the Convergence exhibition clearly demonstrates the tagline of WSRC: where research, art and activism converge. Artists have shown their efforts for campaigning for women's rights in their works: Mary Oestereicher created a book called More Pawns, showing that women could do the jobs that men could do in medieval Europe. Susan Eisenberg took a picture of two women who were holding a slogan of "stop gender harassment" during a parade.
Overall, "Convergence" is a great exhibition. The art works not only showed the diversity and creativity of WSRC scholars, but they were creative, provocative pieces in their own right.