Healing – Rethinking Gender: The Solari Collection and Us: History/Present. Collective project, Northlight Gallery, ASU, Phoenix. Spring 2024
In February 2024 we inaugurated the collaborative co-curated exhibition Healing – Rethinking Gender: The Solari Collection and Us: History/Present. It included twenty eight faculty and MFA students exploring gender and sexuality by responding to images from the Solari Archive. In Fall 2023 I made an open call inviting prospective participants to choose one photograph from the Solari Collection that engaged issues surrounding gender/sexuality. A dialog would be generated by the participation of faculty and graduates. Participants could submit their own work or someone else’s in a wide variety of mediums: photography, video, painting, sculpture, textile, ceramic, performance, etc. This project had many aims, firstly to bring the academic community together in a collaborative spirit, secondly to promote the Solari Collection which is not sufficiently known and includes over 2000 photographic prints in gelatin silver, albumen, photogravure, stereograph, palladium, and platinum, and other analog mediums, and specifically contains large collections of late 19th century and early twentieth century nudes and erotic photography. Thirdly, I wanted to create a non-traditional exhibition by working without the hierarchies and rules that are associated with institutions and with curating.
This interdisciplinary exhibition was an homage to Sylvia Salazar Simpson (Santa Fe, New Mexico, 1939), a radical artist ahead of her time, whose work addresses gender in direct and prescient ways, has not received, to this day, the support and recognition she deserves. Her invisibility suggests the persisting pains the art world and society undergo to acknowledge, support, and provide a free, fertile, and safe space to be, explore and imagine gender and sexuality beyond the confinements of societal norms.
The end result of this curatorial experiment was a collaborative exhibition of artists, faculty, graduate students, and alumni. Participants were: Alejandro T. Acierto, Ari Agha, Liz Allen, Julie Anand, Andrea Benge, Liz Cohen, Jennifer Ling Datchuk, Camila de Andrade Bianchi, Cecilia Fajardo-Hill, Mikey Foster Estes, Erika Lynne Hanson, Hilary Harp, Meredith Hoy, Gigi Marja Konecki, Adriene Jenik, Mehrdad Mirzaie Shahrestanaki, Amanda Mollindo, Richard Pence, Rebecca Ross, Lindsey Rothrock, Gregory Sale, Camille Schneider, Vivian Rae Spiegelman, Sarah Sudhoff, Caitlyn Swift, Liza Stout, Teri Tera, and Benjamin Timpson.
For the opening and the first Fridays we organized several events: Performances by Ari Agha, Transgender (in)Sanity, 2023-24; Liza Stout, Shell, 2024; Andrea Benge, Front Row Seat, 2024, and Julie Anand, Itinerant Camera Obscura, 2024. For each event we did a pop up question and answer, an informal and even humorous part of the opening, where we could ask quick questions to each other to be responded to in a quick manner. As each work in the exhibition was accompanied by information, the idea was that this question and answer be more personal and informal in our responses. I started each time by introducing all of the participants and asked the first question and the person answering would ask a question to someone else after their response. We also invited the public to ask questions. This project was exciting and demonstrated that if we create creative opportunities to come together, people respond with enthusiasm thus there are endless possibilities about what can be done at Northlight and other spheres of the School of Art and the university at large.
