Re-Viewing the Past

Opening Reception: Thursday, January 27, 5:00-7:00 pm. Free and open to the public.

Presented in conjunction with the exhibition, Samuel Bak and the Art of Remembrance, the group exhibition, Re-Viewing the Past, highlights the work of artists who explore ideas of history and memory as part of processes of re-writing or re-imagining. Creating in diverse media, including painting, printmaking, animation, and the graphic novel, participating artists consider their connection to history — whether personal or collective — as it resonates with or is interpreted through the present moment and current socio-political and cultural issues.  Artists include Paul Emmanuel, Maya Erdelyi, Dell M. Hamilton, Dave Ortega, and Jordan Seaberry.

The exhibition continues in the Paul M. Scott Library Gallery.

Born in Zambia and currently living in Johannesburg, South Africa, Paul Emmanuel employs various media to reveal layered visions concerned with his identity living in the post-apartheid nation. Over the last decade, Emmanuel has conceived and implemented the large-scale and ongoing Lost Men project, a series of site-sensitive elegiac counter-memorials installed, to date, in public spaces in South Africa, Mozambique, and France.  The Lost Men, was launched at the Grahamstown National Arts Festival in Grahamstown, South Africa. In 2007, Phase 2 of this project took place in Maputo, Mozambique. In July 2014 The Lost Men France was installed adjacent to the Thiepval Memorial to the Missing of the Somme, Northern France.

Maya Erdelyi is an award-winning animator and artist. She creates intricate hand-made animations and collages inspired by imaginary worlds, music, memories, and the unconscious. Her animations explore a hybrid approach to cut-paper stop-motion, puppetry, hand-drawn, digital animation, and installation. Her work has been shown in national and international film festivals, galleries, museums, and DIY venues. She is a recipient of a 2020 City of Boston Artist Fellowship Award, a 2019 Yaddo Residency, a 2018 WGBH Launchpad Residency, a 2017 Brother Thomas Fellowship Award, and the 2017 Massachusetts Cultural Council Fellowship in Film.

Dell M. Hamilton is an interdisciplinary artist, writer, and independent curator. Born in Spanish Harlem with ancestral roots in Belize, Honduras, and the Caribbean, her practice wrestles with the social and geopolitical constructions of memory, gender, race, language, and history through the mediums of photography, video, drawing, installation & performance. Dell’s work, artist talks, solo performances, scholarly lectures, and collaborative performances have been presented to a wide variety of audiences nationally and internationally. Dell is a 2021 recipient of a James and Audrey Foster Prize, the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston.

Dave Ortega has been self-publishing comics and zines since 2010. For the past 8 years, he has self-published over 6 issues, the story of the early life of his grandmother: Días de Consuelo. In March 2022, Días de Consuelo will be collected and published as a graphic novel by Radiator Comics. In 2013, his comic Hacienda won the Comics Composition Competition, awarded by Comics Workbook. In 2015, he was invited by the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston to design an immersive educational experience around comics in their Art Lab space. He has taught at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and Lesley University, and has been awarded grants from the Massachusetts Cultural Council and the Collective Futures Fund.

 Jordan Seaberry practice bridges the painting studio with community organizing and advocacy. His large-scale, narrative paintings address family histories, systemic injustice, social and political change. Born and raised on the Southside of Chicago, Jordan first came to Providence to attend Rhode Island School of Design. Alongside his art, he built a career as a grassroots organizer, helping to fight and pass multiple criminal justice reform milestones, including Probation Reform, the Unshackling Pregnant Prisoners Bill, and laying the groundwork for the “Ban the Box” movement in Rhode Island.