December 10, 1999


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Exhibit communicates sense of community

By Gabriel Hankins | Phoenix Staff

This month the List Gallery is showing a particularly social and uniquely grounded exhibit of works by artists associated with Swarthmore College. The Faculty/Staff Art Show runs through Dec. 19.

Curator Andrea Packard describes the show as "an exhibit of many materials and many viewpoints within the college community."

A vivid painting by Andrea Campbell (Environmental Services) hangs close to a intricate quilt by Sara Hiebert (Biology). Nearby are needlepoint pillows, massive sculptures, photographs, and collages, all too intimate and personal for a staid and serious museum exhibit. This intimacy is the main advantage of the setting and the arrangement, giving the show a strong sense of connection within the Swarthmore community. The warmth of the exhibit as a whole is striking; while I have been to many exhibits where the power of individual expression more intensely struck me, few others have had such a sense of rootedness in place and community.

The permanent collection has also been replaced in the back section of the gallery, making visible our own tradition. Standing out most clearly among the landscapes and portraits is Edward Hicks' "Peaceable Kingdom," a striking example of the Quaker ideal of harmony in this world.

In the main exhibit, a fantastic Freudian landscape of a child's dream is surrounded by photographs and oils like a slip of the artistic conscious. Created by Rodney Milstead, the son of Donzella Franklin (Environmental Services), the drawing traces in glitter the incredibly expensive car that for many children symbolizes the pinnacle of wanting.

Nearby is a chair titled "Six String Acoustic Rocking Chair" reminiscent of a twisted 50's Fender melting into the comfort of Chevy Bel-Air, most beautifully uniting function and funkiness. One of my favorite works was Madeleine Thomson's "In Praise of Small Creatures" #3 and #4, paper and fabric collages of beautifully intricate beetles that demonstrate the elegant possibilities of small scale, possibilities that nature has explored more fully than any work of art.

All of the works are recent - most were created within the last year. Peter Schmidt (English) demonstrated a unique hyperlink examination of computer gaming on a laptop that many of the visitors were visibly afraid to touch. Another work could have been created at no other time and no other place: Kae Kalwaic (Education) took as material part of the old swing tree near Sharples that fell in the wind, making out of it a memorial to the sights and sounds that were associated with the tree. "The community forms attachments," says Packard, "even to individual trees here, trees that have been part of our campus for decades." And this is precisely what the exhibit is: the attachments that we form and what these attachments say about us.