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Beginning to See the Light

Feb - July 2019 | Hyde Park Art Center, 1st Floor

This exhibition was built to coincide with the launch of the Public Programs department and the opening hosted on the spring Equinox to coincide with the welcoming of the new season. This project sought to explore and enhance the program goals for the year which were to generate collective joy and happiness through art, dialogue, performances, and events. The exhibition itself was inspired by my curiosity of how the art world could adopt the languages and practices of musicians (“the jam” and “the collab”) to better organize without pressure or stakes, but to try to find a space to heal and reflect.

This exhibition was also focused on the first floor environment of the Art Center. Connected to a public cafe, many visitors only walk through this hallway to get to the coffee or to class. Artwork was hung low and was touchable in anticipation of the upcoming Creativity Camp, but also to generate conversations around the duality of our space and who the exhibitions are for. We support art at all levels, but sometimes it can be perplexing to the public about what is deemed worth to hang on the walls, with invisible hierarchies at play.

This exhibition stayed flexible throughout it’s run. Work broke, a mural was painted and engaged with over the entire course of the 6 months of the exhibition, paintings were switched out, signage was replaced, field guides were updated, supplies ran out and were replenished - all in the spirit of reflecting that an exhibition can evoke the feeling of “just another day at a neighborhood art center.”

Some text from the project:

Written in 1977 for the Village Voice, Ellen Willis’s essay of the same name explores the ever shifting politics of freedom and the fight for equality through the lens of the radical shift felt during the 60’s rock and roll revolution, into the tumbling onslaught of rage centered punk, all while questioning how exclusionary these movements have been to those outside the cultural standard (i.e. cis, white, het, able-bodied) without uplifting alternative forms or voices.

Grounded in the essence of rock and roll, Beginning to See the Light is a jam session we all play within. Music has always been essential to revolution and remains a wealthspring of inspiration and hope but also a space for venting, a call to attention and a platform, that can be utilized to press for change. Or as our current day Willis, critic Jessica Hopper wrote in 2002, “Because there is a void in my guts which can only be filled by songs.”

The everyday can seem impossible, and Light seeks to make it hopeful through rotating pop up exhibitions, interactive activities, tender dialogues, and community gatherings for music, poetry, honesty, empathy and time spent presently together. Searching to foil the energy present in our current lived environment, we ask our visitors to prioritize their own joy in this moment.

This project is curious if there are new ways we want to understand the world and feel connected to each other, when we have exhausted other forms of social or online engagement. What are ways we can create happiness, and shared collective joy by taking time to reflect on where we have been, where we are, and where we would like to go? How can we learn to not just listen, but hear and understand? How can we manifest the change we long for in small, collective action? How to balance survival of the self and survival of the planet?

Or as Willis directs us: “I just thought that the question they ought to ask was not “How can I make them like me?” but “How can I make them hear me?”