Arriving into ourselves
"A Gathering" at Brandeis's Kniznick Gallery embraces what happens when we cherish our experience rather than judge it from society's standpoint.
A Gathering: Gardens, Portals, and Protests, a radiant exhibition curated by Olivia Baldwin at Brandeis Women’s Studies Research Center’s Kniznick Gallery (through August 21) accepts that loss, grief, and breakdown are inevitable. And still, it seems to say, isn’t it glorious to be a living human who can love and express?
The show delights in the senses, and in the ways life cycles through materials and through our hands into the world. During her studio visits with artists, Olivia found herself in conversation again and again about community and care. A Gathering is a wellspring of those ideals.
What does it mean today, when so much feels beyond repair, that contemporary art is more and more about comfort and joy?
Art always twines with society’s thoughts and struggles. At the beginning of the 20th century, Cubism came hand-in-hand with Einstein’s Theory of Relativity. Both exploded notions of time and space being linear or fixed. Soon after, Cubism lent itself to a full-throated cri de coeur in response to the brutalities of war. Surrealists, leaning into the work of Sigmund Freud, pushed against the limits of reason and into the great unknown of the unconscious. Pop Art came with the postwar surge in spending and an explosion in popular culture.
Today’s emphasis on care is no different. Ecofeminist art – driven by the notion that dominance of the earth and its resources is interwoven with gender oppression – has been around for nearly 50 years.
Now, though, it seems that artists are truly claiming – even relishing – the intellectual framework of care offered by activists, artists, and thinkers such as Adrienne Maree Brown, Ursula K. Le Guin, Joanna Macy, Tricia Hersey, Joy Harjo and Donna Haraway: Life and success comes and goes. Build, create, celebrate; lose, age, and let go. Ride it all through with love.
This focus on joy and comfort has burgeoned since COVID, and like Surrealism, it dovetails with therapeutic trends. Trauma therapy’s body-centered practices exploded into popular awareness with the 2014 publication of Bessel van der Kolk’s The Body Keeps the Score. Queer studies turned academic and personal attention to subjective experience.
The less we think of ourselves as objects of someone else’s plan or power, the more we realize we deserve comfort and joy; the more we embrace our complexity rather than condemn it as messy or inappropriate. And unlike success or progress, which are judged from without by societal measures, joy and comfort spring from our ability to be present within ourselves.
My God, why haven’t we been practicing this all along? We were deluded by systems of power and obsession with forward movement. We were blinded by what others were telling us about our worth rather than tuning to our own sense of what was happening. But boy oh boy, exhibitions like A Gathering indicate we are arriving into ourselves, and this is a huge and welcome shift.
