Staniar Gallery Exhibition Opens with Curator’s Lecture
“New Codex Oaxaca: Immigration and Cultural Memory”Washington and Lee University’s Staniar Gallery presents “New Codex Oaxaca: Immigration and Cultural Memory,” a traveling exhibition which explores the impact of immigration to the U.S. through artworks made by those who are left behind and often separated from their loved ones.
The exhibition will be on view April 24 – May 26, with a curator’s lecture and reception on April 26 at 5:30 p.m. in Wilson Hall’s Concert Hall. Both events are free and open to the public.
In 2010, artist and curator Marietta Bernstoff began working with citizens of the San Francisco Tanivet, a small town in the Mexican state of Oaxaca, to make art as a way of exploring the effects of migration on their small rural community. The project continues to grow and over 40 artists have contributed textiles, photographs, engravings and other ephemera representing the immigration experience.
The traveling exhibition addresses important questions about the immigration experience: What are the implications for the state of Oaxaca, which has seen over one million inhabitants immigrate to the United States? What is happening to their land in Mexico and the family they left behind? How do we keep traditions alive within another culture? Has immigration changed the way we see ourselves as a culture?
Bernstoff is a curator at the Social and Public Art Resource Center in Venice, California, and founder of the MAMAZ (Mujeres Artistas y el Maiz) Collective, a group of women artists in Mexico and the U.S.
Staniar Gallery is located on the second floor of Wilson Hall, in Washington and Lee’s Lenfest Center for the Arts. Gallery hours are Monday through Friday, 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. For more information, please call (540) 458-8861.
You must be logged in to post a comment.