It’s mid-November now and the exhibit Memory || Place || Desire: Contemporary Art of the Maghreb and Maghrebi Diaspora has long been installed and viewed my many guests. Opening day, Friday, October 24 came with a gallery space overflowing with spectators.
The opening began as Koshland Director of the John B. Hurford ’60 Center for the Arts and Humanities, Laura McGrane, introduced head curator, Professor Carol Solomon along with the student curators.
Professor Solomon speaks with guests about the exhibit. Photo courtesy Haverford College
Next to speak was Professor Solomon, who explained the exhibition as one that aimed to illustrate the diverse types of art that come out of the Maghreb and that guests should leave the exhibit realizing that there is not one type of art coming from this region. After this introduction, Professor Solomon turned the guests to the student curators, who guided the crowd through the gallery and spoke for a few minutes about pieces that they studied in depth the previous year.
The exhibit opening has come and gone, but Memory || Place || Desire: Contemporary Art of the Maghreb and Maghrebi Diaspora will remain until December 14, 2014. Tours will run every Thursday at 4:00pm for the duration of the show.
With the school year coming to a close, and the departure of the artists in residence, the students of Carol Solomon’s Curatorial Praxis class continue to progress in the making of the Memory || Place || Desire exhibit.
Students gather around Mustapha Akrim’s Article 25. Photo by Lisa Boughter.
Recently, the class met with Matthew Seamus Callihan, Associate Director of the Cantor Fitzgerald Gallery and Campus Exhibitions, to discuss the setup of the gallery. Now, a group of students from the class have been working on several possible layouts using Google SketchUp. The application helps students to create an accurate model of the exhibit space, and allows them to rearrange the gallery’s moveable walls and even import scaled art works onto the walls. Using SketchUp, the students are able to present a lifelike version of what the gallery space will actually look like when all of the works are in it, and thus many issues involving space can be realized in this digital format before the final set up is devised.
While the class has been educating each other on each of the artists that have works in the exhibition, Professor Solomon has been working on a satellite exhibition: Khamsa: Amulets of North Africa. The exhibit features several Khamsas—literally meaning five—or Hands of Fatima, which will be on display. Khamsas are hand shaped amulets, typically used in jewelry or wall hangings as a sign of good luck and protection. These amulets have Jewish and Muslim origins, and the Khamsa is referred to the hand of Fatima in Islam (named after Mohamed’s daughter) and the hand of Mariam or Mary in Judaism and Christianity. This exhibit will coincide with Memory ||Place || Desire and will be located in Magill Library’s Alcove Gallery.
Detail of a khamsa. Photo courtesy of haverford.edu
Moroccan artist in residence, Mustapha Akrim, has extended his participation in the Haverford College community to working with some of the school’s art classes. In a workshop led by Akrim alongside Professors John Muse and Erin Schoneveld, Akrim showed various students from the Tri-Co how to construct art with concrete.
Mustapha Akrim guides students through the process of mixing concrete. Photo by John Muse.
Students were assigned to choose any word, in any style, to that they would make a mold of and create out of concrete. In order to explain how students arrived at their respective word choices, Professor Muse recalled that the class discussed “words, concrete, and typography” together and how each principle could relate to each other. Like with Mustapha’s Article 13 and Article 25, the students considered how their words would be interpreted once molded into concrete. One group of students played with the use of concrete as a very permanent material and the impermanence of promises, especially those made over text message, by creating the word “Yes” surrounded by a speech bubble. Other students focused less on the metaphorical meaning of concrete, and focused more on the typographic style of the words.
Professor Erin Schoneveld discusses the nonsensical word, “cevbil” that students made up. Photo by John Muse.
Akrim uses concrete in part for its accessibility and his familiarity with the material, and partly because of the permanence that it represents. Because many of Mustapha’s works relate to the dichotomy between what the government promises its people and what the people actually receive, concrete serves as a vehicle for showing this irony. This workshop allowed students to fully understand the effort that goes into Akrim’s work and how it is as much a complex creative experience as it is physically labor intensive process.
Students begin the process by splitting the polystyrene board into more manageable pieces. Photo by John Muse.
To start off the tutorial, Akrim directed the students to cut their words out of the polystyrene mold with a drill. After cutting squares surrounding each word out of the polystyrene, they placed the print out of their words on the polystyrene and poked holes through the page, outlining each letter.
Students outline the word “grow” repeated three times, onto the board. Photo by John Muse.
Students traced over the imprinted poke holes left in the polystyrene, then began to cut out their words; the negative space being left in order to be filled in with concrete.
Students partake on the final step: pouring the concrete mixture into their mold. Photo by John Muse.
Students left their molds in Mustapha Akrim’s studio for a few days, and are set to retrieve them tomorrow, Saturday March 29.
