Alumnae Featured in Two New York City Exhibits
Alumnae Priscilla Aleman '19 and A Young Yu '19 are both featured in a new exhibit at SoMad. The show, If You Can Make It, “brings together artworks by 14 NYC-based artists to represent the strength of collective energy and care as a form of collaboration.” This show will only be open October 1 and 2, 2021.
The artists shown in this exhibit first met in January 2020, and as the world began changing all around us, they “did what artists in NYC’s radical history have done before them: collectivized.” As their communities were impacted by COVID-19 and the divisions among the intersecting “systems for justice, healthcare, and housing cracked wide-open, the artists in If You Can Make It held space for each other to be seen and heard with an understanding of cultural production as a form of survival.”
Each artist in this show grapples with our newfound reality through a different medium, making the exhibit incredibly diverse. “Major themes in the artworks include the African diaspora, anti-colonialism and decolonization, queerness and self, environmental justice, psychological interiors, feminism, and ritual.”
Aleman has a second show on view at Wave Hill Sunroom Project Space from October 16 until December 5, 2021. This installation, Origins of Devotion, transforms the exhibition space into an “environment that uses the body as an innate symbol in ceremony to convey the sacred, the afterlife and the deities of our time.”
In her work, Aleman explores ideas of time and colonialism through “examin[ing] archaeological materials and ecological transformations in the Americas, including the Caribbean.” She reimagines these structures through her own sculpture, recontextualizing these historical realities through creating “sites for ceremony and ritualized performances.”
