‘Sown in the Half Light:’ Visual Arts Alumna Tara Geer ’97 to Illuminate Duck Creek with Drawing Installation

Visual Arts Alumna Tara Geer ’97 is showcasing her drawing installation, Sown in the Half Light, at the Arts Center at Duck Creek, in Long Island. Geer will deliver a talk and engage in a Visual Thinking Strategies discussion on the closing day, August 20, 2023, at 3pm.

Geer’s inspiration for this installation came from a winter visit to Duck Creek, when she found herself captivated by the historic 20th-century barn that now hosts the main gallery. Envisioning the barn as a backdrop, she started creating a series of drawings. As winter transitioned into spring, and then to the early days of summer, Geer collected, discarded, selected, and carefully transported these drawings that match the old-world feel of the barn.

Geer’s work aims to evoke emotions, capturing details from her environment and blending them with an imaginative narrative. Her process, which she describes as a “stomach-clenching fury,” communicates an intense feeling of life beyond just visual representation. Geer is drawn to the unexplainable aspects of the world, the “wildernesses just off the ground,” as she phrases it.

"We are all trying to learn how to live with what we have previously sown in a half-light, of not knowing what we are doing or not being able to see well enough through the haze," she says. Geer uses her drawing to uncover the raw realities of existence, going beyond just the visual to probe what lies beneath the surface. “Not to find the skin of the visible world, but to find what lies, heaving, right beneath it.”

Tara Geer (b.1970, Boston, MA) makes, teaches, and studies drawing. Her drawings are in the collections of the Morgan Museum, the Parrish Museum and the Harlem Children’s Art Fund. Her work with the 6-woman activist collective, Victory Garden, is in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, The New York Historical Society, The Beinecke Library at Yale University, and The Canadian Museum. She’s had solo shows in LA and in NY, and exhibited at Guild Gallery, Jason McCoy, Tibor de Nagy, Glenn Horowitz Gallery, The National Arts Club, Steven Harvey, Aran Cravey, Flowers, the Four Seasons and Ace hotels—among others. There are 2 books about her work; Carrying Silence: The Drawings of Tara Geer; and New York Studio Conversations. Articles in Bomb, ArtNet & White Hot Magazine. She has been teaching for 3 decades—to children with visual processing challenges, museum educators, blocked artists, doctors at Yale, poets at the Homeschool, and—since 2012—in the Art and Art Education program at Teachers College, Columbia University. She has a BA and MFA from Columbia University where she had a full teaching fellowship and graduated Magna Cum Laude, and Phi Beta Kappa. She has received the Louis Sudler Prize, the Joan Sovern prize, BlogHer Voice of the Year, and residencies at Denniston Hill and The MacDowell Colony. She lives and works in New York City.