By Nicolas Tapasco
Deep within the corridors of Boylan Hall, down the lower level and by the cafeteria doors, lies a newly unveiled exhibit titled “Urban Contours: Brooklyn College Faculty Exhibition.” Debuted on Nov. 7 and running till Dec. 20, the exhibit allows visitors a chance to peer within the minds of those who instruct our artistic sense at BC.
With over 40 art faculty pieces housed within the 7,000 square-foot gallery, a variety of art forms are displayed, from paintings, sculptures, videos, or a mix of all three. Attendees get to see these creatives at work, and visualize how the greater Brooklyn borough has influenced them as artists giving back to the community that’s given them so much.
“It’s a beautiful reflection of how diverse the city is, or even potentially Brooklyn College,” Lamar Robillard, the exhibit’s art handler, told The Vanguard “‘Urban Contours’ is doing this wonderful job of meshing these many different practices and materials together. I find it really beautiful to see.”
Withins the exhibit sits Professor Whit Harris’s piece “Smoke Break,” displaying a naked black woman laying in a field smoking a cigarette in a flurry of browns, pinks, yellows, and greens. She details her thought process behind the painting through her use of color and narrative.
“Who’s entitled to a rest from work? Whose work is valuable? I’m inspired by clichés, sayings, phrases, the convention of language and how that relates to the materiality of my existence. It’s become this conventional phrase of what rest is, what it encompasses, what you’re allowed to do,” Harris attracts an audience with the pieces’ vibrancy, but maintains their attention with the concepts it ponders. “I use color and these unassuming narratives to draw people in to look at these ideas that you carry around.”
A few steps further sits Professor Stephen Kwok’s sculpture “Candelabra.” Conceived during his stay at an unoccupied home, his sculpture places candles on top of antennas and coaxial cables.
“I was thinking a lot about the home as a command center of sorts, as a place where we receive a lot of information and the role of the domestic space in our ingestion of information,” he told The Vanguard. “I was thinking also about the relationship between information and spirituality, and so this body of work came out of that experience.”
And with so much more to be experienced in the two showroom floors, “Urban Contours” finds cohesion in variety by rooting every artist and their work to their origins in the Brooklyn borough. And for the BC community, they hope to inspire others to look around at the beauty within their city, not just with this exhibition, but with future displays held within the new gallery space putting students, alumni, and residents in the forefront.
In Robillard’s words, “You can find fine art in your backyard. There’s so much more in your neighborhood than you’d believe.”
“Urban Contours: Brooklyn College Faculty Exhibition” is free and open to the public on Tuesdays and Wednesdays from 10 a.m. to 5:30 p.m., and Thursdays and Fridays from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. Located at Boylan Hall, room 0400