“…and when she went out it seemed to her that she too had migrated, that everyone migrates, even if we stay in the same houses our whole lives, because we can’t help it. We are all migrants through time.”
—Mohsin Hamid
As invoked in its name, Seeing Otherwise invites visual inquiry and discovery to challenge representations of migration and mobility in art. Whitfield Lovell, an artist featured in this exhibition, once observed that installations are about “the markings that the past has made—and continues to make—on who we are.” Seeing Otherwise explores relationships between displacement and reinvention, inclusion and exclusion, presence and absence, and the multilayered presence of the past seeping into the present. Artists featured in this exhibition include Romare Bearden, Phong Bui, Lalla Essaydi, Whitfield Lovell, Meleko Mokgosi, Richard Mosse, Fred Wilson, Leo Rubinfien, and Alfred Stieglitz.
Seeing Otherwise is presented in conjunction with Making Migration Visible, a state-wide initiative featuring events by dozens of partnering organizations offering parallel exhibitions, film screenings, performances, lectures, community dinners, poetry, and more. This exhibition is curated by Catherine Besteman, Chloé Powers ’19, and Caroline Webb ’19.
Selected Works from the Exhibition (Click to Enlarge)
Banner Image: Romare Bearden, Cotton, 1964. Gelatin silver print (photostat) on fiberboard (Ed. 1/6), 39 x 49 in. (99.1 x 124.5 cm). Colby College Museum of Art. The Lunder Collection, 2017.003. © 2018 Romare Bearden Foundation/Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY.