Bennington Students Participate in 50 State Initiative
As part of Usdan Gallery’s participation in the For Freedoms/50 States initiative, Art New England highlighted the related work that director and curator Anne Thompson, artist Torkwase Dyson, and Bennington College students are pursuing.
From the article:
"At Usdan Gallery, a long-planned show by painter and sculptor Torkwase Dyson seemed like a natural fit to Thompson when she was contacted about Bennington College participating in the 50 State Initiative.
Thompson described Dyson’s artistic approach as using 'the language of abstraction and sculpture to talk about political ideas [and] climate change—in the broader sense, the era of the Anthropocene.' The gallery also put an open call to students to create programming that was thematically related to Dyson’s work, and selected three groups of students. One group is setting up a mobile recording station where participants can talk about their experiences with migration, immigration and family. Another group will feature a gospel performance, while the third will feature a series of watercolors about Native American identity."
We get so much of our information online, and so much is self-controlled by what we like, or an algorithm chooses it…A billboard is one of the last places that you can see a message that you don’t like.
Anne Thompson, Usdan Gallery director and curator