Nina Willis from the Evergreen Reporter writes, “Art often represents self-expression of human experience in visual form, opening up a dialogue for its audience to explore and interpret for themselves.”
The “Contemporary Women Printmakers” exhibit, is at the WSU Museum of Art through November 17. Co-curators Zachary Mazur and Ryan Hardesty created the show when they realized there was a lack of female artists in the museum, but also wanted to share the voices of women of color.
Featured artists include Hung Liu, Wangechi Mutu, Deborah Oropallo, Wendy Red Star, Alison Saar and Lorna Simpson. “Hailing from many places around the world—Africa, Asia, and North America—these artists offer a diverse set of perspectives on a wide-range of themes pertaining to global culture. Each is critically engaged with content surrounding issues of identity formation—through gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, or economic class—and each employs figuration as a means to explore representations of the female body within contemporary art and popular culture,” writes the Washington State Art Museum.
The WSU art museum benefits by drawing from the Jordan Schnitzer Family Foundation collection, “As one of the museum’s largest donors for the recent museum expansion, part of the agreement with WSU includes use of his collection. The works are strictly for educational purposes and provided to universities free of charge,” Mazur said. Because Schnitzer has been collecting for many years, he has an expansive selection to choose from to build exhibits.
“You don’t get to see world-class art for free, typically,” Mazur said. “All we have to pay for is shipping.”
Mazur said he selected the art pieces through a long process of looking through Schnitzer’s collection. The artwork became sorted down to “women,” then “women of color,” seeing who’s available in that collection, narrowing the collection down further, he said.