In The News Hartwick’s Foreman Gallery Presents Multi-Artist Portrait Exhibit on Identity

The Foreman Gallery of Art at Hartwick College launches a new, multi-artist exhibition later this month that focuses on how portraiture-style images can change perception of identity. As You Will Be: Amy Ritter, Courtney Garvin, and Xyza Cruz Bacani runs from February 8 – March 18 at the gallery, located in the Anderson Center for the Arts on the College campus. There will be an opening reception on Thursday, February 9 from 4:30 – 6 p.m. Also, the artists will be on hand for a moderated panel discussion and artist talk on February 22 at 6 p.m.; light refreshments will be provided. The exhibit, opening reception, and panel discussion are all free of charge and open to the public.

“Through portraiture, identity can be crafted, memorialized, drafted, and even destroyed,” said Foreman Gallery and Exhibitions Coordinator Sydney Sheehan. “As You Will Be is an exhibition that brings artists Xyza Cruz Bacani, Courtney Garvin, and Amy Ritter together to explore identity, memory, storytelling, and community-building through portrait-style works. Playing with the idea of traditional portraiture, As You Will Be asks viewers to consider the fluidity of identity and its relationship to the visual. By expanding, bending, and even deconstructing what is seen as ‘portraiture’ (i.e images of the self or others) this exhibition hopes to rebuild the way we often relate ourselves to others through visual concepts.”

Cruz Bacani’s Im Migrant project focuses on the Bengali community in New York and their journey towards achieving the American dream. In her photographs, she documented the lives of various Bengali families as they navigate their lives in New York. Her photographs are as intimate as they are exploratory, interspersed with handmade textiles and traditional Bengali wedding garments. Im Migrant captures the very many ways in which “American-ness” might be defined and redefined by the immigrant experience.

While Cruz Bacani points her camera outward, towards communities carving their own identity into the American Dream, Garvin aims inward. Her introspective portraits ask viewers to think deeply about who is looking back at them. Garvin’s work, both images of herself and her close relations, put forth the questions not just of what makes up identity, but who? Her photographs and video, Here for a Good Time & a Long Time, takes into account the generational knowledge and memory that often accompanies our own visions of identity.

Ritter’s installations consider identity as it is formed through visions of home and visions of bodily self. Inspired by mobile home communities and the people that live there, her work aims to expose the socio-spatial shame of home phenomenon often associated with mobile home communities, while humanizing the residents that live there. Using Xerox prints, plywood, and cinder blocks, materials that echo the makeshift homes of her past, Ritter’s installations explore understandings of self, place, and community while asking visitors to confront these questions too.

About the Artists:

Ritter grew up in the rural Pennsylvania town of Orefield. Her work is an exploration of her relationship to her identity vis-à-vis mobile homes and their interior landscapes. It stages her memories of growing up in a mobile home community, a place she left but still feels connected to. Her ongoing work of archiving these homes and neighborhoods gives shape to immersive installations and site-specific public sculptures. Ritter has shown her work nationally and has had numerous art residencies and fellowships. Ritter received her MFA from The Ohio State University, a BFA from Tyler School of Art and attended Skowhegan in 2016. Most recently she has been awarded a Fellowship with A.I.R. Gallery with a solo exhibition later this year in Dumbo, NY.

Garvin is a visual artist born in South Carolina and currently based in New York City. She received her B.S. in Communications and Rhetoric with a minor in Art Photography from Syracuse University’s College of Visual and Performing Arts. She is a Magnum Foundation 2018 Photography and Social Justice Fellow. Her work examines portrayal across various mediums. She also has a deep interest in family histories, memory, storytelling, and sex education.

Cruz Bacani is a Filipina author and photographer who uses her work to raise awareness about under-reported stories. Having worked as a second-generation domestic worker in Hong Kong for almost a decade, she is particularly interested in the intersection of labor migration and human rights. She is one of the Magnum Foundation Photography and Social Justice Fellows in 2015, and has exhibited worldwide and won awards in photography. She is also the recipient of a resolution passed by the Philippines House of Representatives in her honor, HR No.1969, which recognized her work as a photographer. Cruz Bacani was awarded The Outstanding Women of the Nation’s Service in the field of Humanities; one of the Asia 21 Young Leaders (Class of 2018); the WMA Commission grantee in 2017; and a Pulitzer Center and an Open Society Moving Walls 2017 grantee. She was also one of the BBC’s 100 Women of the World 2015; 30 Under 30 Women Photographers 2016; Forbes 30 Under 30 Asia 2016; Fujifilm ambassador; and author of the book We Are Like Air.

For more information, contact Sheehan at (607) 431-4575 or sheehans@hartwick.edu.