What's Up - Your guide to what's happening in Fayetteville, AR this week!
Issue link: http://www.epageflip.net/i/1350124
MARCH 14-20, 2021 WHAT'S UP! 11 FEATURE Los Angles-based visual artist Sarah Cain is known for her site-specific and site-responsive practice. One place visitors will see that reflected is in Cain's piece "Wild Flower." During an early visit to the Momentary when the space was still under construction, Cain noticed a high up window that was set to be filled in. It seemed the perfect spot for her stained glass piece so she asked that the window be kept and it now frames the work. (Courtesy Photo/the Momentary, by Ironside Photography) to be filled in. Having recently added stained glass work to her practice, Cain asked staff to keep the window. It ended up being the perfect spot for her 2018 stained glass piece "Wild Flower." "I think that's one of the things that I enjoy the most about the Momentary and our building, and our process of working with artists for a lot of these projects," Haynes shares. "We're able to really have these conversations, and these push-and-pull moments that really create an overall final product." Opened Feb. 23, Derrick Adams' "Sanctuary" uses art to examine a difficult piece of America's past that is still lamentably relevant today. The Green Book, or "The Negro Motorist Green Book," was a guidebook published from 1936 to 1967 to identify welcoming businesses, towns and even whole regions, as well as unsafe establishments for Black Americans during the Jim Crow era. Through mixed-media collage and sculpture, Adams uses The Green Book as reference material to reflect on the concept of freedom of mobility — who has it and who doesn't, even today. "For me, this exhibition fits so lovely in our space, because it's taking something that's historical as its starting point, but really bringing it to this present moment," Haynes says. "And [he's] also really talking about how this idea of relaxation and leisure, how it can be seen as a political act for Black Americans — this idea that, 'I just want to go on a road trip,' 'I just want to go swimming,' I just want to do these things that so many people take for granted, and what it means to do that in a continually fraught time." Finally, on March 5, Diana Al-Hadid's "Ash in the Trade Winds" brought towering, imposing, but also awe- inspiring and intricate pieces into Gallery 2. In her wall panels and sculptures, Al-Hadid explores dualities in gender, memory, migration and progress. The mixing of materials also reflects Al-Hadid's cross-cultural identity, being a Syrian immigrant raised in Ohio. Figurative suggestions exist in Al-Hadid's pieces. Glimpses of the female form, moments from history and Islamic architecture lie just under the surface of the pieces' hard exteriors, encouraging slow examination. "It was really enlightening to have her as an artist to speak about this moment, because I think we often have been talking about this is like the worst year ever," muses Kaitlin Garcia-Maestas, assistant curator at the Momentary and the curator of "Ash in the Trade Winds." Some of the history of catastrophe in Al-Hadid's work offers hope to the struggle we face today, Garcia-Maestas says. "Not to play down … the last year and the pandemic, but to really offer some perspective, and some hope that, even though we have these challenging moments through history, artists always continue to make art to reflect on these moments. … That has been really one of those special things about working with her, and a testament to just the overall process of working with living artists, is that they teach us so much, and they offer us so many new perspectives to see our lives in."