On Wednesday, October 2, artist and activist Zoë Buckman spoke to MMC art students at the Fort Gansevoort gallery about her current solo show, Heavy Rag, as part of the College’s recurring “Conversations on Diversity and Social Justice” series.
The gallery, a 19th-century Greek Revival row house located in SoHo, was the perfect venue for her work, according to MMC Professor of Art, Hallie Cohen. Buckman spoke about the genesis and inspiration for her art practice, and how for her, the personal is political.
Culled from deeply personal experience, the exhibition embraces the domestic archetype by balancing an ambiguity between vulnerability and strength.
Occupying the three floors of the gallery, the bodies of work are interconnected by the manifestation of the artist’s relationship to physical spaces—the home, her mother’s kitchen table, the boxing gym. After learning of her mother’s terminal diagnosis, Buckman began to employ a variety of techniques and materials traditionally adorned by women; embroidered tea towels, quilting and pottery.The works which take form as misshapen tea cups, clusters of boxing gloves, and framed flatworks are intrinsically referential to the bodily form; all at once unveiling a complex dichotomy of trauma and pleasure and the slippage in between.
While courses within the Department of Art and Art History were conducted remotely throughout the Fall 2020 semester, faculty and students took advantage of public art spaces and exhibits around New York City as creative influences for their projects.
