CSUMB art exhibit highlights Social Justice Colloquium

By Mark Muckenfuss

An art exhibit highlighting Cal State Monterey Bay's 27th annual Social Justice Colloquium opens Tuesday, April 8, in Visual and Public Arts’ Building 70. It features work by faculty, staff and students, and runs through April 24.

An opening reception and gallery walk-through for the exhibit – “DEAI Now!”-- is planned from 5 to 7 p.m. Thursday, April 10. It kicks off a month of activity that also includes a lecture and workshop by a visiting artist later in the month. 

Visual and Performing Arts Chair Angelica Muro said CSUMB has had faculty art exhibits in previous years, but this is the first to include staff and students as well. That participation is both in the artwork itself – which includes sculpture, ceramics and multimedia works – and in its subject matter. One dominant piece features the faces of five facilities workers on campus. 

Hector Mendoza, associate professor of sculpture, said the wall-mounted full-figure portraits of the workers came out of a relationship he established with them over a few flowers. 

“I’ve known the foreman for 10 years,” Mendoza said. “There were a couple of years where they planted a flower bed in front of the art buildings. It was gorgeous.”

He invited the crew for coffee and donuts as a thank you, and has been friends with them since. When he was considering the content of the exhibit, he decided he wanted to include some of the lesser known, behind-the-scenes members of the campus community. 

“I was thinking we could put on an exhibit of people who are not usually included in exhibitions,” he said.

He took photographs of five grounds crew workers and then paired each with a student, who then created a whole-body portrait to go with the photo. The result is a powerful, heroic-looking installation that celebrates the strength of the workers. 

Muro said the exhibit is “important and timely,” even though it was planned and named last spring, before the current concerns about diversity, equity and inclusion.

“It’s a way of building community,” she said, “which is what the VPA has always been about.”

Other pieces in the exhibit include a chain mail dress, multi-media ceramic work, photographs, a video presentation and large-scale wall-mounted pieces, such as a 10-foot-high colorful butterfly that addresses issues of immigration. In addition to the elements of beauty, flight and fragility, the body of the butterfly is made up of wooden shoe soles. Not only do the soles connect with the idea of human migration, but each has handwritten quotes on both sides, which relate to human rights and ideas of immigration. Anguiano said he’s thinking of having a table with blank soles on which visitors can write their own thoughts or quotes.

Bay Area artist Katherine Sherwood will visit CSUMB April 24 and 25 as part of the colloquium. Already an accomplished painter, Sherwood’s life and art changed when she had a cerebral hemorrhage at age 44 and was left partially paralyzed. Forced to “relearn” painting using her left hand, her official bio says she “became a more fluid and urgent left-handed painter,” and adopted a more gestural painting style by working flat and pouring paint directly onto her canvases.” 

Her work “addresses intersectionality, feminism and art history through the lens of disability,” the bio says. 

Sherwood will deliver a lecture from 6-8 p.m. Thursday, April 24, in Building 70. The following day, she will conduct a workshop from 10 a.m. to noon in Building 72. The workshop is open to the public, but space is limited. To register, contact Mercedes Maciel at MeMaciel@csumb.edu.

Gallery hours for the exhibit are noon to 4 p.m. Monday through Friday.