Arts & Events
Art
The Fabric of Race: Lynching in America
Penn State Altoona's McLanahan art gallery featured the work of California photographer/installation artist Renee M. Billingslea, with her art installation entitled The Fabric of Race: Lynching in America.
The exhibit featured an assortment of rusty canning jars, filled with disturbing images of body parts, teeth, and ashes. All objects represented souvenirs collected by people who have attended the thousands of lynchings of black men, women, and children in the United States. On another wall hung an old-looking quilt. Within hand-sewn squares of denim, flannel, velvet, and cotton prints, the artist sewed appropriated images of actual lynchings, showing the reality of these violent acts and those who attended. Arranged on the gallery walls were white dress shirts burned and stained, each with a hand-embroidered nametag honoring the lost victims.
Exhibition features work of three generations of artists
The Sheetz and McLanahan Galleries featured the work of WPA printmaker Michael Gallagher and his granddaughter, videographer/visual artist Gwyneth Leech. This exhibition of art, Imprints on a Landscape: The Mining Project, was featured in conjunction with a two-week dance residency by Liz Lerman Dance Exchange Choreographer Martha Wittman, daughter of Gallagher. Wittman met with students and members of the community to identify and gather mining family oral histories for the college's dance performance in May.