Reimagining The Global Village
Frederick Layton Gallery, Milwaukee Institute of Art & Design
October 11th - December 4th, 2021
Reimagining The Global Village showcases transnational art collaborations among artists and between artists and communities. This exhibition is an ambitious but necessarily incomplete survey of various strategies artists have employed while working toward a more connected and caring world. Artists explore what is weighing down on our planet, issues often too large to be addressed by any single person, community, or country. Refugees at borders, ruptures in cross-cultural communication, challenges in global movement, and the ever-present cloud of climate change are all addressed with the very human act of making.
The notion of "global village" as predicted by Marshall McLuhan in the 60s is utopian and fraught with conflicts of interest, economic and racial power dynamics. This notion is a dilution of individual identities and cultures inherent in the idea of a global village. At the same time, isolationism and hyper nationalism left a majority of us living in silos even before the pandemic. Initially the year 2020 brought yet another layer to this isolation. But we eventually found ways to create community and also gather and make together. Zoom, Google Meet and other virtual meeting technologies facilitate meaningful connections and collaborations. This fundamentally alters the way we will work for the foreseeable future. The ability to connect and work with someone beyond our immediate reach has brought us closer to creating a global community while acknowledging our varied situations. This exhibition showcases collaborative artwork in three frameworks – Transnational collaborations between artists, transnational collaborations between artists and communities and global collectives.
Artists have always found ways to subvert barriers. In this exhibition, they distill the importance of human connection through their work and words; reimagining the world as a rhizomatic, interdependent network.
To see the exhibtion in-person, visit MIAD Gallery on Monday through Saturday from 10 a.m. – 5 p.m. All admissions are free. For more details, visit miad.edu/galleries.
Curator: Nirmal Raja