Elin, Madeleine, Sarah and Susanne Slavick
TSB Wallace Arts Centre, Auckland, New Zealand
April 21 - June 13, 2021
FAMILY TREE WHAKAPAPA
Opening 11 December 5pm EST / 12th December 11am NZDT
MEDIA RELEASE
Four sisters exhibit together in Masterton and Auckland, New Zealand
Aratoi Museum of Art and History, with support from Masterton Creative Communities, presents Family Tree Whakapapa, featuring the work of four sisters: elin o’Hara Slavick (Chapel Hill, North Carolina, USA), Madeleine Marie Slavick (Wairarapa, New Zealand), Sarah Slavick (Boston, Massachusetts, USA) and Susanne Slavick (Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA).
As curators, painters, photographers and writers, all have incorporated images of trees in social, political and environmental conditions — trees that stand as refuge and livelihood, consumed and consuming, under assault and triumphant, as historical record and as harbinger of things to come. The exhibition offers perspectives both unsettling and soothing as nature increasingly reflects salient issues of our times.
“Aratoi is honoured to exhibit this body of work, by a family of accomplished artists whose work spans the globe,” says Aratoi Director Susanna Shadbolt. “We are also pleased to publish a full-colour publication, with artwork by the four sisters, an essay by historian and theorist of contemporary art Katherine Guinness (USA), and a poem by Wairarapa kaimahi Rawiri Smith. The cover, pictured above, features an oil painting by Sarah Slavick.”
Family Tree Whakapapa opens on Saturday 12th December with an artist talk at 11am – with Madeleine present and her sisters joining online from the United States. The exhibition runs at Aratoi until 14 February 2021. It will then travel to Wallace Arts Centre in Auckland from 20 April - 13 June, 2021.
In its beauty and bounty, nature is often regarded as benign and apolitical. We do not expect a tree to assume an editorial stance or embody ideology. The conceptual, analytical and sensual intersect in Family Tree Whakapapa with works that probe the multitude of relations within and between trees and humans. Branching out to, and from, the world, the artists address a variety of concerns.
Based on her experiences in Japan, elin o’Hara slavick presents photographic works that bear witness to the ongoing aftermath of atomic bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the nuclear power disaster in Fukushima.
Madeleine Slavick’s photographs reveal dichotomies and their collapses in our experience of nature in environments both rural and urban—they decry the marginalization of trees.
Sarah Slavick’s paintings explore the underground life of trees in an elegiac series that conveys both grief and hope, for what is threatened and for what might survive through possible strategies that trees offer—for all species on the planet.
Susanne Slavick hand paints trees derived from ‘tree of life’ carpet designs over printed scenes of environmental destruction and depredation. These trees do not lie down like doormats; they rise up and persist, suggesting the possibility of recovery.
The artists have also made recordings of poems related to the exhibition’s themes; visitors may listen around a live tree in the gallery, while Madeleine Slavick’s poem ‘one leaf, one moment | Kotahi ake te rau, kotahi ake te wā’ acts as entrance and exit. (The translation is by Rawiri Smith.)
The artists acknowledge support from Masterton Creative Communities, as well as the City of Boston, College of Fine Arts at Carnegie Mellon University, Hiroshima City University, Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum, The Japan Society for the Promotion of Science, and Lesley University.
GALLERY STATEMENT:
FAMILY TREE WHAKAPAPA
In a 1940 poem, Bertolt Brecht asked:
What kind of times are they, when
To talk about trees is almost a crime
Because it implies silence about so many horrors?
In a 1995 poem, Adrienne Rich answered:
.....so why do I tell you
anything? Because you still listen, because in times like these
to have you listen at all, it's necessary
to talk about trees.
Family Tree Whakapapa brings together the work of four sisters to ‘talk about trees.’
As curators, painters, photographers and writers, we portray trees in conditions in and outside of human care and conflict. Genealogical roots and botanical roots intertwine.
In its beauty and force, ‘nature’ is often regarded as benign and apolitical. We do not expect trees to assume editorial stances or embody ideologies. Whether bombed or irradiated, contained or marginalised, in underground union or standing in persistence, trees and their representations can offer solace and space—for the necessity of talking, listening and learning.
Family Tree Whakapapa offers both critical commentary and sensual delight in visualizing the tree as refuge and livelihood, consumed and consuming, under assault and triumphant, as historical record, and as harbinger of things to come.
PRESS LINKS:
Sisters add Whakapapa to work, Wairapapa Times-Age, May 5, 2021
Family Tree Whakapapa, CAA News Today, CWA Pick for April 2021, April 27, 2021
Family Tree Whakapapa, Love in the Time of Covid: A Chronicle of the Pandemic, December 2020
Monday Artpost, December 28, 2020
“Family Tree Whakapapa” PhotoForum, December 19, 2020
Becky Bateman, “Family Tree Whakapapa”, Wairarapa Midweek, December 16, 2020, p.14
Susanne Slavick, Tree of Life: Nepal, 2020, Gouache on archival inkjet print on Hahnemühle paper, 66 x 36 inches
Sources: Detail from photo by Simon de Trey White, World Wildlife Fund UK, Nepal firewood. Tree of Life design from English embroidered canvas, first half 17th century, Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY.
Slavick’s work pursues empathic unsettlement, combining images of incomprehensible destruction and the possibility of recovery, however elusive. For example, ‘Tree of Life’ carpet designs are painted over images of environmental devastation, from diverse cultural and environmental locales. These trees do not lie down; instead, they stand up in persistence. Whether inflicted by logging or global warming, deforestation knows no borders. The creative impulse motivating the painting, weaving and planting of trees is necessary for a global crisis that needs global solutions.
elin o’Hara slavick, A-Bombed Weeping Willow Tree, Hiroshima, 2019, Solarized silver gelatin print, 16 x 20 inches
Elin’s work in Family Tree Whakapapa is from the series After Hiroshima, Nagasaki and Fukushima. Some of the exhibited works can be found in her monograph After Hiroshima (Daylight Books, 2013). During eight trips to Japan, she made cyanotypes of A-bombed artifacts from Hiroshima and Nagasaki and irradiated matter from Fukushima, conjuring the shadows left by humans and things as a result of the blinding light and heat of the atomic bombs and the waves of the tsunami and radiation in Fukushima. Exposure is central to her project—both photographic exposures and exposure to radiation. Like humans, trees stand as witnesses, victims and survivors. Slavick also works in the darkroom with related and symbolic materials, x-ray film exposed to the lingering radiation in A-bombed artifacts, and rubbings of A-bombed surfaces, including some of the sixty trees that survived the A-bomb in Hiroshima.
Madeleine Slavick, Parking Lot Conversation, 2020, Archival inkjet prints, Diptych, each print 35.43 x 16.54 inches
This body of work speaks of Family, Tree, Whakapapa, and of the way I see: in juxtapositions, relationships.
A necessary connectedness.
We Are Never Alone.
I have called myself a tree.
An affirmation. To stand, endure, accord with any season, storm.
To be full of grace, resilience, wisdom.
Tree, tree, stand inside me.
Yet, often, nature, and the tree, is marginalised, contained, lessened.
We control, tame, fell, profit; trees become products, ornaments, bystanders.
Trees also stay trees, breathing, communicating, even in parking lots.
draw me a winter tree, the infinite delicate 為我畫一棵冬天的樹, 畫無限的柔美
silhouettes of black rivers and visible fingers 黑色河流與清晰手指的剪影
make a large winter head full of thought 巨大的, 冬天的頭顱,裝滿思想
This work was compiled in a difficult year – the massive struggle in Hong Kong, the menace in The White House, the climate crisis, the hate crisis, the pandemic...
Yes, I still want to call myself a tree.
加油 | we shall overcome | kia kaha
- Madeleine Slavick / 思樂維
Sarah Slavick, Elegy to the Underground, 2020, Oil on canvas, 56 x 44 inches
In producing oxygen, the trees above ground are critical for human survival. Sarah Slavick, in her Elegy to the Underground series, is particularly drawn to what happens below ground, especially the recent discoveries concerning latticed fungi or mycorrhizal networks. Through sharing resources and working together in complex and infinite pathways, alliances, and kinship networks, trees reach enormity, increasing their chances of survival and ours as well. These new insights into the hidden life of trees offer new strategies for protecting our own home and species. Fearing and mourning their heartbreaking loss, her watercolors and paintings constitute elegies, alternately acting as tributes and memorials to trees.
GETTING THERE
Andrew Ellis Johnson and Susanne Slavick
Schmucker Art Gallery at Gettysburg College
September 4 - December 6, 2019
Catalogue available with poems by David Hernandez, Maria Melendez Kelson, Blas Manuel De Luna, Dunya Mikhail, Prageeta Sharma, Warsan Shire, and Wisława Szymborska; an essay by Suketu Mehta; and texts by Vu Tran.
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Getting There is aspirational; it implies a destination, marking progress toward some kind of goal. Getting There is a burden, but also a dream of many migrants and refugees. We cannot speak for those in flight, in hiding, and in desperate hope. But we can speak to the contradictory fears and hypocrisies, ignored histories and punitive policies that we as a nation hold and enact here.
We are all from somewhere else. At some point in our family lineage, someone has crossed a border. Escape, expulsion, exile, exodus and emigration are integral to human history. Today, there are over 65 million refugees, asylum-seekers and internally displaced people around the world, according to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. They are driven from their home by persecution, conflict and violence, or human rights violations.
Driven or displaced, cut loose or set adrift, or simply seeking safety—all are precarious states of passage. The decision to leave home may be voluntary or involuntary, arising from desperation or anticipation. Those of us not needing to flee live in comparative luxury. Yet many Americans choose to feel invaded, believing our jobs are threatened or our culture diluted or even contaminated.
There is real fear and fabricated fear. Both are fierce and ubiquitous. There is the natural fear of the unknown, shared by the vulnerable and those made to feel vulnerable. How are the vanquished so easily demonized into a formidable foe by the rhetoric of demagogues and the media that serves them? Why do alarmist claims of invasion and infestation persist despite the evidence, and despite the abusive history of such language? The “other” is imagined as larger than life—and worse, fueling the dangerous perception that “the thing that is lower than I, makes me bigger.”
Such assumptions and attitudes insist that is not enough to be strong; those perceived as weak and powerless must be punished with deportation, incarceration, and separation from those they love. They must be dehumanized and denied rights to asylum and autonomy. They must remain invisible. The works in Getting There question these manufactured imperatives and expose the consequences of our resentment or fear of “the stranger.”
The USA is a nation of immigrants and used to lead in resettling refugees. Today, with far fewer resources, Turkey and Pakistan now host the most refugees. Our current administration is slashing admissions to its lowest point in 40 years. Immigration policies have hardened, vilifying and incarcerating people who legally seek asylum. Outrage and soul-searching followed the separation of children from parents at the border, but the fury has failed to stop their indefinite detention in unprecedented numbers, against international law.
Being a refugee is not a choice. Those of us who are settled may never know the anxiety, risk or terror of those uprooted, the profound loss of what is left behind, and the daunting uncertainties ahead. Through these works, we explore encounters, intersections and perceptions between radically different worlds—between security and insecurity.
We are moved by images. We are moved by words. We are grateful to novelists, poets, anthropologists and journalists who have informed our projects and whose words we have included or cited. Among them are Jenny Erpenbeck, Lev Golinkin, Eliza Griswold, Mohsin Hamid, David Hernandez, Ali Johar, Maria Melendez Kelson, Jason De León, Blas Manuel De Luna, Suketu Mehta, Dunya Mikhail, Yasser Niksada, Prageeta Sharma, Warsan Shire, Wisława Szymborska, and Vu Tran.
Getting There suggests movement—but more than the literal movement of migrants and refugees. We hope Getting There advances an evolving ethos, a humane reception, an empathic embrace—and movement of our own consciences.
VISUALIZING NARRATIVES: SHAPING RESISTANCE
Stamp Gallery, University of Maryland, College Park
Curated by Alison Singer
February 13 to March 30, 2019
Protests and opposition movements have long been a social tool by which to mobilize groups of people around shared grievances, allowing them to collectively interrogate power structures and enact change through the discursive processes of resistance. Various forms of protest have been an important point at which resistance enters the public space and gains broader visibility, often through media images that become symbols of the movement. The images produced around protests and resistance movements – by artists, the media, or everyday documentarians – thus play a large role in shaping narratives for public consumption.
This exhibition at the Stamp Gallery seeks to explore the role of visual production around protests and forms of resistance. Featuring work by artists Becci Davis, Malik Lloyd, Leah Modigliani, Susanne Slavick, and the TUG Collection, this considers such questions as: How does the mass media visually shape narratives? How does artwork respond to, reshape, interrogate, or blur these narratives? How does the visual response to protests and resistance movements by artists memorialize or historicize the events?
SCREEN | ANDREW ELLIS JOHNSON + SUSANNE SLAVICK | RESORT + QUENCH
Center for Maine Contemporary Art
March 16 - June 16, 2019
RESORT and QUENCH are two recent collaborative video works by artists Andrew Ellis Johnson and Susanne Slavick that frame the global refugee and migration crisis through the lens of the sea.
PROFESSOR SLAVICK WINS CAA DISTINGUISHED TEACHING AWARD →
Professor Susanne Slavick will be presented the 2019 Distinguished Teaching of Art Award from the College Art Association (CAA)—the preeminent organization for professionals in the visual arts—at their annual conference in New York City in February. This prestigious award, given annually since 1972, honors an exemplary educator for which teaching and making art are inseparable.
An accomplished artist and curator, Slavick believes that “art is an intimate and generous way to share what matters to us. At its best, it moves us to respond—to act.” She sees working with her students as a mutually empowering experience toward both personal and social transformation.
“Art is constantly testing the reality principle—and challenging the status quo,” she says. “Artists can expose things we don’t want to face or imagine alternative worlds. Art is an essential political force, even if it may not immediately change the world. There is nothing more rewarding than helping students recognize how they can shape the cultural consciousness—and their futures.”
Slavick received an MFA from the Tyler School of Art at Temple University and a BA from Yale University. She began her tenure with CMU’s School of Art in 1984 after a three-year stint at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She served as Head of School from 2000-06 and has held the title of Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Art since 2001.
“There has been no single person or professor who has had a greater impact on my career than Susanne Slavick,” says Lauren F. Adams, a 2007 graduate of the School of Art’s MFA program and current painting professor at the Maryland Institute College of Art. “Her commitment to teaching and rigorous approach to the multiple pathways that students may travel has proved a durable influence upon me and many others. This has inspired me to model my own teaching techniques after her.”
Even after more than three decades teaching, Slavick remains excited by each new group of students. Though she has taught in many courses across the program, introductory painting is her favorite class to teach. “At this level, there’s a magic elixir of curiosity, spirit, energy, and work ethic,” she says. “It is exhilarating to see the growth in students’ work and their excitement about the possibilities of painting.”
Slavick says that teaching at CMU’s School of Art, which has long distinguished itself through its interdisciplinary approach, has been especially rewarding. “Teaching has led me to areas of knowledge and processes that I might not have ever considered. Teaching has broadened by own perspective.”
“Susanne’s generosity and deep commitment to our students is evident far past their classroom experience,” says Head of School Charlie White. “Even after students graduate, Susanne tirelessly advocates for our community, consistently boosting alumni successes and using her broad reach to connect them to opportunity. She manages to do all this while maintaining a vibrant studio and curatorial practice. Her work as both artist and teacher is always attuned to the political moment, responding with compassion, grace, and insight.”
Slavick has exhibited her own work nationally and internationally, with recent solo shows at the Chicago Cultural Center, McDonough Museum in Youngstown, and the Bernstein Gallery at Princeton University. Her recent curatorial projects include: Marx@200 (2018); Unloaded (2015), a traveling multimedia exhibition exploring the impact of guns in our culture; and Out of Rubble (2011), a book and traveling exhibition featuring international artists who respond to the aftermath of war.
The School of Art will honor Slavick at an alumni gathering on February 15 from 7:00 to 9:00 p.m. at PPOW Gallery in New York City. School of Art alumni and friends of Susanne can RSVP for the party here.
Photograph by Jacquelyn Johnson
DISPLAY OF ARMS
Shared my curatorial experience with UNLOADED in "DISPLAY OF ARMS: A Roundtable Discussion about the Public Exhibition of Firearms and Their History" in Technology and Culture, published by Johns Hopkins University Press and edited by Jennifer Tucker. In conversation with Glenn Adamson, Jonathan S. Ferguson, Josh Garrett-Davis, Erik Goldstein, Ashley Hlebinsky, and David D. Miller.
RESORT : ANDREW ELLIS JOHNSON AND SUSANNE SLAVICK
The McDonough Museum of Art at Youngstown State University
September 7 – October 26, 2018
Public Reception, Friday, September 7, 5-7pm
Gallery Talk, Friday, September 7, 5 pm
New Immigrant and Refugee Visions screening, 6-7pm
The John J. McDonough Museum of Art, on the campus of Youngstown State University opens the fall season with RESORT, a traveling exhibition of works by Andrew Ellis Johnson and Susanne Slavick. It accompanies Sanctuary, an exhibition of paintings by John Guy Petruzzi. Both shows will be on view in the galleries September 7 – October 26 with an opening reception on Friday, September 7 from 5-7pm. Susanne Slavick and Andrew Ellis Johnson will give a gallery talk on the evening of the reception beginning at 5pm.
In addressing RESORT Slavick and Johnson comment: “Driven or displaced, cut loose or set adrift, or simply seeking safety—all are precarious states of passage. The decision to leave home may be voluntary or involuntary, arising from desperation or anticipation. RESORT, as a title, reflects that duality. To flee is a last resort. The destination is often another shore, literally or figuratively. The shore can also be a place for a benign kind of escape—an actual vacation resort. Some European vacationers have actually watched refugees wash ashore, from vessels both intact and capsized. We have similar scenarios on land at our own borders, worsened by recent separations of children from their families. RESORT explores the intersection of these two worlds—of security and insecurity— and our responses to those caught between them.”
In conjunction with RESORT, there will be several screenings from New Immigrant and Refugee Visions, produced by Community Supported Film. A preview screening will take place on Friday, September 7, 6-7pm. Additional screenings will take place from 12:30 to 1:30pm on September 11,14, 25, 28 and October 9, 12, 23 and 26. New Immigrant and Refugee Visions is a collection of documentary films made by new immigrants that provide unique insider perspectives on both the challenges of integration and the contributions immigrants make to our culture, economy and social fabric.
McDonough galleries are open Tuesday through Saturday from 11am until 4pm.
Office hours are Monday through Friday from 8am to 5pm.
The Museum is open to the public and admission is free.
ARTISTS WHO TEACH
Westmoreland Museum of Art, Greensburg PA
August 25 - November 25, 2018
Susanne Slavick will join other artists for gallery talks on Wednesday, September 12 > 5:30-7pm | RSVP
The Cantilever Gallery at The Westmoreland is brimming with contemporary artworks created in a broad range of mediums—painting, sculpture, photography, video, stained glass, installation and mixed media.
While the works themselves explore diverse themes using various techniques and materials, each of the artists in this exhibition share one thing in common—they all teach at one of the numerous colleges and universities in our region.
Artists Who Teach celebrates the incredible talent and broad range of art making in this region today. The 58 artists in this exhibition are all inspiring the next generation of artists by teaching at Carlow University, Carnegie Mellon University, Chatham University, Indiana University of Pennsylvania, Robert Morris University, Seton Hill University, Saint Vincent College, University of Pittsburgh/University of Pittsburgh-Greensburg and Westmoreland County Community College.
Recuperation:Diurnal, 2007, oil and acrylic on three panels, 80 x 109 inches
The convalescing Cedar of Lebanon in Recuperation simultaneously embodies bleak realism and hopeful romanticism. It is a metaphor for the damage we do to ourselves and how we try to recover. In the daytime version of the painting, pale atmosphere alternates with raw flesh color, suggesting both cruelty and compassion. In the nighttime version, the tree’s amputated limbs are silhouetted against a deep blue vapor.
In 2006, I visited Isola Bella on Lago Maggiore in Italy. That summer, the gardens were in disarray. A freak tornado had torn it apart and uprooted an ancient Cedar of Lebanon. Maintenance workers and gardeners had propped up this huge specimen with pulleys, slings, and guy ropes. Bandages wrapped fractured and stumpy limbs and sprinkler systems were suspended high amongst its branches in hopes for resuscitation. At the time these paintings were made, it was not known if the cedar would survive.
I photographed this poignant spectacle partly because it coincided with my prior research into landscapes of ruin, especially those devastated by war. That summer, the world watched as the 2006 Lebanon War decimated the country, all while the larger war in Iraq raged. The Lebanese town of Qana was attacked for the second time in a decade and suffered extraordinary numbers of civilian deaths, lives that could never be resuscitated.
Marx@200 in The Brooklyn Rail
A review by Matthew Friday of Marx@200 in The Brooklyn Rail, June 5, 2018.
Curated y Kathy M. Newman and Susanne Slavick
TAMING A RUDE BEAST : MARX@200 IN RED WEDGE
A review of Marx@200, curated by Kathy M. Newman and Susanne Slavick, by Frances Madeson
Taming a Rude Beast: Marx@200, Red Wedge, May 28, 2018
SITE
SITE, a group show curated by Dragana Crnjak
Andy Curlow, Andrea Jok, Matthew Kolodzie, Eric LoPresti and Susanne Slavick
Judith Rae Solomon Gallery at Youngstown State Universit in Ohio.
March 26 through April 20, 2018.
FEMINIST BORDER ARTS FILM FESTIVAL
RESORT, a video co-created with Andrew Ellis Johnson, is included in:
New Mexico State University Art Gallery
March 12, 2018 from 10am-6pm
A second screening event occurs on April 16, 2018 from 6pm-8:30pm at the CMI Theater Milton Hall 171 on the campus of NMSU. Sponsored by the Gender & Sexuality Studies, Interdisciplinary Studies Department, and the Creative Media Institute.
THE OTHER BORDER WALL
Flatland Gallery, Houston TX
February 12 - March 30, 2018
Organized by JM Design Studio
https://www.otherborderwallproject.com/
Image: Susanne Slavick, Asclepius Viridis Wall shows a "wall" of milkweed plants native to the south central and south eastern United States.
These plants attract monarch butterflies, a migratory species that travels over 2500 miles each year. These species allude to freedom of movement-- a more welcoming reception to those seeking refuge, safety, reunification with families, a living wage and a better life.
No Vacation: 'Resort' is a voyage of ‘empathic unsettlement’
RESORT, a two person show by Andrew Ellis Johnson and Susanne Slavick at The Fed Galleries at Kendall College of Art and Design in Grand Rapids, Michigan, previewed in this REVUE article by Marla Miller.
UNLOADED at Harris Gallery, University of La Verne
UNLOADED, a traveling group show that explores historical and social issues surrounding the availability, use, and impact of guns in our culture. Curated by Susanne Slavick
September 5 - October 26, 2017
Curator's Lecture: September 14, 2017
Reception: Thursday, September 14, 7PM, Harris Gallery
