Fall 2018

October 1, 2018 to October 6, 2018

Rocks, Minerals, and the History of Art

This one‐week installation features the new cross-disciplinary Art History and Geosciences course debuting in Spring 2019. Rocks, Minerals, and the History of Art (Art H/ Geosc 107) will explore ochre, lapis lazuli, garnet, rock crystal, porphyry, diorite, basalt, alabaster, and marble, from both geoscience and art historical perspectives. Visitors can examine and handle materials like porphyry and rock crystal, crush lapis lazuli, mix ochre paint, and even sculpt in alabaster. 
October 8, 2018 to October 19, 2018

50 State Initative

Brooklyn-based artist Hank Willis Thomas, in collaboration with Professor of Art Lonnie Graham, will create a local iteration of his 50 State Initiative. The 50 State Initiative is part of Thomas’s For Freedoms Campaign to activate awareness around issues that will affect the population of the United States as the current political climate advances its agenda. The project is designed to catalyze an informed dialogue between members of the community to cultivate common ground and a healthy exchange of ideas.
October 22, 2018 to November 2, 2018

Sing Out: A Scholarship Competition for Voice Performance Across Theatrical Genres

Sing Out! is a performance-based competition created by the combined voice areas of the School of Music and School of Theatre. This new venture asks Penn State students to imagine a program of three contrasting selections: one from opera, one from musical theatre, and one of the singer’s choice. Finalists will be given the opportunity to workshop their programs with faculty members through voice lessons, musical coaching, and staging rehearsals. Sing Out! brings these rehearsals into the Borland Project Space, allowing members of the Penn State community a rare inside view into the process of theatrical and musical preparation leading up to a performance. 
November 6, 2018 to December 7, 2018

Collective Conjure: The Shape of Memory

Collective Conjure is an experimental group bringing together five artists from the Penn State community whose artistic work explores the sacred, the profane, ritual, and spirituality in the African Diaspora. The participants use their work art to examine ways black women across the Black Atlantic engage in the act of conjuring as both a social and sacred practice. The Shape of Memory considers how artists examine the shared social memory and cultivate new modes of representing diasporic cultural practices. 

Comprising a series of installations, video art, and interactive performance art, Serap Erincin’s residency, titled Human Rights/Human Rites, highlights legitimized human rights violations in the Western/Civilized/First world. Erincin contemplates ritual as metaphor through a constellation of affective and sensorial pieces, such as LifeWest and WishBoat, which contextualize the refugee crisis in the Mediterranean, and The Time of Your Life, about the death penalty. Additionally, Erincin will host participatory events, including a workshop and a panel, that invite the community to create multimedia art and converse on issues at the intersection of social justice and aesthetics.