Fenwick Gallery
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George Mason University Libraries provides a hybrid, walk-through exhibition space in Fenwick Library to enhance and enrich teaching, learning and culture at the University. This space highlights Mason Libraries’ resources together with original visual and multi-media work.
Exhibit themes emphasize facets of the Libraries’ collections, research interests of Mason faculty, students and staff, Mason’s curriculum and local cultural initiatives. Fenwick Gallery is dedicated to exhibiting high quality works by students, faculty, staff and other emerging and experienced artists that highlight aspects of the Libraries’ collections.
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Recent Submissions
Item Erika Hopkins: TEAR/TORN(Fenwick Gallery, George Mason University Libraries, 2018-12) Grimm, Stephanie; Lillis, Jennifer; Hopkins, ErikaCatalog for the exhibition "TEAR:TORN," presented at Fenwick Gallery from December 11, 2017 - February 2, 2018. TEAR:TORN is a collection of mixed media pieces by third year MFA Painting candidate Erica Hopkins. Employing collage, video, and photography, the series exhibits the journey of self-discovery, defining “ecstasy” through the act of tearing in relationship to being torn. By collaging fragments of papers and photographs of everyday life, the series becomes an action of reconstructing chaos in the confinement of square panels. Buried in the layers of tearing, madness is brought to order, forming a portrait of the artist.Item Process Logs(Fenwick Gallery, George Mason University Library, 2017-08) Grimm, Stephanie; Kardambikis, Christopher; Moon, Becca; Lyons, Beauvais; Chagoya, Erinque; Wiley, William; Stout, Renee; Schmidt, Louis“Process Logs” highlights five Navigation Press artists and their completed prints, as well as the often-invisible practices behind the finished work. The exhibition also introduces the many behind-the-scenes printmaking collaborators who made these works possible.Item Flying Words(Fenwick Gallery, George Mason University Libraries, 2017-02) Navab, Nasrin; Navab, Nahid; Moon, BeccaSisters Nahid and Nasrin Navab are two DC-based Iranian-American artists. They express their love for literature, art, freedom of expression and social justice through the creation of Flying Words, a collection of drawings, handprints, installations, and artistic books exhibited in Fenwick Gallery from January 18 to February 24, 2017. Growing up in Iran during the 1960s and 1970s, the work of Nahid and Nasrin reflect their experience with international artists, authors, and poets. Flying Words is a tribute to literature that brings people together despite geographic borders, cultural barriers, age, gender, and racial differences. A number of these books have rested in their hearts, stimulated their imaginations and touched their personal lives in intimate social ways.Item Gilbert & Sullivan(Mason Publishing, George Mason University Libraries, 2017-05) Moon, Becca; Vay, RobertBritish dramatist W. S. Gilbert and composer Arthur Sullivan were perhaps the most popular and influential collaboration in the history of musical theatre. Their famous comic operas — including H.M.S. Pinafore, The Pirates of Penzance, and The Mikado — continue to fill theatres and delight audiences to this day. “Oh, Joy Unbounded…": A Celebration of Gilbert & Sullivan, featuring items from the David and Annabelle Stone Gilbert & Sullivan Collection, is a tribute to this lasting delight. The exhibition showcases memorabilia from all fourteen Gilbert & Sullivan operas, the individual compositions of each man, and personal items from their lives. In addition, the exhibition contains representative examples of other works performed by the D’Oyly Carte Opera Company, the chief custodians of the Gilbert & Sullivan tradition for over 100 years, until its closure in 1982. The exhibition is part of a larger celebration of the famous duo, which the University Libraries and the College of Visual and Performing Arts are coordinating at Mason throughout 2017.Item End Cycle(Fenwick Gallery, George Mason University Libraries, 2016-11) Kardambikis, Christopher; Moon, BeccaA collection of books as travelogue. Books as time capsules that reveal how images are built and rebuilt. Books that contain multiple spaces, all folded up and overlapping and spilling out. END CYCLE is a show of 23 books and 1 large format print. The work is arranged in vitrines circling the gallery so as to allow for new connections to be made between points in space and time – between the Terra Nullius of New Castle – a small town in western PA frozen in grey post-industrial collapse – and the 1,520 pages sewn together in Bed Stuy, Brooklyn – tied to the daily routine of cross-neighborhood foot commutes. Between Southern California streets scorched by the sun and endless comic-book panels burnt into a childhood brain over the course of long afternoon readings.Item Currents: Call & Response(Fenwick Gallery, George Mason University Libraries, 2016-10) Smith, Anne; Whipkey, Nikki Burgnoli; Mack, M; Martínez, Marcos; Moon, BeccaThe theme for Call & Response 2016 is CURRENTS, in conversation with the College of Visual and Performing Art’s 100th Meridian Project, an interdisciplinary multimedia arts and science project investigating drought and the American West. Call & Response: a collaboration between writers and visual artists, in which one calls and one responds. The result is a set of paired works, resonating with each other, demonstrating the interplay of artistic media, and speaking of our times. In 2009, Susan Tichy and Helen Frederick curated an annual exhibition in collaboration between the MFA program in creative writing and the School of Art. The now annual exhibition has been a themed Call and Response since 2010.Item Renewable by Jonathon Lee(Fenwick Gallery, George Mason University Libraries, 2016-09) Moon, Becca; Stevens, Jen; Coniglio, Jamie; Lee, JonathanA long standing mission of the library is to gather and preserve information, artifacts, and data in order to make them available for future use. The contemporary library, however, must be more than just a repository. Due to its unique place between the analog and digital world, it must be concerned with both the legacy of history and the pace of technology. It functions as both an information access point and a community center; a place for discovery, congregation, contemplation, interaction, opportunity, debate, escape, entertainment, and research. In order to accomplish this, many libraries have decreased their shelf space in favor of more open, usable space and new digital platforms. This has led many to discard books containing ephemera, marginalia, inscriptions, bookplates, and other unique pieces of historical data, many of which are associated with the history of the institution that collected them. Libraries are a renewable resource. Every day, they provide us with access to countless possibilities. Past information is made new through the lens of our own experience during our moment in history. In each floral arrangement the artist has made, there are words, numbers, and marks that aren’t fully revealed as well as things we all recognize. Flowers are flexible symbols, used to represent everything from love to loss, innocence to desire, life to death. The blooms of spring signal rebirth and renewal, as do the flowers in the work. On the slips, each unique date marks an idea being planted. Each flower is the result of the imagination in bloom. Though the artist is not directly invoking the language of flowers, he works towards encouraging the viewer to explore their symbolic associations outside any specific species.