Renowned printmaker and public artist Tomie Arai will arrive on campus on Monday to kick off a week of print media collaborations.
Arai, who lives in New York City, primarily focuses on issues of cultural identity in her work, but also explores the relationship between art and history and the role that memory plays in the retelling of a collective past.
"Public art, murals, installations and printed books are projects she has designed to include, rather than exclude, different voices with different points of view," said Assistant Professor of Art Carrie Scanga. "In developing new work, she tries to use the specificity of her experience as an Asian-American as a personal space in which to locate broader issues of race and gender; a space through which a glimpse of common ground is made possible."
Scanga invited Arai to campus as part of this year's Marvin Bileck Printmaking Project at Bowdoin College, sponsored by the Marvin Bileck and Emily Nelligan Trust. Now in its second year, the project annually invites well-known visiting artists and Portland-based printmaker David Wolfe to campus to collaborate on a print edition with students. This year, the two artists will work with students to produce a series of solar plates.
Arai's prints are currently featured in the collections of the Library of Congress, the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Japanese American National Museum, the Los Angeles County Art Museum, and the Williams College Museum of Art.
Arai will give a lecture on her work Tuesday at 4:30 p.m. in the Beam Classroom of the Visual Arts Center.
-Compiled by Evan Gershkovich.