October 15, 2024-April 11, 2025
Northern Arizona University’s Clara M. Lovett Art Museum is pleased to announce a juried two-dimensional exhibition to be presented at the Clara M. Lovett Art Museum in the fall of 2024. The exhibition at the Clara M. Lovett Art Museum will present new works conceived within the conceptual categories of identity, community, and geography within the broader theme of a sense of place. The Museum invited submissions exploring the many layers of our connection to physical past, present, and future spaces, as well as how place impacts community collective identity and personal concepts of identity (or the lack thereof) in relation to the Colorado Plateau through painting, printmaking, and/or photography.
“To be at all—to exist in any way—is to be somewhere, and to be somewhere is to be in some kind of place. Place is as requisite as the air we breathe, the ground on which we stand, the bodies we have. We are surrounded by places. We walk over and through them. We live in places, relate to others in them, die in them. Nothing we do is unplaced. How could it be otherwise?” Edward S. Casey, The Fate of Place
Place is both material and immaterial, tangible and intangible, and marked by boundaries that can be real or imagined or layers of borders from the geographical to the cultural. Our relationship with the land we live on shapes our understanding of the world and creates a sense of community with those we share it with. Our collective living gives us a sense of place as a space filled with meaning. On the Colorado Plateau, the geography dictates much of how we live, from the snow in our mountains to the wildfires that ravage our landscape. Place is, however, is more than our physical connection to the earth but also the meaning we ascribe to it as part of our individual and community identities. Together, we turn our lived space into a particular place. Approaches to this theme should focus on one of the following within the geography of the Colorado Plateau (which includes parts of Arizona, Utah, Colorado, and New Mexico and converges at the four corners of these states) and will creatively explore our relationship to the geography and environment, individual experiences of place historically or in the present or imagining place in the future in the region, reflect on the cultural or physical borders and boundaries that have shaped collective and personal identities, or examine aspects of cultural, political, economic, environmental, or other forms of displacement.
Congratulations to the following artists selected to participate: Accordion Closed
Brandín Baron
Melanie E. Brewster
Natalie Christensen
Barbara F. Dickinson
Jessica Downs
Matt Drissell
Irwin Freeman
Matt Gauck
Pato J. Hebert
Tony James Holmquist
Megan Beth Johnson
Lynn Haygood Lee
Genise McGregor
Domini Mostofi
David Politzer
Alan Petersen
Carol Russell
Beth Shadur
Catherine Eaton Skinner
Cheryl A. Thomas
Doug Tolman
Jane Thorp
William Waters