Header Image “What About The Future” courtesy of Catherine Caddigan featured in Forms of Resistance
January 25 – February 19, 2022
Presented at Cambridge College’s Town Common Gallery & Online
500 Rutherford Avenue, Charlestown, MA; Gallery Hours: Wednesday through Saturday from 12:00-4:00pm
*The Cambridge College’s Town Common Gallery Adjusted Hours: February 7-12 from 12:00-6:00pm & February 14-18 from 5:30-7:30pm
Juried by Danielle Abrams
About | Forms of Resistance
Forms of Resistance is presented in partnership with Cambridge College, taking inspiration from the theme for their 2021-2022 Academic Year: Good Trouble.
Shortly before his death in 2020, civil rights activist and Representative John Lewis said “Never, ever be afraid to make some noise and get in good trouble, necessary trouble.” Using his words as a point of departure, Cambridge College and the Cambridge Art Association invite you to examine, respond to, and question: what does it mean to engage in forms of resistance or as Representative Lewis makes reference to, “good trouble”? What shape does this type of action or ways of being take in our everyday lives, as artists, activists, and social beings? As the U.S. saw an unprecedented level of engagement in social justice initiatives this past year, we encourage you to creatively process and reflect on the various forms of resistance—both public and personal—that continue to bring increased awareness and renewed meaning to the issues of our time.
About | Danielle Abrams
Danielle Abrams’ performances arise from the social tides that shape her mixed race and queer identities. She adopts personae that animate the dualistic relationships between racial and ethnic groups. Her work stages interactive encounters, and by using plays, puppetry, and monologues, she reimagines the narratives of art history, civil rights, segregation, and popular culture. By rearranging time periods and juxtaposing clans, Abrams’ performances build a radical social vision. Intimate dialogues, homespun lore, and sass are Abrams’ syntax, which liberate the scripts of the past.
Abrams has performed and exhibited at the ICA Boston; Detroit Institute of the Arts; Bronx Museum of the Arts; The Jewish Museum, NY; Queens Museum; Grand Central Art Center; and at the Live Arts Biennial at USC Roski School of Art and Design. She has received awards from Live Arts Boston/The Boston Foundation of the Arts, Boston Center for the Arts, The New York Foundation of the Arts, Urban Arts Initiative, the Franklin Furnace Performance Art Fund, and was the recipient of the Distinguished Artist Award from the St. Botolph Club Foundation in Boston, MA.
About | Cambridge College
For more than 45 years Cambridge College has been a leader and pioneer in adult learning. With a main campus in Boston, Massachusetts, and four regional locations nationwide, we provide academically excellent, time-efficient, and affordable higher education to a diverse population of adult learners. A private, nonprofit institution, Cambridge College is accredited by the New England Commission of Higher Education (NECHE, formerly known as NEASC); our various degree and certificate programs enable students to earn the credentials they need to advance in their careers.
Our more than 30,000 alumni are the best evidence of the quality and value of a Cambridge College education. Each day, all around the world, they are changing the schools in which they teach and lead, the healthcare and social service agencies in which they work, and the communities in which they live and serve. The impact they have on the world begins with the open doors and accessible opportunities at Cambridge College.
Danielle Abrams: Juror Statement:
There must be a revolution in the way we see, the way we look.
Representation is a crucial location of struggle for any exploited and oppressed people asserting subjectivity and decolonization of the mind.
-bell hooks, Art on My Mind: Visual Politics (1995)
The exhibition Forms of Resistance enlarges John Lewis’ provocation that citizens deploy “good trouble,” an imperative of democracy. Lewis’ call to resistance echoes the myriad calls for liberation by writer, bell hooks. It is easy to imagine Lewis and hooks joining an era, and marching over the Edmund Pettus Bridge from Selma to Montgomery on “Bloody Sunday” in 1965. I can see hooks, arm-in-arm with John Lewis, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Rev. Hosea Williams, and 600 additional marshals of civil rights.
On July 17, 2020, we bid farewell to US Representative John Lewis. His life commands abundant respect and a collective recommitment to social justice.
On December 15, 2021, bell hooks, transitioned – almost five months from the date we lost John Lewis. bell hooks’ legacy is language, which will be interpreted in perpetuity as we re-vision our power, our points of view, and our expressive potential. Her recent passing summons re-opening her earmarked books and reiterating the candor of her complex analysis to the next generation of readers, writers, artists, and warriors.
bell hooks and John Lewis materialized thoughts and motivated bodies. They shifted the brutal course of bias and brutality in the 20th and 21st centuries. Their wisdom, resilience, and love are our inherited ancestry.
The artists in this exhibition have witnessed and responded passionately to social injustices, which have re-cycled globally since Lewis (arm-in-arm with hooks) traversed the Jim Crow South. Forms of Resistance presents radical imagery, which gives bite to hooks’ assertion that representation and visuality are sites for the people’s “struggle.”
Made with the urgency of a Polaroid photo, the demand for persistence from wire, and the balance of intuition with contemplation that is necessary to transfigure paint, ink, and found matter into form, these cultural producers have navigated the adversity of fascism, xenophobia, inhumane immigration policies, climate crisis, and a global pandemic with deep analysis and empathy. These are artists have doggedly used their mediums to eschew compliance. The artists’ studios are locations where the external and interior chaos, characterizing the last two years, been been mounted with ferocity. They have re-inscribed social media’s oft-reproduced and heartless images with robust aesthetics that are urgent, intimate, communal, dilapidated, absurd, speculative, generative, and proud.
I am honored to have had the opportunity to view the work of all the applicants who submitted art to Forms of Resistance. These artists have transformed the ubiquitous frustration, isolation, loss, and impotence felt in 2021 into representations that have a pulse. They are creating multivocal works expressed in potent tones that amplify John Lewis’ and bell hooks’ summons for “noise” and “necessary trouble” as a means of REVOLUTION.
Accepted Artworks:
| Last Name | First Name | Title | Media | Dimensions | Price |
| Asbridge | Bayda | Hanging by the Thread | slice of wood, acrylic media, thread, needle, beads, red paper | 17 inches in circumference | $350 |
| Barnes | E.J | Coronavirus Firing Squad | India ink, ink wash, and gouache | 12.25 inches x 13.25 inches | $175 |
| Bradway | Chelsea | Soul’s Reflection | photograph | 16 inches x 20 inches | $375 |
| Brown | Lizi | Protest | oil on paper | 20 inches x 16 inches | $600 |
| Caddigan | Catherine | What About the Future | digital collage | 10 inches x 10 inches | $250 |
| Camargo | Annielly | New Glory (Counter Back the Blue Protest in Quincy, MA) | original expired Polaroid 600 | 4 inches x 3.5 inches | $3,000 |
| Camargo | Annielly | Pardon Our Appearance (March for George Floyd in Boston, MA) | digital photograph | 24 inches x 36 inches | $250 |
| Camargo | Annielly | Land Back (Indigenous Peoples Day March Boston, MA 2020) | digital image on cross stitch fabric | 35 inches x 29.5 inches | $300 |
| Funk | Sue | We are Abandoned | mixed media | 16 inches x 20 inches | $1,800 |
| Lopez | Andres | Homage to the Missing Migrant | HDPE (plastic), wire | 15 inches x 8 inches | $350 |
| Lord | Madeleine | Voter Suppression | welded found steel | 30 inches x 22 inches x 14 inches | $2,200 |
| Prat | Adriana | Your Brain on Climate Crisis News | acrylic, acrylic and ink pen, and Uni POSCA pen on canvas | 40 inches x 32 inches | $3,500 |
| Singhal | Neetu | The Source & Surroundings | mixed media on canvas | 36 inches x 36 inches | $8,500 |
| Sun | May | Wired Resistance | mixed media and collage on paper | 11 inches x 14 inches | $325 |
| Zaks-Zilberman | Meirav | I See You Can You See Me? | oil on linen | 40 inches x 30 inches | $8,400 |
End of exhibit pick-up: Friday, February 25 (12:00 – 4:00PM) + Saturday, February 26, (10:00AM – 2:00PM) at the Kathryn Schultz Gallery, 25R Lowell Street, Cambridge MA 02138
Have questions? Please email Associate Director, Candice Bancheri at candice@cambridgeart.org, or call us at 617.876.0246
Cambridge Art Association does not issue refunds.
All decisions/selections are made by the juror. All decisions are final.