Curatorial Statement
The Contemporary Collection at GCC is a group of artworks permanently on display in the administration building, in addition to three outdoor murals, at Glendale Community College. Developed over a five-year period from 2017 to 2022, The Collection delivers first-hand exposure to an array of artworks to our campus of over 15,000 students, faculty, and staff. This effort enhances GCC’s portfolio of cultural experiences for our community, complementing our ongoing art gallery, theater, music, and observatory programs.
The Collection also aims to connect the visual arts to the academic college experience, linking visual art to the intellectual and social concerns of our diverse and dynamic student body.
Four principles underlie The Collection’s structure:
To feature professional Los Angeles-based contemporary artists, who have active exhibition records at notable, regional cultural institutions;
To collect artists that mirror the diversity of GCC’s student body in race, gender, sexual orientation, cultural experience, and age;
To emphasize artists whose work connects to disciplines in the humanities and sciences, or bridges the arts to global citizenship and social justice;
To collect artworks with a tactile or process-based sensibility, from artists who use materials in innovative ways.
To assure the quality of selections, several strategies were used to build the inventory. Three of the artists won public art competitions produced by The Art Gallery @ GCC; others had artwork featured in exhibitions on campus. Several were collected with consultations from Los Angeles-based museum and art professionals, and still others were acquired from local galleries with a track record of representing a diversity of artists and highlighting artworks with an intellectual or conceptual foundation.
Regarding ideas, The Collection has several conceptual strands. One group of artists explores the formation of social identity in diverse society, and some consider the effects of colonialism, genocide, and living in diaspora. Davidian explores what it means to be living away from your homeland; Williams wonders about the residual effects of colonialism on Philippinx identity in the US; De Boer returned to Indonesia thinking about his own hybrid personal history. Kacherian’s canvas was completed to commemorate the 2017 Armenian Genocide Memorial.
Another group is connected to understanding the built and natural environment. Doucin-Dahlke uses the campus to inspire a digital artwork that reflects on GCC as a physical place. Schoenstadt creates composite fantasy architecture that imagines a utopian future. And, Ramirez requires we contemplate the hidden, decimated natural and cultural history of Los Angeles.
Other artists underscore climate change, respect for nature, and sustainability. Halloran’s cyanotypes are minimal meditations on the beauty of the atomic and the cosmic, while also acknowledging the significant history of women in science. Musso’s hand-rubbed woodcut wonders about the fate of delicate ecosystems in the face of climate disaster.
Still, another group follows the role of women in science and history, typified by Morrison’s imposing artwork that reveals distortions of gender and race already present at the inception of US.
Another thread in the collection concerns psychological and physical processes. Piller considers memory and time by exploding a polaroid camera into a decomposed wall sculpture. Davidian, via conceptual photography, and Kacherian, via surrealist painting, examine remembering and being unable to quite remember. Williams and Argote use materials that play with composition and decomposition, with Williams making monsters from founds scraps and Argote building luminescent surfaces from decaying citrus and insect dye. Hana Kara is a collaborative effort; Clark, Lazarri, Turner, St. Ama compose wall installations via small pieces made individually by each collaborator. In each case, the final artwork is significantly larger than the sum of its fragments, ingredients, or parts.
Finally, a primary goal of The Contemporary Collection is to feature artworks that must be experienced in person because of their high level of material presence. The intention was to counteract isolationist tendencies the arts, as social media accelerates the idea that a picture of an artwork is as good as the artwork itself. This was exacerbated by extended campus closures due to the COVID pandemic, which prevented us from being together with a work of art.
The Collection is nonetheless an invitation to be physically present with art. Several artworks play with scale. For example, Schoenstadt’s huge seascape image on the side of an elevator tower, Musso’s technically impossible hybrid print of a grand oak tree, or Grande’s larger-than-life canvas that overlays the aesthetics of the digital and the abstract. Some artworks shimmer in person, like Argote’s luminescent, floating panel or Halloran’s glowing blue figures, both on soft fiber paper. Morisson’s enormous faux stone bas relief, de Boer’s muted dyed batik, William’s yarn-threaded and fringed monster mask, or Piller’s photograph breaking out of its own plastic film case - all require the viewer to stand in front off, next to, or underneath the artwork for full effect. The collateral benefit is GCC can approach the usefulness of having a teaching museum, where students can see up close how materials, ideas, and installations interact.
In the end, the Contemporary Collection @ GCC is an open invitation to come to campus, to interact with our students and community, and to see in person how visual art is in conversation with our social and inner lives. We hope you come to visit.
DAVID JOHN ATTYAH
Collection Manager, The Contemporary Collection at GCC
Director, The Art Gallery @ GCC
Director, Art and Visual Literacy Program
2017-2021