Laurence Salzmann
Selections from La Lucha and Imagining Cutumba

Pew Award winner, Philadelphia photographer Salzmann's direct black-and-white documentary photographs of teenage wrestlers in La Lucha are in stark contrast to the mysterious multiple exposure and layered color and black-and-white images of Ballet Folklorico Cutumba dancers from Santiago de Cuba.

Catalogue with essay by Kristina Wirtz available.

Rick Hildenbrandt
Regional Artist Exhibition
Decoding the Icon

Allentown artist Rick Hildenbrandt describes his work as “often fragmented, reflecting a fast-paced digitized world, where data is collected, then later put together to coherent, though sometimes ironic, wholes.”

James Drake
A Thousand Tongues Burn and Sing, 1997-1998
Tongue-Cut Sparrows, 1996-1997
Conversation-Inside-Outside, 1998-1999
Video, still Photography Installation

In the streets outside the El Paso, Texas, County Detention Facility—a minimum security prison now occupied mostly by Hispanic inmates in violation of immigration laws—artist James Drake met a group of women communicating with their partners “on the inside” using a self-created sign language. Gradually he introduced them to passages from Shakespeare, Borges, Lorca, Antonio Machado, Cormac MacCarthy, and William Blake; the women translated the literature, and words became flying arms and swaying bodies, clenched fists and curled fingers. Drake documented this extraordinary communication process with video, still photography, and tableaus of words.

Drake has been observing the meeting of two cultures in the border town of El Paso, separated from Mexico by the Rio Grande River for over thirty years. As Mary-Kay Lombino, author of the exhibition brochure writes, Drakes “underlying theme is an exploration of real-life problems he has observed over the years. The works in this exhibition all address love and loss and the need to communicate. Here Drake brings to light a poignant side of El Paso culture and reveals the resourcefulness and perseverance of the human spirit and will.”

Ursula von Ryingsvard
Richard A. and Rissa W. Grossman Artist-in-Residence
Intensity of Purpose

Ryingsvard monumental and large-scale cedar sculptures made using circular saws and chisels, are abstract in shape, but refer to the human figure, landscapes, and domestic objects. Large sculpture at the Grossman Gallery, small models in the Williams Center Gallery.

Illustrated catalogue with essays by Robert S. Mattison and Alistair Noble available.

A joint exhibition with Lafayette's Grossman Gallery, Williams Visual Arts Building

William Busta
Guest Curator
Faith in my Possibilities

Four generations of teacher/mentor & students. Sponsored by Lafayette's Experimental Printmaking Institute & Williams Center Gallery

May 8, 7:00 pm, tentative, discussion on the mentoring process
May 9, 6–7:00 p.m., reception for exhibition, before Jazz Band concert