2022 Gallery Director's Message

A MESSAGE FROM THE GALLERY DIRECTOR

BE/LONGING, the 2022 Thesis and Senior Exhibition will be fully back in person. This marks a return after the past two years to exhibition normalcy, but the path of these students has been far from typical. Many of them took their first college art classes remotely, and some spent years away from campus, piecing together a college experience in the midst of a multi-year global pandemic. This cohort had to find ways to navigate their academic tracks, communities at a remove, and a life interrupted again and again by restrictions and necessary isolation.

Each of their journeys was different, as distinct and particular as the artwork on display this year. But themes still emerge, representing perhaps what has become most important to this group: born and found family, identity and a sense of self, a striving for solace in the midst of uncertainty, our place in and impact on the environment, isolation in togetherness (and togetherness in isolation). Some of the work speaks to a longing for connection. Some is concerned simply with what it means to be, as a person and a maker in this very specific space, in this very specific time. 

BE/LONGING is all this made manifest, generously shared with the Wellesley College community and beyond, and in many ways I think this year’s show is ultimately a celebration of belonging. Whatever paths people took to get here, everyone now exhibiting work was able to come together in classrooms and studios, to make and think and talk about art with professors, visiting artists, and, most crucially, with each other. This shared work is what makes a community, and it’s work that goes both ways. You do this work because you belong to the community, and you belong because you do this work.

The way was not easy, and may have been full of a thousand questions: am I doing the right thing? Is there any point to this? Will this mean anything to anyone else? Do I belong here? But the answer is in the work. Look around the galleries, catalog, and website and you will see these questions answered over and over again, in painting and photography, in printmaking and sculpture, in video and installation and new media. You do the work because you belong, and you belong because you do the work.

Congratulations to the Class of 2022.

–Samara Pearlstein

Gallery Director

May 2022

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