Closing Reception for The Artist as Witness

Please join us at the Closing Reception Thursday, November 3rd, 6 pm to hear Jeffrey Greene's presentation and talk on the Prison Arts Program for Community Partners in Action (CPA), a non-profit agency founded in 1875.  We will have light refreshments catered by GRDN Kitchen. The event is free and open to the public.

 

The Artist as Witness inspired by The Best We Could Do, by Thi Bui is currently on display at the Adolf and Virginia Dehn galleria at Manchester Community College, until November 9th this year.

On display are the art projects created by students from the institutions that partnered with Eastern Connecticut State University 2021's Big Read award:   University of Connecticut, Central and Eastern Connecticut State Universities, EO Smith High School, and Manchester Community College.

Maura O’Connor, MCC Professor of Graphic Design assigned The Best We Could Do to her class in Fall '21 and her students produced a selection of astounding graphic novels in response to their own stories of immigration. These novels are on display at the gallery.

The Artist as Witness was previously on display at the Dodd Center for Human Rights at University of Connecticut, Storrs. ( March 3 - April 4, 2022) The exhibition was originally curated for the Eastern Art Gallery, in Fall 2021 and included 100 works from the Prison Arts Initiative. Eastern Art Gallery and the Department of Criminology and Social Work have been working with Jeff Greene and his Prison Arts Initiative for the last four years.

Thi Bui’s 336 pages of sequential art follow the history of 24 family members over five decades chronicling a turbulent sail across the Pacific Ocean, and their subsequent quest to make a new home in America itself a powerful account of witnessing – provided an abundance of ideas for visual responses that are on display at the gallery.

This current re-iteration of the Artist as Witness at MCC in 2022, a year after its launch on October 18, 2021, proves that Thi Bui’s book produced a remarkable ripple effect in our community. The Best We Could Do will continue to inspire our audience and so our students. – Julia Wintner, Coordinator of Gallery and Museum Serivces, Eastern Connecticut State University.

 

 

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