How might the law read a wall drawing? Would it accept the “evidence” presented in an artwork? What does dispossession look like in different geopolitical and cultural contexts? What can art fix? What do we build with this wreckage?
Join artist and researcher Sa’dia Rehman for an interdisciplinary conversation about art and architecture, ecocatastrophe, and the law, with Azra Dawood, the Loeb's Andrew W. Mellon Curator of Academic Programs, and Arpitha Kodiveri, Vassar Assistant Professor of Political Science and author of Governing Forests.
This public program is presented in conjunction with the Loeb exhibition Water/Bodies: Sa’dia Rehman. Anchoring the galleries, Sa’dia has created a large site-responsive wall drawing that breaks with the idealized pastoral representations and technological and racial erasures of Vassar's founding collection of Hudson River School art. Paying attention to water’s material nature, and to its varying relationships with land (flooding, draining out of, contained within), Rehman’s work critically engages with the latent themes of empire, religion, and Manifest Destiny that undergird the Hudson Valley, as well as global histories of dam displacement and shifting waterways. The wall drawing is in conversation with other multimedia works by the artist.
A reception with light refreshments will follow the program. As part of our Late Night at the Loeb series, the galleries will remain open until 9 p.m.
Cosponsored by the Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center and the Environmental Studies Program at Vassar.
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