Welcome Here!

The Harris Gallery is pleased to present Welcome Here!, a group exhibition featuring the work of Mark Batongmalaque, Anne H. Berry + Sarah Edmands Martin, Theron Brown, Chet Glaze, Dana Sperry, Mercedes Teixido, and Arnold Tunstall. Welcome Here! explores a critical geographic reimagination of Americana and the diversity it encompasses. These artists work across mediums investigating and presenting a remapping of their communities’ histories, ethnic, racial, gender, economic, and cultural stories to enrich engagement, perhaps even contestation, with the themes expressed in the exhibited artworks.

Mark Batongmalaque’s recent paintings investigate his experiences as a first-generation Filipino-American, his family’s striving to become middle-class, and the material culture that represents this status. Mercedes Teixido, is an improvisational storyteller creating textile, watercolor, drawing, and site-specific works. She is the Loren Barton Babcock Miller Fine Arts Professor at Pomona College.

The collaborative team of Cleveland State University professor Anne H. Berry, and Notre Dame University professor Sarah Edmands Martin’s Ongoing Matter calls average citizens to respond to what has become one of the most consequential political moments in modern history—a moment when the integrity of American elections and democracy itself is at risk—by reading Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s words. The artists and designers in this project consider their charge to be empowering, using the art of communication design to 1) spur audiences to act and 2) combat widespread misinformation and disinformation.

Dana Sperry is an interdisciplinary digital media artist whose recent work explores states of loneliness and isolation resulting from experiences that convey insignificance within a modern post-industrial society. He is a Professor of Digital Media at Youngstown State University, Youngstown, Ohio. Chet Glaze is a painter whose canvases illustrate the end of micro-industrial agriculture in the Inland Empire. Glaze is a professor at Mt. San Jacinto College.

Over his thirty-year career, photographer Arnold Tunstall has been documenting the idea of “America.” As a product of the mid-late twentieth century in a Northeast Ohio suburb, he is fascinated by layers within an urban environment and what is revealed or covered by each layer. He is the Director, of University Galleries at Myers School of Art, at The University of Akron. Theron Brown is a jazz musician who creates free-form musical dialogues telling stories of everyday life. Brown is an Assistant Professor of Practice, School of Music at The University of Akron and the artist coordinator for Curated Storefront’s Artist Residency Program at I Promise School. He has performed with the Cleveland Orchestra, Akron Symphony, Cleveland Jazz Orchestra, Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra, and the Glenn Miller Orchestra.

To facilitate a multigeneration conversation among the artists and their works featured in the exhibition, Welcome Here! includes paintings selected by the curator from professor Dion Johnson’s Spring 2022 University of La Verne class. Works created by Mariana Braña, Brianna De Santiago, Samantha Gonzalez, Laryssa Lahn, Fel Nikoli McCoy, and Marco Rodastorres explore themes of identity and geographic location in relation to their personal experiences.