Courtney Desiree Morris in Groundings: Care and Climate Justice
In Morris’ self portrait photographs, she addresses environmental racism, emulating “the deep existential and psychic grief that accompanies the loss of one’s home environment due to forces beyond one’s own control.” Morris captures the landscape of the abandoned town of Mossville, Louisiana, a community that was a refuge for Black people after the Civil War and was then destroyed by the petrochemical industry, brutally impacting the people living there, including Morris’ family. She poses her own vibrantly dressed body in these empty sites, colliding with the silent setting, occupying her family’s history of dispossession.
In her experimental film and performance titled ‘Oñí Ocan,’ Morris showcases themes of contemplation, grief, pleasure, and joy, through a wide range of communities, including sex workers, and bodies, many of whom are gender-non-conforming, queer, and trans. The film contributes to the exosexuality movement, which promotes taking the earth as your lover as a form of environmental activism. ‘Oñí Ocan’ also lends itself to ideas of afrofuturism, a movement that gives Black people a chance to explore art freely without having to portray the traumatizing history that is regularly represented in films, music, and other forms of popular culture in a way that decenters images of violence and oppression on Black bodies and instead turns toward a positive outlook of the future as Black artists reclaim power over their stories.
Solastalgia series
‘Colored Swimming Pool’
‘My Heart Belongs to Daddy’
‘Guardian’
2019, photograph printed on canvas
‘Oñí Ocan’
2023, five-channel experimental film and performance, displayed as one-channel video
Text by Natalie Beier ‘24, Colette Bernheim ‘24, Caitie McCabe ‘26, and Nia Stiggers ‘27
The mission of The Gallery at Heimbold Visual Arts Center is to cultivate appreciation and understanding of the arts and to foster creativity and intellectual growth in ways that reflect the interdisciplinary nature of the Visual and Studio Arts program. Through rotating exhibitions, artist lectures, hands-on workshops, and regular publications, The Gallery at Heimbold Visual Arts Center seeks to bridge the classroom with the art world. Our programming supports a diverse range of artists in terms of gender, race, perspectives, methodologies, and disciplines, whose works inform and challenge our students and the community. Primarily a teaching gallery, we involve students in all aspects of our exhibition programming—installation, curation, artist lecture selection and preparation, and collaborative publication efforts—simultaneously supporting our students, the teaching artists within the college, and the vibrant community surrounding us.
Exhibition inquiries can be submitted here.
Weekdays, 10 a.m.-4 p.m.
Weekend showings by request between 1-4 p.m.
Upcoming Exhibit
In the Room: Featuring Works by Four Contemporary Photographers
Sarah Lawrence College’s Gallery at Heimbold Visual Arts Center is pleased to announce exhibition opening of In the Room Featuring Works by Four Contemporary Photographers
Opens on January 22, 2025
Opening reception the week of January 27, 2025.
Workspace Residency Program
Artist in Residence: Allie Tsubota
The Gallery at Heimbold Visual Art Center is pleased to announce the 2024 Gallery Workspace Artist in Residence, Allie Tsubota. Located in the Heimbold Visual Arts Center at Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, NY, the residency will take place from November 8th through January 6th, followed by participation in the group exhibition In the Room all made possible by a grant from the Mellon Foundation.
This new program dynamically bridges the classroom and art world by reframing the gallery space as a temporary extension of the artist’s studio. Participating artists are provided with time, funding, student assistance and access to fabrication facilities. In this exchange, the college supports the artist, enabling them to explore new ideas, materials, and processes. Simultaneously, the institution benefits from the artist's creative contributions within an academic setting. During the course of their residency the artist will provide open hours and participate in Visual and Studio Arts programming.
Missed an exhibit?
See recaps and photos from past exhibits at The Gallery at Heimbold Visual Arts Center.
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Sarah Rosalena's textile series, 'Above Below,' featured in group exhibition Groundings: Care and Climate Justice at the Gallery at Heimbold Visual Arts Center
Rosalena explores the relationship between planets Earth and Mars, warm and cool tones, as well as the landscapes of ocean and desert. These comparisons mark the past and future effects of climate change and colonization. The process for for these textiles includes programming a Jacquard machine to weave imagined images of Martian surfaces from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, a spacecraft used to search for evidence of water. Rosalena brings together the cosmos and the planet through this conflation, using Indigenous cosmological representation from her tribe and ancestry. Rosalena uses software editing and 3D design as a first step in her artistic process; she describes her work as "born from multi-generations of women wavers, [working] by hand from her digital Jacquard loom to her mother's bead loom." Rosalena uses the colors red and blue to blend in conversation with each other, where the mixing of these colors creates muddy brown and orange undertones. The untouched fringe allows this textile to be looked at from any direction, and enables the viewer to imagine a continuation beyond the object.
"Above Below", 2020
AI-generated textile, cotton, training: Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter satellite images taken from High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HIRISE)
Text by Ingrid Specht '24 and Aysu Aricanli '25
CRITIQUE WEEK - Sign-UP OPEN
Spring 2024
Sign-up is now open for Visual and Studio Arts students taking a 5 credit class.
Visiting artists: Kari Cholnoky,Carla Edwards, Kris Grey, Heidi Hahn, Ege Okal, Laura Parnes, Fay Sanders, Riley Strom, Ka-Man Tse, Craig Taylor
Workshops: “BUT IT’S OURS “ artist talk and interactive painting workshop with exhibiting artist Shanequa Benitez, The Art of Folding, Cyanotype Printing for Dummies, Visualizing Music through Art, Slip Dip Casting, Point of Impact, Color Theory workshop, More Than You Ever Thought There WAS To Know About Paper Dolls, Custom Frame Making, Learn Adobe InDesign Beginners Workshop, Paper Casting, The creation of SVG's and Pen Plotting Machines, Printmaking: One-Day Letterpress
Sign-up for workshops, panels and critiques now through April 5, 5pm!
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The textile-based artwork of Emily Johnson (of the Yup'ik Nation), featured in group exhibition 'Groundings: Care and Climate Justice' on view at the Gallery at Heimbold Visual Arts Center through May 12th.
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Groundings: Care and Climate Justice
Emily Johnson, Cannupa Hanska Luger, Courtney Desiree Morris, and Sarah Rosalena
March 26-May 12
March 26 Artist Roundtable and Opening, 6pm
Sarah Lawrence College’s Gallery at Heimbold Visual Arts Center is pleased to announce the exhibition opening of Groundings: Care and Climate Justice with artists Emily Johnson (of the Yup’ik Nation), Cannupa Hanska Luger (of the Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara Nation, and the Lakota Nation), Courtney Desiree Morris, and Sarah Rosalena.
Groundings insists on care as a slow, attentive, relational foundation for climate action, climate adaptation, and energy transition. Against the urgency and presentism that tends to dominate climate discourse, Groundings is rooted in the radical care traditions of those who have long endured environmental crisis on this continent, now centuries deep into settler colonialism and racial capitalism. The artists in the exhibition invoke care as a form of grief and remembrance, slowness, attention and refusal, expansive imagination and speculative worldmaking. In works that are communal and collaborative, they model forms of interconnectedness, pleasure, and kinship. In response to violent pasts and presents, they imagine and prefigure diverse visions of Indigenous, Black, and Brown futurity. Across media and from a particular place and experience, these artists explore possibility and becoming, which loosens the grip that despair and anxiety have on us as dominant moods of the Anthropocene. Care is more than collective survival, more than resistance; it is the necessary relational infrastructure for collective flourishing.
This group show is the final exhibition in the Mellon-funded Care and Climate Justice series. More information can be found at careandclimatejustice.org
Image: Courtney Desiree Morris, My Heart Belongs to Daddy Solastalgia series, 2019, photograph printed on canvas.
@sarah_rosalena @emilyjohnsoncatalyst #courtneydesireemorris @cannupahanska
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The gallery will be open on Monday (2/26) for those who have not gotten a chance to see Gabriela Salazar “Observed”
Don’t forget to stop by on Tuesday (2/27) for the Closing Event from 12:00-3:00 PM
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Gabriela Salazar “Observed” Closing Event February 27 12-3pm
In her recent “Leaves” series, Salazar cast natural and inorganic objects in water-soluble paper to create a metaphor of fragility, care, and temporality. On February 27, 2024, in a collaborative process, Salazar will break apart the large-scale, site-specific artwork, “Leaves (One 365 (November, December)),” and distribute the pieces to the exhibition’s final visitors. Through this exchange, Salazar seeks to transmit an understanding of responsibility, community, and care.
All are invited to participate in the breaking apart and giving away of “Leaves (One 365 (November, December))”.
Observed is one of three exhibitions that will take place at Sarah Lawrence College in winter and spring 2024; each exhibition is focused on the theme of Care and Climate Justice, and is co-curated by Sarah Hamill and Izzy Lockhart. The exhibitions are funded by a grant from the Mellon Foundation, which supports the Sarah Lawrence Interdisciplinary Collaborative on the Environment (SLICE), a collaboration to teach climate justice across the humanities at Sarah Lawrence and Bronx Community College.
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Reception for Gabriela Salazar’s “Observed” that was held on January 30th in the Gallery at Heimbold Visual Arts Center (photographs by Conner Crosby)
“Observed,” which serves as a response to the overwhelming scale of the global climate crisis, is on display until February 25th, 2024
The Gallery at Heimbold Visual Arts Center is open weekdays 10:00 am to 4:00 pm and weekends 1:00 pm to 4:00 pm
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Gabriela Salazar, "Observed"
January 24 - February 25, 2024
Salazar's work focuses on the beauty, fragility, and the temporality of the present. Her work reminds us of the intergenerational transference of knowledge of our built environment, and the ways in which we access our relationship to its construction and endurance.
The Gallery at Heimbold Visual Arts Center is open weekdays 10:00 am to 4 pm and weekends 1:00 pm to 4:00 pm
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Sarah Lawrence College’s Gallery at Heimbold Visual Arts Center is pleased to announce that Gabriela Salazar’s solo exhibition Observed will be on display from January 24 to February 25, 2024. Salazar was the inaugural artist in the Gallery’s Workspace Residency Program in fall 2023, and her exhibition is made possible by a grant from the Mellon Foundation.
Gabriela Salazar, Observed
January 24 - February 25, 2024
Opening Reception January 30, 5-7pm
Closing Event February 27, 12-3pm
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