Cotuit art exhibit inspired by hope
Kathi Scrizzi Driscoll
"Hope" is the word that officials at Cotuit Center for the Arts choose to use to end this year of pandemic, political/social division, and fears for the future.
Hope is the theme for the final art exhibit of 2020, a juried display traditionally open to students, faculty and center members. And this year, poetry and masks as artwork are in the mix.
“In these difficult, soul-searching times, many of us are looking for ways to stay positive and look toward a better future,” reads a description of the exhibition, which was “designed for artists to express their visions of a hopeful tomorrow.”
More than 150 pieces on that theme were collected Monday, and a majority of those will — from Saturday through Dec. 26 — fill the walls of two floors of galleries for people to visit anytime during open hours in socially distanced ways. Those pieces not chosen for hanging will be shown in a special digital display, and all will be part of an online exhibit.
Exhibitions specialist Michelle Law and center executive director David Kuehn felt it was important both to make sure everyone’s vision is seen in some way, and to offer art online to those uncomfortable with an in-person visit.
The goal was for everyone at the center, professional artists or not, to not only erdepict what hope means to them, but be part of a larger community expression about it.
“If ever we needed hope, now (is) the time,” Kuehn says. “Everyone’s tired and exhausted and what we’ve been living through just continues. Art has always been a place where people find solace.”
“Hope” was the only guidance given to artists, and Law received a variety of interpretations, some personal, some global. Artists were not asked to write about the works, so the pieces are open to view interpretation.
“We thought it would be nice to have something to glue us together a little bit as everyone became more and more unhinged,” Law says of the community exhibit.
Officials realized after choosing the theme that “hope” was also the guide for a 2010 year-end exhibit to coincide with a theatrical production of an “It’s a Wonderful Life” radio play. “It’s interesting how we’ve evolved over the last 10 years, thinking about hope,” Law says. “Now (the theme) just seems to have a little more weight to it.”
Fitting right in during this pandemic was “The Unmasked Project,” an idea by Dr. Kimberley Crocker Pearson of Brewster to ask local artists to decorate the type of masks that have become such an important part of our lives now. More than 20 masks are expected to be part of the display, commenting on current issues from the pandemic to Black Lives Matter.
Crocker Pearson pursued the project, and then asked Law about exhibiting it when she heard of the "Hope" exhibit, based on her own experience during the HIV pandemic.
Crocker Pearson began working as a doctor in that era and told Law via email that it was “probably the most traumatic time of my life. Every day I would be admitting young patients who I, and they, knew would be dead in less than two weeks.”
What got her through then was art: A “Bearing Witness” exhibit in Boston by Michael David, she said, was “the only thing that made me feel less helpless and alone”; and the AIDS quilt project, “which finally allowed us to mourn properly and look forward with hope.”
“My fantasy,” Crocker Pearson told Law, “is that we start something here that helps in the same way.”
Another key part of the "Hope" exhibit is the addition of words — poetry from the Cotuit center’s new Purple Figs program — that will be on display in both written and spoken form. Visitors can scan QR codes on their phones to hear the poets read their work.
That idea came from Kim Baker, the center’s associate director for administration and co-host of Purple Figs, which focuses on ekphrastic, or descriptive, poetry based on art. Baker was inspired by MassPoetry, which started in May to publish poems on its website in "The Hard Work of Hope" series. Baker and Cape poets John Bonanni and Carole Stasiowski were all published there.
“I thought it would be great to include their poems in our HOPE exhibit, to honor their publications and to bring more artistic variety in the form of poetry to the exhibit,” Baker says by email. “But then we wanted more poetry!”
She and education director/poet Christine Ernst invited others to participate and add their recordings. “I love the series title ‘The Hard Work of Hope’ because it is often hard to be hopeful during the pandemic and during such a tumultuous time in our country," Baker says. "So we will have poems of hope as well as the struggle to find and maintain hope.”
Baker’s own poem is “Let Grief Come,” which she says “encourages the reader not to avoid grief but to invite in grief because ‘there is no way but through.’ Not a typical hopeful poem. But it expresses how hard finding a way back to hope can be sometimes.”
Kathi Scrizzi Driscoll can be contacted at kdriscoll@capecodonline.com. Follow her on Twitter: @KathiSDCCT.
If you go
What: “Hope,” an open juried exhibit
When: Saturday through Dec. 26 (gallery hours are 10 a.m. to 4 p.m.)
Where: Cotuit Center for the Arts, 4404 Route 28; online at artsonthecape.org
Admission: Free
Information: artsonthecape.org, 508-428-0669
