Berman Museum of Art Starts 2024 with a Spotlight on Women

The Berman Museum of Art is opening three exhibitions from women artists this spring: Kukuli Velarde: Free, Total, Faithful, and Fruitful, which examines the evolving nature of womanhood in a post-colonial world; Sahar Tarighi: Şamaran شاماران, exploring the long-lasting power of an ancient myth; and Adriane Colburn: Paths of Extraction, a collaborative effort with Ursinus student researchers to visualize data related to local extractive industries.

“We’re excited to work with such a fantastic group of artists this spring. They are each, in their own way, investigating the systems and power structures we navigate as individuals and collectively,” said Berman Executive Director Lauren McCardel. “We’re thrilled to highlight these works and create dialogue around the important issues they raise as we reflect on our histories and imagine alternative paths for the future.”

Mark your calendars for Thursday, February 8, at 5 p.m. to celebrate the opening of these three exceptional exhibitions with the Berman staff, Ursinus students, and the exhibiting artists.

This spring, the Berman Museum of Art presents:

KUKULI VELARDE
Free, Total, Faithful, Fruitful
January 20 to April 7, 2024
Main and Front Galleries

Peruvian-born, Philadelphia-based artist Kukuli Velarde draws deeply on her cultural heritage in a practice that spans ceramic sculpture and painting. Free, Total, Faithful, and Fruitful brings together works from various series over the course of Velarde’s career to celebrate the dynamics and fluidity of identity, womanhood, ritual, history, and adoration. The exhibition’s title references the components of “perfect” marital love, according to teachings of the Catholic Church. Velarde reinterprets these concepts to convey an expansive and inclusive connotation of perfect love. The exhibition includes self-portraits that exalt the realities of Velarde’s changing body, ceramic infants separated from their mothers and left unattended, and sculptures of pre-Columbian religious figures that survived colonization by adopting the guise of Catholic saints and virgins.

SAHAR TARIGHI
Şamaran شاماران
Threads of Transformation
February 8 to May 12, 2024
Upper Gallery

Sahar Tarighi is a multidisciplinary artist from Kurdish Iran currently based at the University of Delaware as a ceramics instructor and Ceramics MFA candidate. In her interdisciplinary practice, she leverages visual language to engage Kurdish traditions and resist enduring effects of political power on daily life. In Şamaran, Tarighi reimagines the eponymous Kurdish myth about a half-woman, half-snake, who avenges her own death and punishes the men who betray her. Over time, Şamaran has emerged as a symbol of wisdom, protection, and empowerment for people contesting patriarchal and totalitarian regimes. Tarighi’s exhibition features a sculpture of the Şamaran with a video and an overwhelming number of ceramic braids that speak to Kurdish mourning rituals.

ADRIANE COLBURN
Paths of Extraction
February 8 to December 15, 2024
Baldeck/Hollis Gallery

The Berman Museum’s 2024 artist-in-residence Adriane Colburn creates large-scale installations that investigate the relationships between humans, infrastructure, and earth systems. In partnership with Ursinus students, Adriane Colburn is researching raw materials extracted from the land near Ursinus College. Extractive industries remove local resources—such as coal, oil, and iron—from the ground and distribute them around the globe. Colburn will use data visualization techniques to interpret these industries’ environmental and economic impacts: why these raw materials travel through our local area, where they end up, and how traces of them filter into our atmosphere, communities, and bodies. Paths of Extraction repurposes the remains of ash trees cleared from Ursinus campus to construct maps related to Colburn’s findings.

For more, visit ursinus.edu/berman.