One art curator’s perspective of beauty will be showcased at the Grunwald Gallery of Art’s new exhibit “Framing Beauty: Intimate Visions,” opening Friday.
Curator Deborah Willis, professor and chair of the Department of Photography and Imaging at New York University, selected works from 20 contemporary artists from around the world to represent beauty from a viewpoint that incorporates race, gender and culture.
“I don’t have a definition of beauty,” Willis said. “It’s just something that when you feel it, you know it. I never identify beauty, I never focus beauty. What I try to do is have an experience and appreciate it.”
The topic of this semester’s College of Arts and Sciences Themester is also beauty, so it was only fitting to have a matching exhibit at the Grunwald, Willis said.
Instead of just having a show with different beautiful things in it, the gallery wanted to address beauty in a different way.
Beauty is largely overlooked in the art world today, Willis said. It is seen as frivolous, not as something to be appreciated.
She said she wants to encourage people to rethink beauty as something to embrace.
“I wanted to explore it as a frame of expression, a frame of something personal as well as political,” Willis said.
Willis’ experience as a curator and a prominent photographer has made her familiar with many different artists and their work, director of the gallery Betsy Stirratt said.
This means the exhibit will allow IU students to view artists’ work that they would not see anywhere else.
“It’s a good chance for them to compare what this person thinks beautiful and what they themselves think is beautiful,” Stirratt said. “I think that’s a really important question that we all have to look at because everyone is a photographer now, everyone makes things, everyone sends pictures to each other.”
For example, the work of artists Omar Victor Diop from Senegal and Ji Yeo from Korea would be hard to find in Bloomington, but Stirratt said their pieces are some of the most interesting in the exhibit.
Diop takes photographs of himself depicting different historical figures and cultural elements, often including soccer. Yeo’s photographs are of plastic surgery clinics in Korea, where young women try to conform to different standards of beauty.
The exhibit, which includes video and installation as well as two-dimensional art, encourages viewers to think about the multi-faceted concept of beauty, Stirratt said.
“What is beautiful?” Stirratt said. “I think that’s a question of our time.”
