A spring-semester exhibition at the Syracuse University Art Museum will features works curated by a faculty member in the Department of Communication and Rhetorical Studies (CRS). “Faculty Fellows Curate” features the work of 2024-25 Syracuse University Art Museum Faculty Fellows Lyndsay Michalik Gratch, associate professor of communication and rhetorical studies, and Elizabeth Wimer, assistant teaching professor of management in the Martin J. Whitman School of Management.
The works will be on display in the Joe and Emily Lowe Galleries at the Art Museum from Tuesday, Jan. 21, through Saturday, May 10.
The Syracuse University Art Museum Faculty Fellows program supports innovative curriculum development and experiential learning and aims to more fully integrate the museum’s collection into the University’s academic life, says Emily Dittman, museum director.
Gratch’s exhibition, “Performance, Gesture and Reflection,” mirrors her performance studies course CRS 314, which explores the social, cultural and political dimensions of performance in various forms, including theater, dance, rituals, everyday life and media. The display features 23 objects that examine the social, cultural and political dimensions of performance, including how human gestures shape identity, power, memory and social relations.
Gratch says the portrayals “show gestures as more than isolated movements in a single time and place. Gestures are dynamic, culturally loaded and ever-changing symbols which have a wide range of social, political and historical meanings based on when, where, how, by whom and why a gesture is made and also interpreted.” Gratch says the course and the exhibition illustrate how performance “is not necessarily something that’s theatrical or fake or put on, but actions we do as part of everyday life.”