De Anza’s Euphrat finds ‘common ground’ with new exhibit
The Euphrat Museum of Art is getting a jump on next year’s Silicon Valley Reads with the opening of an in-person exhibition that dovetails with that event’s theme of “The Power of Kindness, Resilience, and Hope.”
The museum at De Anza College is set to open “common ground” to the public on Saturdays starting tomorrow.
The artwork in “common ground,” which can also be viewed on the Euphrat’s website, explores U.S./Mexico border and migrant experiences, the impacts of history and the call for revolutionary love. These themes reflect those of the featured memoirs for Silicon Valley Reads 2022: “A Dream Called Home” by Reyna Grande and “See No Stranger” by Valarie Kaur.
Resting against the wall near the museum entry is Hector Dio Mendoza’s 16-foot sculpture “Holding/Leaning/Pushing,” with hands held up in the air and the posture of someone being detained. Mendoza’s “Hercules/El Mundo” and “Pulling/Jalando” depict bent-over figures, one carrying large round bundles, the other pulling a large, elongated bundle across the floor. Their legs are covered with bark like the trunks of trees, resilient yet vulnerable.
Mendoza’s drawing, “White Wilderness/Maleza Blanca,” explores the complex relationship between nature and immigration, race and class. Maleza are weeds or undergrowth—any plant that takes root where it’s undesired. In the drawing, layered plant silhouettes create a dense landscape that speaks to the beauty of the wilderness and the tension of the unknown.
Tom Kiefer’s “El Sueño Americano/The American Dream” is a photographic documentation of the personal belongings carried by migrants and those seeking asylum that were seized by U.S. Customs and Border Protection at a processing facility near the U.S./Mexico border in Arizona. His painterly photos honor the people who carried these belongings across the desert.
While working part-time as a janitor at the facility, Kiefer asked for permission to retrieve canned food from the trash. The food had been carried by migrants and confiscated and discarded by border patrol agents. He wanted to bring it to a local food bank so it wouldn’t go to waste. When he started collecting the food, he saw what else was being thrown out: possessions such as family photos, diaries, rosaries, bibles, wallets, shoes, blankets and children’s toys.
These confiscations struck him as wrong. “The cruelty of stripping away such personal items from vulnerable people is dehumanizing, both to those whose belongings are taken and to those who enforce this policy,” Kiefer says.
Nye’ Lyn Tho’s “Natural Heir” series is a visual pun about the embracing of natural hair by people of the African Diaspora. She points out that as recently as 2019, California passed the Crown Act to prohibit discrimination against workers and students based on natural hair. Just a month ago, Louisiana made working with textured natural hair a required section of the cosmetology licensing exam.
Tho’s work also refers to how, for survival, some African women carried rice and seeds in their hair on the Middle Passage on their way to enslavement. Her contemporary subjects have sage and sunflower crowns, plants that represent aspects of themselves and their ancestors. Look closely and you’ll find a ladybug or bee hovering like a guardian spirit.
“Having to mask one’s identity to avoid racial injustices of course has huge psychological effects,” Nye’ says. “’Natural Heir’ is a celebration and support to people who decide to embrace their own natural state of being,”
Fortune Sitole creates mixed media paintings of day-to-day life in Black South African townships to bring attention to the conditions suffered there and by those living in poverty throughout the world. Using found tin, stones, wood and paint, he depicts the makeshift shelters of his homeland, made by optimizing outside space and leftover materials such as metal, tires, stones — whatever they can find to build their homes.
The characters in his scenes reflect communities that continue to overcome adversity and build lives and relationships against the backdrop of vivid South African dawns and dusks. They embody resilience and hope.
The Euphrat Museum of Art at De Anza College is open to the public beginning Saturday 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. Reservations can be made on Eventbrite.com; visit www.deanza.edu/euphrat for hours and events, the registration link and COVID-19 guidelines for campus visits.