Art and the Humanities
Humanities for All is all about discovering what it means to be human. Subjects such as critical thinking, ethics, and world language enable students to explore new cultures, diversify their perspectives and expand their worldly knowledge. One great way to explore the world around us and the human experience is through art.
When you experience visual art, you see the world through the artist’s eyes — eyes that may be much different than your own. Whether they’re exposing you to an entirely new topic, or simply shifting the viewpoint, the artist is showing you what it means to be human to them.
CCBC has three galleries of visual art across the three main campuses. The Galleries at CCBC give students, faculty, and staff access to art from around the world right in their own backyard. Through June 10, 2023, The Gallery at CCBC Essex is exhibiting Twined Musings with art by Annika Cheng and Paolo Miguel Dela Vina.
Annika Cheng is an interdisciplinary artist and activist from Queens, New York City. Through soft sculptural works, she explores the sino-diasporic experience, and seeks to define what contemporary Chinese American culture looks like. She investigates the ways traditions are passed down, changed, and adapted, and how these practices bond people together. She also explores the disruption of culture and the separations of people, and how that can affect identity on both an individual and collective scale.
Paolo Miguel Dela Vina is a ponderer, someone whose mind is never quiet or still. Usually not sticking to just one methodology of making, they integrate their understandings of visual and performance processes to form narratives of human experience in mindfulness and healing. Their research is much like an ongoing sketchbook or diary where they are simultaneously observing and thinking in the past and present tense. How they choose to create is driven by the intention of releasing what is no longer serving them to embrace presence.
Both of these artists are fantastic examples of how experiencing art can deepen your understanding of the world and the people in it. Visiting the Galleries at CCBC is a great way to complement your course work through Humanities for All to broaden your horizons! Stop by and visit the Galleries before Twined Musings leaves on June 10!