Gathering

Gathering – by Abigail Drapkin, Kayla Cochran, Maria Huang, and Maria Zamora

This exhibition brings together four female artists with varied backgrounds, connected through a practice of collection and transformation. The things we gather in our studios—crumpled receipts and discarded shopping lists, dried artichokes and flowers, bundles of fabrics and threads—are objects of fascination and subjects embedded with symbolic meaning. Through close observation, we process these items. We paint them, print them, cut them up, stack, and sew them back together. For each artist, the output of this creative process is different, reflective of an individual’s experience and personal history. The colors are vibrant and the works layered, a gathering of painting and printmaking where elements of abstraction and figuration interplay.

Why do we gather? Until recently the myth that ancient females were only gatherers endured as proof of women’s inferiority. Yet, recent evidence points to women as both hunters and gatherers, collecting raw materials from the wild to provide sustenance for their families. Today, women still perform the majority of unpaid or underpaid, often unseen labor: grocery shopping, cleaning, child rearing, teaching, caring for the family through cooking and shared meals. The works in this exhibition reveal hints of these hidden acts of labor, love, and community: A family gathered at the table after dinner, a bouquet of flowers carefully arranged, patterned female forms holding one another, a Post-it note with the scrawled ingredients for a cookie recipe. We gather to comfort, to sustain, to lift up, to make something from nothing.