The Department of Art and Art History is hosting the Sylvia J. Smith ’73 Artists in Residence Program in order to enrich the visual arts education on campus. Over the next few weeks, artists Rena Leinberger and Juanli Carrión will be working in collaboration with Dickinson students to help them manifest their own artistic interests.

“The residency program permits a rare opportunity for students to observe an artist’s creative output in a condensed amount of time,” said Associate Professor of Art Anthony Cervino.

“We want to help them find a sense of agency,” explained Leinberger. “When you have an assignment, there are parameters to that assignment. When you can do anything, anything, it is much harder to figure out what you’re interested in.”
However, Leidberger feels that the purpose of the program is not to teach, but rather to work in collaboration with the students.

“Collaboration is a negotiative process. I think people misunderstand it as a process of compromise. But that’s not how I see it at all,” she added. “There is this third entity that ends up being created from the collaborative process.”

The five-week seminar series presented by the artists, titled “Common Contexts,” focuses on breaking down societal influences and building up individual artistic perceptions of reality. The learning experiences relate to Leinberger and Carrión’s current project, “Un-dramatics,” in which an individual’s perspective combats the artificial representation of human wants and needs displayed by mass media and corporations.

“When you create art, you are analyzing reality and different types of landscapes. It can be a social or political landscape, or any type of landscape,” said Carrión. “To highlight the ideas I find interesting, I create a new reality, a new landscape that incorporates all of these landscapes.”

“If you look at what is close around you, and you change the order of elements, you can bring out some ideas and can question some ideas that are right in front of you but you can’t see,” he added.

The current goal of “Common Contexts” is to allow the students to take what is around them and add to it their own perception of society, politics and environment. The seminar series is free of charge and open to students of all majors and interests. More information on seminar days and times is available by contacting Cervino at [email protected] and the Department of Art and Art History.