Nebraska Wesleyan's Elder Gallery will showcase the work of Nancy Friedemann-Sánchez in the exhibition, "Studio Visit." This exhibition presents a variety of works ranging from excerpts of her visual novel "Mestiza Dos Veces" to collaborative book projects like "Redolent" with poet Farid Matuk and "Un Acordeón Tras la Reja" with the Instituto Caro Y Cuervo de Colombia.
Friedemann-Sánchez’s current body of work is conceived as a visual novel comprised of paintings, sculptures, objects, and mixed media that together, speak as a narrative novel about cultural memory and migration. Anchored in feminism, the work is infused with American and Colombian cultural forms, and informed by the encounter of Europe and the Americas. Having grown up in Colombia as the child of a Colombian woman and a United States citizen, and having migrated to the U.S. as an adult, she makes art in two languages about the curious and intense experience of migration. For the past six years, she has researched the practice of "Barníz de Pasto." This technique developed through the global commerce intermingling of pre-Columbian art, and Spanish and Asian decorative practices in the colonial era. Her research of "Barníz de Pasto" allows Friedemann-Sánchez to create hybrid motifs and large-scale collages that tell stories of colonization, abundance and extraction.
"Redolent" is a handmade, limited-edition artist book comprising 12 prints of paintings by Friedemann-Sánchez and seven poems by Matuk. The project draws on resonances across Friedemann-Sánchez’s and Matuk’s independent practices in which each address the ever-developing legacy of colonization in the Americas, including through personal experiences of migration - Friedemann-Sánchez from Colombia and Matuk from Peru. The poems and images in "Redolent" build a vocabulary of beauty and violence, where lush flora and fauna are entangled with symbols of surveillance and militarization and where tender expressions of kinship brush against relations of patriarchy and nationhood.
"Un Acordeón Tras la Reja" is a republishing of a story written by Afro-Colombian writer Manuel Zapata Olivella containing 13 woodcut prints created by Friedemann-Sánchez at Constellation Studios in Lincoln Nebraska. The publications were distributed to rural libraries across Colombia and tell the story of the violent political and cultural ramifications of colonization in Colombia through the experience of an Afro-Colombian accordion player.
The exhibition opened on March 1 with a reception on March 4 from 5-8 p.m. in Elder Gallery, located inside the Rogers Center for Fine Arts at 50th Street and Huntington Ave. Gallery hours are Tuesday-Friday from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. and Saturday-Sunday from 1-4 p.m. The last day for the exhibition is on April 10.