STANDING UP

Since 2014 Cambridge College and Violence Transformed have collaborated to sponsor an annual exhibit linked to a socially relevant theme –a theme that helps us document the transformative power of art and the ability of art, artists and artmaking to address compelling issues of our time. This year’s theme is “STANDING UP.” The artists featured here have created works that address the many ways in which people in this country and around the world are “standing up” for human rights, civil rights, health equity and social justice for all.

STANDING UP is conceived in relationship with the theme of Cambridge College's 2020-2021 academic year, "Bodies." We are embodied beings: our bodies are how we experience and encounter the world, and they are also how the world encounters and perceives us. They are familiar to us and foreign to other people; bodies are contradictory – simultaneously sites of intimacy and desire and sites of pain and suffering. The featured artists and their work in STANDING UP will inform students' examination of bodies from multiple perspectives, considering lived experience, bias, health, physicality, and place. What happens when we seriously consider our bodies, with their multiple complexities, as well as, and in relationship to, the bodies of others?

The fifteen artists in this exhibition are featured individually for a fuller virtual experience of their work and their words. The exhibition and related events will be available to Cambridge College's classes and displayed virtually on our respective web and social media platforms for the benefit of faculty, staff, students and community audiences at all Cambridge College campuses (Massachusetts, California and Puerto Rico).