Curatorial Projects

Dispatches from Kindred Worlds was a group exhibition on view at Da Vinci Art Alliance August 1 - August 25, 2024. Featured artists: Amy Block, Annie Stone, Ayiana Porter, Bobby Rosin, Brian Kelley, Carolyn Harper, Claire Coslop, Dana Suleymanova, Daniel Neufeld, David Heshmatpour, Derek Ayres, Eleanor Barba, Erika Kuciw, Jay Roth, John Scott, Kathy Robinson, Lauren Trainer, Lia Huntington, Maria Lindenfeldar, Meg Wolensky, Neill Catangay, Ona Kalstein, Pamela Tudor, Zach Zecha, Rob Lybeck, Robert Gorchov, Robert Solomon, Rosemary Luckett, Sam Koren, Sandra Benhaim, Sarah R. Bloom, Sharon Bloomfield Hicks, Steven Climer, Ted Warchal, Varvàra Fern, and Willard (Goby) Johnson.

Curatorial Statement: It can sometimes feel like we are all islands separated by a vast ocean, inaccessible to one another. In times of uncertainty and struggle we often retreat to a place within ourselves and struggle to share this place with others. 

Where do you go to make sense of the world? Is it a person? A place? A state of mind? Dispatches from Kindred Worlds explores the profound connection between art-making, world-making, and truths that are communicated through these worlds. 

Artists serve as conduits, bridging the tangible and intangible, the known and the mysterious. Art-making is not merely a creative act; it is a profound act of world-making. Artists wield their tools to construct new realms, shaping landscapes and experiences both physical and metaphysical. 

In Dispatches from Kindred Worlds, artists use their craft to forge connections to places far beyond the reaches of our everyday experience. Through their art, they transport us to distant landscapes, both real and imagined, inviting us to explore the depths of their innermost worlds. We lucky onlookers get to peer into these worlds, to wander through realms otherwise inaccessible to us, and leave with a kernel of truth that would have otherwise remained elusive. A boat in the vast ocean that separates us. 

This exhibition serves as a constellation of invitations, each artwork a beacon broadcasting its message on all frequencies. As we navigate these diverse artistic landscapes, we are reminded of the infinite possibilities that exist when we tap into and share our rich inner worlds.

TuftCon was a three-day craft convention held in Philadelphia from Friday, March 24 through Sunday, March 26, 2023, at the Asian Arts Initiative and the Bok Building. 

2023 TuftCon was the first-ever tufting convention and was Tuft the World’s way of continuing to grow a supportive and educational tufting community. Programming for the convention included beginner and advanced tufting workshops, lectures, demonstrations, a panel discussion, a juried exhibition, and more. Attendees were able to learn directly from special guest artists and designers as well as engage with the guest juror and internationally celebrated fiber artist, Qualeasha Wood. 

Tuft the World was established in 2018 by Tiernan Alexander and Tim Eads, Texas-born artists, and business owners living and working in West Philadelphia. The company was founded to provide the craft community with the resources they need to make their own projects. Tiernan and Tim’s collective experience as crafters and educators, as well as their unique creative approach to art and life, inspire their mission to make craft accessible to a broad audience while staying true to their values of equity and sustainability.

Read press coverage about the event here: https://whyy.org/articles/philadelphia-tuftcon-2023-tufting-rug-making/

Curating for Equity was a student spotlight series of three student-run exhibitions, centering on a different topic each month. The month of February highlighted the contributions of Black designers throughout history via a student-designed and researched mural; the exhibition in March centered on women’s rights and featured posters created by female designers, and the exhibition in April focused on environmental justice, specifically how environmental concerns intersect with race and class in the United States. Students worked on their projects with McKenna Sanderson, Assistant Professor in Graphic Design, and Veronica Cianfrano, Director of Melton Gallery.

The three exhibitions coincided with heritage months & holidays :
Feb. 17–28: Black History Month
March 10–28: Women’s History Month
April 7–21: Environmental Justice/Earth Day

The Midnight Garden was a solo exhibition that featured a collection of works by Marium Rana, an American-born Pakistani artist. The exhibition featured three of her painting series: A Place to Call Home, Siyah Qalam, and Sleepwalk Daydream. Much of the work featured in the exhibition was created to debut at Melton Gallery.

 Marium Rana’s work serves as an intimate exploration of what it means to straddle the space between two cultures. In her work, Rana employs personal, disparate, and inherited memories to navigate the often-tangled concepts surrounding “home” and “belonging” – a thing we all must do to varying degrees in order to piece together our sense of place in the world. Remembered and invented landscapes, recreated memories from familial and personal experiences, and the meditative solitude that comes late at night; are all woven throughout this collection. As a whole, the atmosphere of The Midnight Garden draws from the uncanny feeling of the familiar transforming into the otherworldly during nights without sleep as Rana cared for her infant daughter.

View the gallery talk on our youtube site here: https://youtu.be/FEB9dmY1_Hw

The Melton Gallery Zine Library is one of Oklahoma’s first permanent zine collections and the University of Central Oklahoma’s first permanent zine library. The Melton Zine Library is accompanied by a zine-making workstation where visitors can freely create and collaborate on their own zines. The unstructured format of the zine workstations allows for more freedom of use without fear of judgment or exclusion. Zines created by gallery visitors are copied, cataloged, and archived in the permanent collection, and the Max Chambers Library at UCO has made the zine library catalog searchable through the research database. The design of the space is based on the Fluxus art movement, which operates under the principles of blurring the boundaries between art and life, bringing art to the masses, and changing the balance of power in the art world by decapitalizing art; relying on the element of chance to shape the ultimate outcome of artworks, and valuing the process of creation more than the finished product. 

Grant Funding: The Melton Zine Library was supported in part by the Oklahoma Arts Council, which receives support from the State of Oklahoma and the National Endowment for the Arts.

The Melton Zine Library is accompanied by a traveling exhibition entitled Women’s Rights Are Human Rights: International Posters on Gender-Based Inequality, Violence and Discrimination, curated by Elizabeth Resnick, M.F.A, professor emerita, Massachusetts College of Art and Design and hosted by UCO's Melton Gallery in partnership with Prof. Mandy Horton from UCO’s School of Design. My team and I conducted research to create a timeline that extended throughout the gallery. This timeline was designed to add context to the theme of gender equity by celebrating historically erased and underrepresented women of color and gender-nonconforming social justice advocates of all races and ethnicities while highlighting the inequalities they have fought against. Both the posters and zines on view center intersectional social justice and both art forms hold an important place at the center of some of the most prominent social justice movements.