Stony Brook Art Crawl Showcases Diversity of Campus Art and Culture

Stony Brook's Fall 2024 Art Crawl took place on October 9, treating campus and community members to exhibitions featuring four artists. Photos by Ellen Cooke.

Stony Brook University is proud home to a variety of renowned art galleries that provide unique spaces and opportunities for cultural and artistic exchanges and collaborations. Since 2017, Art Crawls showcasing these spaces have united the galleries in campus through a series of free guided tours led each semester by expert curators, while supporting the university's commitment to celebrating diversity.

The Fall 2024 Art Crawl took place on October 9, treating campus and community members to exhibitions featuring four artists.

The Crawl began at the Charles B. Wang Center, where Eric Murphy,assistant to the director of Asian Art and Culture led attendees on a look into an installation called Yarnscapes: Mulyana's Environmental Tapestries,which showcased the work of Indonesian artist Mulyana, renowned for his imaginative use of crochet techniques, creating large-scale installations and soft sculptures that evoke themes of nature, sustainability, and community. Mulyana transforms simple yarn into mesmerizing pieces of art, bringing to life colorful, whimsical installations through crochet, stitching, and knitting."

"The Wang Center's Asian Arts and Culture department is focused on bringing programs to students and the surrounding communities that promote a deeper understanding of Asian and Asian American arts and culture," said Murphy. "World class art exhibitions like this help foster a meaningful type of engagement that might inspire viewers in unexpected ways. The campus art crawls and similar events help our students become more engaged on a level that isn't necessarily scholastic, but on a level of genuine interest for art or culture."

Yarnscapes can be viewed until December 10, 2024in the Wang Center's Skylight Gallery.

From there it was on to the Paul W. Zuccaire Gallery in the Staller Center for the Arts, where attendeesexperienced the work of installation artist Nicole Cohen. The installation, titled Nicole Cohen: SUPER VISION,features videos and photo-collages that explore perception as viewed through interior spaces and architectural environments. Cohen's work often overlays past and present imagery, including vintage magazine pages, domestic interiors, period rooms, historical paintings and iconic architectural spaces to comment on socially constructed space.

"These photos and videos by the new media artist Nicole Cohen layer historical and contemporary imagery," said Karen Levitov, Zuccaire Gallery director and curator. "Her work is a comment on socially constructed spaces."

SUPER VISION is on view at the Zuccaire Gallery through October 18.

In Gallery Unbound in the Staller Center, visiting artist Young Maeng presented Non-Human Ontology + AI Humanity, a new body of work that transfers AI-generated images onto canvas, blending them with traditional painting techniques to explore philosophical and ethical questions about the coexistence of humans, nature, and AI companion robots from a non-anthropocentric perspective.

"My work explores the co-existence of AI and humans," said Maeng. "We usually have only a human perspective, but AI has added a new creative perspective to art."

The crawl concluded in the Lawrence Alloway Memorial Gallery in the Melville Libraryto view MFA graduate student Diana Salomon's solo exhibition, "DO THEY LOOK LIKE ME?"

Salomon is a visual artist who works across photography and painting. Her practice often deals with issues related to the loss of identity, the balancing act she performs as both a mother and artist, and the societal expectations placed on the mother's body.

"Stony Brook's Art Crawls are a great way to experience all of the amazing art galleries across campus," said Levitov. "Each semester offers a new opportunity to hear from artists and curators about the exhibitions on view."

- Robert Emproto

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