2016-2017 CAPP Committee Curatorial Statement
Over the past year, six undergraduate students from a wide range of disciplinary backgrounds shared a single mission: to collaboratively select for the University of Maryland’s permanent collection a body of contemporary artwork that would prove relevant, sincere, and significant to all individuals who enter the STAMP Student Union, independent of their prior relationship to the arts.
The resulting acquisitions come from our committee’s understanding that beauty can be a point of access for people, and that strength can be intertwined with vulnerability. It comes from our dissatisfaction with gaps in perspective, and how these gaps are filled in by power. It comes from our desire to justly portray people's needs and hopes, and to acknowledge that every experience has a history and a future. It comes from championing inclusivity and intersectionality, and confronting gentrification, misrepresentation, and oversimplification. It comes from adamantly believing in the communicative potential of visual language. In an unpredictable, frightening, and consistently challenging time in our history, it is the hope of the 2016−2017 CAPP Committee that these works will stand as a reminder of the inextricably complicated, and yet incredibly resilient, connectivity of all people. It is the committee's hope that works created from empathy, will perpetuate it.
2016-2017 CAPP Committee
Rachael Carruthers, Grace DeWitt, Nicolay (Nick) Duque-Robayo, Kathleen (Kat) Hubbard, Damon King, and Sarang Yeola