The Center for Art and Social Engagement serves as a venue for investigating social issues through arts-based methods. Anchored by a permanent display of The Sister Chapel, a historic collaborative feminist installation, CASE draws inspiration from the cooperative spirit of the women’s art movement.

This exhibition presented photography that through humor, theatrics, and playfulness reframed and fractured conventional, binary perceptions about culture, race, and gender identities to one that is diverse, interactive and layered. Each artist explored stereotypes of their own cultural heritage and origins in order to break down misconceptions and to shift the narrative of what it means to be who they are as multidimensional Americans.

This group exhibition includes works that resonate with the complexities and divergent perceptions attributed to gardens and cultivated spaces. On a personal and intimate level gardens are perceived as a place of refuge, solace and emotional centering. The larger, more broader impacts however, reveal the disparate interpretations of cultivated spaces from socio-economic and environmental perspectives. The works in this exhibition are not literal representations, but rather through artistic processes and intentions serve as an entry point in considering a myriad of intersections.

Through cast rubber sculptures, Silverthorne posits her studio as a metaphor for abandonment, collapse, and entropy as it relates to the absurdity of social constructs and the misguided perceptions of stability and constancy. Today as we reflect on the work displayed, created between 2009 and 2021 it becomes relatable to our current state of social isolation and displacement.