About The Center
About The Center
THE CENTER FOR ART AND SOCIAL ENGAGEMENT
The Center for Art and Social Engagement is a new initiative of Rowan University Art Gallery at Westby Hall. It 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, the Center draws inspiration from the cooperative spirit of the women’s art movement. Programming at the Center encourages interdisciplinary collaborations that explore diverse and timely social issues through multidisciplinary practices, broadly conceived to include a variety of mediums such as photojournalism, film and video, historical ephemera, faculty and student research presentations, info-graphic presentations, STEM/STEAM installations, and public programming.
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COMING SOON
Exhibition on view October 4 - December 21, 2022
Opening Reception and Artist Talk
Thursday October 20
Talk begins at 4:00 pm in room 111
Followed by a reception in CASE
5:00 - 7:00 pm
In her collage and silk paintings, Erb embeds
within the boundaries of a larger-than-life
human form, navigational charts such as
road, topography, and war campaign maps
to represent the different facets of the human
physiological system. Road maps become the
nervous system, topographical maps become
the circulatory system, and war maps become
the lymphatic system.
Each work in the series stands at 9.5 feet high
by 4.5 feet wide which are within the same
dimensions as the works in The Sister Chapel.
Like The Sister Chapel, Erb’s figures are larger
than life, a monument to the Greek goddess
Gaia: the personification of the earth.
About The Sister Chapel
The Sister Chapel was conceived in 1974 by Ilise Greenstein, who envisioned a monumental “hall of fame” in which women’s achievements would be presented from a female perspective. Greenstein’s participation in several feminist consciousness-raising groups and all-women activist organizations prompted her to question the enduring androcentric view of history. Using a nominal pun on the Sistine Chapel, she proposed a secular, nonhierarchical alternative to the patriarchal system embodied in Michelangelo’s renowned ceiling fresco.
