Photo by Georgie Riggs
Last month, the Neidorff gallery highlighted the best of student art projects with “The Mini.” Now, this month, “Threshing Whispers” brings work from alumni artists back to campus.
“‘Threshing Whispers’ features three alumni, which is one way our department can tie into the 150th celebration and honor the Trinity legacy. We also wanted to bring in alumni who were accessible to the student population,” said Mark Martinez, Neidorff art gallery manager.
Elizabeth Glaessner, ’07, Preetika Rajgariah, ’08, and Margaux Crump, ’11, will be exhibiting their work at the Neidorff art gallery starting Feb. 14 and ending on Feb. 21. All the artists will be present on Feb. 21 for a panel discussion 10:30 a.m. in Dicke Smith Building room 306, which is free and open to the public.
What can you expect to see at this exhibit? Without giving too much away, Martinez provided some detail into the artists’ work.
“Many of them have backgrounds in painting, but beyond that, Glaessner is really known for how she disperses water through her painting. It makes her paintings seem almost iridescent. When you think of an oil painting, you don’t think of brightness. Her work almost fluoresces. Preetika has a painting background, too, but what she’s doing with her saris, Indian traditional garments, hearken back to her more painting background. You’ll see that in person. Margaux uses salts to create her canvases. These flat, framed works are flesh-toned, as opposed to Gleassner’s works which are more grotesque,” Martinez said.
Gleassner, now a successful artist in New York, is excited to show her work at Trinity, her alma mater.
“It’s really interesting to come back to a time and place when I didn’t know where or who I would be. And pretty amazing to be able to reconnect with my teachers who had such a big impact on my life in different ways,” Gleassner said.
Rajgariah expressed similar nostalgia for her college years.
Rajgariah’s inspiration for her pieces in “Threshing Whispers” come from her South Asian background.
“I was painting in Trinity, and then in grad school, I got to University of Illinois Urbana – Champaign, which was very different from Houston, much less San Antonio. I started realizing that a lot of people didn’t know stuff about my culture. And I realized, ‘I grew up differently than these people [in Chicago]’ and that’s when my materials changed. I started using saris, which I initially used at Trinity at my thesis show, but didn’t get any feedback on it. But then I came back back to them. These saris are like self-portraits. So they’re anecdotal and from their titles you can get a bit more insight into what they’re about. Just having fun with materials that hold content, they’re stuff that holds a lot of meaning and it’s the stuff I grew up with. It’s my everyday world,” Rajgariah said.
To check out Glaessner, Rajgariah and Crump’s work, stop by the Dicke-Smith building to see “Threshing Whispers.” The exhibit will run from Feb. 14–21, and the panel with all three artists will be on the final day of the exhibit, Feb. 21.
