Helen S. Smith Gallery

Aisha Harrison: How it's Held

Exhibition running: September 24 - November 8, 2018
Artist Talk and Reception: November 8, noon to 1 p.m.

Aisha Harrison has roots in Olympia, WA going back four generations. She studied abroad in Spain during high school, prompting her to be a Spanish major as an undergraduate. She loved studying Latin American literature because of the ways in which the Indigenous people used Spanish stories and images, subverting them and intertwining them with their own to ensure that Indigenous peoples, images and stories survived. These camouflaged acts of resistance reminded her of ways that she navigates being of African American and European American mixed heritage in predominantly European American spaces. Her work today, as both an artist and arts educator, attempts to navigate the spaces between, centering through making things with your hands, to create personal symbolic imagery, and to encourage others to subvert dominant narratives by telling their stories in hidden and/or overt ways.

^{Through |wood, ink | 2017 | 12"x18"}

^{Privilege | paper, ink | 2017 | 6"x8"}

^{Through II | ceramic, embroidery floss, graphite | 2018 | 15"x18"x10"}