The Silva Gallery of Art at The Pennington School is set to feature “Project 562: Changing the Way We See Native America,” an exhibition by acclaimed portrait photographer and social documentarian Matika Wilbur, from February 17 through March 9, 2016. An artists reception will be held on Tuesday, March 1, from 6 to 8 p.m. with a talk at 7 p.m. The Silva Gallery is located on the School’s campus at 112 West Delaware Avenue, Pennington.
A member of the Swinomish and Tulalip Tribes of the Pacific Northwest, Matika Wilbur has exhibited extensively in regional, national, and international venues such as the Seattle Art Museum, the Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture, the Tacoma Art Museum, the Royal British Columbia Museum of Fine Arts and the Nantes Museum of Fine Arts, France.
Wilbur has been on the road since 2012, working on Project 562, which aims to photograph citizens of each federally recognized tribe with the goal of shifting the collective consciousness toward recognizing America’s indigenous communities. A little over three years into this five-year project, Wilbur has photographed over 250 tribes, presenting the striking diversity and details of contemporary Indian identity. The tribes have shared with her both communal and personal narratives in a range of landscapes. Receiving welcome from sovereign North American indigenous peoples on their own lands, Wilbur has come to believe that Indian identity is inextricably linked to native lands. The exhibition features 24 images selected from Wilbur’s Natural Wanderment series.
Aligning with The Pennington School’s educational commitment to grapple with social justice issues, Wilbur’s visit is part of Pennington’s Stephen Crane Lecture Series. The Stephen Crane Lecture Series commemorates the author of The Red Badge of Courage, who was a student at Pennington in the 1880s and whose father was headmaster of the School from 1849 to 1858. The series invites prominent authors, artists, or public figures to speak or perform on the campus. Among the recent lecturers taking part are Arun Gandhi, grandson of Mohandas K. “Mahatma” Gandhi; Daniel R. Porterfield, president of Franklin & Marshall College; Kevin Bales, noted scholar on slavery in the world today; former U.S. Senator Rudy Boschwitz, Pennington Class of 1947; philanthropist and former NBA star Dikembe Mutombo; and French ambassador Jean-David Levitte.
For information about the Stephen Crane Lecture Series, contact Director of Speaker Programming Amelia Becker at abecker@pennington.org.
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