Who Am I in This Picture?: Amherst College Portraits
Brett Cook & Wendy Ewald
Amherst Press, 2009
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About the Book
Wendy Ewald has collaborated with children and adults around the world for forty years, encouraging them to use cameras to create self-portraits and articulate their fantasies and dreams. In this new public art project Ewald partners with painter Brett Cook to lead the Amherst College campus in exploring the meaning of community and learning. Cook engages in public art projects which often involve teaching workshops along with making music and food. In this project Ewald and Cook work with eighteen Amherst students, faculty, and staff to probe perceptions (and misperceptions) that hold different campus constituencies apart—and to discover the experiences, beliefs and human qualities that connect them.
The result, Who Am I in This Picture? comprises six 12′ x 30′ portrait-triptychs installed around campus. Nine of the portraits were collaboratively created paintings, and nine were photographs; each includes quotes from interviews Ewald and Cook conducted with the sitters. The collaborative process is documented with photographs, interviews with the participants, and illustrations of the completed works. Richard Powell s essay discusses the artists work in the framework of portraiture; Declan McGonagle situates the project in the context of collaborative art; and Rhonda Cobham-Sander writes about education at the beginning of the 21st century. Why this project is special, unique: The catalog reveals how an American institution, in particular an academic institution, functions at the beginning of the 21st century and examines how an artistic/community collaboration can work.