NEWS

Louisiana Tech’s Bellocq Gallery is hosting work created by Erica Harris, a collage artist from Brooklyn New York. The show will run through to Thursday, Dec. 3.

Harris graduated with a bachelor of fine arts in painting and drawing from the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 1993. Since then, she has travelled the globe teaching art to children.

“In recent years I have facilitated projects in Macedonia, El Salvador, Brazil, Myanmar, Laos and Brooklyn,” Harris said. “These settings have had a profound influence on my work, and the collaborations with children have been extremely rewarding exchanges. I learn as much, if not more, from looking at children’s art and talking with them about their process and ideas as I do from the museums and galleries of New York.”

Harris has participated in numerous artist residencies, and she will travel to Varanasi, India, in 2010 for a six-week residency. She creates collages with materials collected from her travels.

“In these countries that have been so damaged by years of war and poverty, I became fascinated by how everyday experiences and ordinary objects related to destruction, chaos, immigration, survival and loss,” she said. “Something very mundane and ordinary could be a symbol of safety, shelter or peace, while simultaneously being a relic of war.

“Combining discarded materials to make these narratives, such as a schoolgirl with a dress quilted from teabags, or a portrait of a woman with a crushed eggshell shawl, is like creating a shrine, or providing a sanctuary for people, places and objects that need mending.”

The Louisiana Tech University Art Galleries are located in the Visual Arts Center between Tech Drive and Mayfield Street, next to the Natatorium, and across from A.E. Phillips School. The galleries are open weekdays from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. and admission is free. For more information call the School of Art at (318) 257-3909.

Written by Judith Roberts