Calendar

On Tuesday September 13, 2022, Aaron Wilder, Curator of Collections and Exhibitions at the Roswell Museum, will moderate a discussion with artists Nicole Anona Banowetz and Ranu Mukherjee.  (register here)

Denver-based artist Nicole Anona Banowetz uses thread and a range of fabrics to create inflatable and stuffed forms. Receiving a BFA in sculpture in 2004 from Colorado State University, she works in the fields of education, design, installation, and sculpture. Banowetz’s work is inspired by the creatures of planet Earth, particularly microscopic forms including bacteria, fungi, and viruses. Her observations of these real-life forms are jumping off points for imagining new creatures. Banowetz playfully manipulates scale and color in her forms to call into question our actual and symbolic relationships to these non-human forms of life that make up important components of our planet’s ecosystem.

The work of interdisciplinary artist Ranu Mukherjee is intensely layered. Resolutely combining mediums into hybrid forms, she employs installation, painting, and video. Inspired by histories of Black feminist science fiction, collage, Indian mythological prints from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Mukherjee’s projects consider the possibility of multiple futures. Guided by forces of diaspora and migration, ecology, non-human agency, and transnational feminisms as well as the experience of motherhood, she explores the possibility of constructing new imaginative faculties from experiences of disruption and desire. The realm of speculative fiction has proved particularly generative for Mukherjee’s recent works charting a course from historic and present crises to possible futures of healing.