Exploring Personal Stories through Ceremonies of Making
With Camille Hoffman
What is a landscape? Can it speak, feel, and hear as much as a person? Can we create landscapes the same way that we paint portraits? In this three-part workshop series, visitors will work alongside Van Lier Fellow and exhibiting artist Camille Hoffman to develop mixed-media landscapes, writings, and drawings that act as self-portraits. Pulling from personal narratives as well as materials collected from everyday life, participants will use drawing, painting, collage, and storytelling to craft new landscapes that speak to the outside world as much as to our own world within.
The workshop on March 31 will feature a collaboration with esteemed author and poet Sarah Gambito, who will engage participants in a generative exploration of creative writing, bodily kinetics, and art making. Participants will assemble an ekphrastic ceremony that meditates on landscape as a portal to unexpected and co-created narratives.
Camille Hoffman (b. 1987, Chicago) received her BFA in Community Arts and Painting from California College of the Arts in 2009 and her MFA in Painting and Printmaking from the Yale School of Art in 2015. She has worked for over a decade as an arts educator and community organizer in Phoenix, the San Francisco Bay Area, New Haven, Brooklyn, and Queens. She is a past recipient of the Carol Schlosberg Memorial Prize for excellence in painting from Yale University, a National Endowment for the Arts scholarship, and a Benjamin A. Gilman International Scholarship. Hoffman has shown throughout the United States and in Europe, in exhibitions including Music and Conversation: East of the Wallace Line at the Yale University Art Gallery and MASIVAMENTE at Espai Cultural Biblioteca Azorín in Valencia, Spain, and participated in the Nuit Blanche arts festival in Paris, France. She recently completed a yearlong residency at Queenspace in Long Island City, New York, and is currently artist-in-residence at Wave Hill in the Bronx.
