The trope of family dinners as insight into a family’s life is old and entrenched in American culture. A nuclear family, fashionably dressed, smiling over Thanksgiving meals; or a silent table, dimly lit, seats empty. This widely known stereotype provides an avenue into examining modern family life and dynamics, and thus an avenue into the conditions of modern life. The world tangles in ways that are often more complicated than they’ve been before, and families can be either a bedrock, a buffer, or support; or they can be the very thing that exacerbates the problem. Language, identity, loss, memory, longing, support, and love all tangle together, often in unprecedented ways.
In this show, we examine how families inform who we are, and what we want. Through a wide variety of approaches — photography, print, drawing, painting — we demonstrate the many different types of family units and dynamics. Yet despite our differences, we each address the same questions: How do we maintain our relationships? Should we maintain them? What, exactly, does it mean to be a family? Who are we in public, and who are we in private? These are concerns that we must ask ourselves now, and that we must keep asking, for as long as we want to have family.
Curated by: Briana McLaurin, Suyang Gong, Elizabeth Calderone, Flynn Forester, and Jiaqi Wu