Event Dates

April 7 - May 21, 2017

108|Contemporary, in partnership with the Oklahoma Center for the Humanities at The University of Tulsa, presents Steeped: The Art of Tea. This exhibition aims to look at the past, present, and future of tea as well as the way this distinctive drink has shaped our sense of personal, ethnic, and global identity. Some of the themes that this show aims to explore are memory, community, relationship building, reinforcement of social development, social status, culture, and ceremony.

Generously supported by The Mervin Bovaird Foundation

 

About the Curators

Anh-Thuy Nguyen is a multi-media artist, whose work spans from photography and video to performance and installation art. Nguyen continuously searches for ways to explore family of origins, identities differences and cultural conflicts, focusing on food and language. Her work has been exhibited internationally and nationally including Texas Biennial (2011), Video Holica International Video Art Festival, Varna, Bulgaria (2012), 2nd Montone International Biennial, Italy (2013), Arizona Biennial (2013) and Tulsa Biennial (2015). Nguyen is 2016-2017 public fellow at Oklahoma Center for Humanities, the University of Tulsa and an Assistant Professor of Photography at Rogers State University in Claremore, OK.

Janet Hasegawa has a doctorate in Psychology and was a pediatric psychologist on the faculty of the University of Colorado Health Sciences Center for several years before pursuing her interests in art after moving to Tulsa in 1991. She studied ceramics for four years with Tom Manhart at the University of Tulsa with a particular emphasis in Japanese ceramics and aesthetics. She continues to be interested in the interface between individual psychology, culture, and art within the community.

About the Oklahoma Center for the Humanities

Each year, The Oklahoma Center for the Humanities at The University of Tulsa draws on a single theme in order to generate a shared community conversation about the role the arts and humanities play in our personal, social, and civic lives. In 2016-17, the Center is exploring food. The manifold ways we grow, prepare, regulate, and share what we eat gives shape to identities both cultural and political, ethnic and national. Our kitchens are social sites where tradition mixes with innovation amid a now global flow of ingredients, tastes, and techniques. The language of food, furthermore, shapes the very ways we write and speak about ourselves: taste and hunger, consumption and starvation—such words borrow the rituals of the table to describe our pleasure, desire, and pain. Food, in short, is an essential element of the human condition and the Center will explore its human dimensions through a diverse array of programs including concerts, performances, film screenings, exhibitions, discussions, lectures, cooking demonstrations, and shared meals.