JUSTICE Art Contest

The Humanities Center and Landmark Arts in the School of Art present original visual art from TTU graduate students, in a juried exhibition on the Humanities Center's 2019-2020 theme: "Justice." The exhibition will open on February 7, 2020 at the School of Art Satellite Gallery at CASP in the downtown arts district during the First Friday Art Trail. An awards reception will be held just prior, 5 – 6 pm; two works will be selected by a jury of TTU faculty for first- and second-place prizes of $750 and $250 dollars, respectively.

To speak of "Justice" necessarily provokes humanities scholarship's broad goal of making sense of what it means to be human, since acts of injustice so often denigrate the humanity at the heart of that academic inquiry. In line with the Humanities Center's 2019-2020 theme, we sought work that exposes or archives historical or ongoing acts of injustice, or imagines redress for those problems.

The JUSTICE exhibition asks us to consider in visual terms how ethical transgressions and acts of violence turn on our failure to see others' humanity. While news reports and documentary propose the "facts" of injustice, the works gathered here invite us to meditate on those contexts in more expressionistic or imaginary terms. In surreal departures and media iconography, these pieces take us out of the familiar and push us past the discursive. In keeping with the Humanities Center's year-long theme, JUSTICE explores inequality and discrimination on personal, local, and global levels. Moving beyond the binaries of partisan debate, this exhibition returns us to the multifaceted ways that that we might make sense of being human. Ultimately, these works deploy a range of media to evoke threat to our collective humanity that every unjust action constitutes as they also envision hopeful possibilities beyond the world we know.

The Texas Tech School of Art Satellite Gallery at CASP is located at 1106 5th Street in downtown Lubbock.

Landmark Arts exhibitions and speaker programs in the Texas Tech University School of Art are made possible in part with a generous grant from the Helen Jones Foundation of Lubbock. Additional support comes from Cultural Activities Fees administered by the J.T. & Margaret Talkington College of Visual & Performing Arts.