Years ago, Portland-based artist Kathan Zerzan inherited her late father’s posters. But they weren’t the kinds of posters you’d get from music stores or movie theaters.
The posters were from Jordan. In the ‘60s, she says, her father spent six months in Amman, Jordan’s capital, serving in the U.S. military. During his service, he sent home posters of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre and other holy sites. He never framed them.
Zerzan says her father’s time in Jordan was one of the most memorable parts of her childhood. And when the family later moved around for his job, so too did the unframed posters move with them.
Today, the posters, now framed, live in Portland — and soon, the posters will find a temporary home on The Bluff.
Zerzan’s exhibit “Greetings from Palestine” will run Nov. 3 to 26 in the Buckley Center Art Gallery. The exhibit, sponsored by the Garaventa Center, will feature Zerzan’s charcoal drawings combined with her father’s vintage posters.
On Nov. 3, the Garaventa Center will also host an exhibit reception with Zerzan from 6:30-8 p.m. in the gallery. The exhibit and reception are free and open to all.
In addition to showing her father’s posters in the exhibit, Zerzan is also including pieces from a 2001 installation called “NOW.” One returning piece includes New York Times coverage of a Palestinian refugee camp.
Zerzan says the art’s focus on the Palestinian territories and local holy sites highlights the current destruction of Gaza.
“[The art] gives the sense that all these holy sites and everything, that was occupied Palestine, and so much of that is in Gaza and is now rubble,” Zerzan said. “Just rubble.”
Prior to the gallery reception on Nov. 3, from 5-6:30 p.m., the Garaventa Center is collaborating with Constructive Dialogues to screen and discuss the film “Arab and Jew: Return to the Promised Land.” The event will take place in the Brian Doyle Auditorium and is open to students, faculty and staff.
Complimentary copies of the novel “Apeirogon” by Colum McCann, about two fathers affected by the Israel-Palestine conflict, will be available at the art reception and film screening.
For Anne Santiago, Dundon-Berchtold faculty fellow for constructive dialogues, illustrating the Israeli-Palestinian conflict through the different mediums of art, film and novel will provide the campus community with many ways of thinking about the conflict.
“[The film is] kind of a nice corollary since this art exhibit is going to be up to just have another way of understanding what the region means to different people,” Santiago said. “I think it’s a nice connective tissue and just really to help students get more informed.”
And just as film tells a story, so, too, can art. Garaventa Center Co-director Shannon Mayer says art is another kind of conversation between the artist and their canvas.
Mayer adds that she finds the upcoming exhibit tells a story most within the relationship between Zerzan’s charcoal drawings and her father’s posters.
“I liked the idea of two sides of the exhibit being in conversation with each other, the kind of juxtaposition of [this] sort of idyllic setting from the 1960s contrasted with the situation now,” Mayer said.
But Zerzan says she wants to leave it up to the viewers to decide what kind of meaning lies within her canvases.
For Zerzan, fostering genuine discussion among viewers is one of her goals — as opposed to telling people what to think about her art.
“I’m trying not to give a message,” Zerzan said. “I’m trying to have people look and contemplate and think about what they’re saying … If I have a message, I’ll give a speech.”
Part of how she avoids telling viewers what to think is through her use of minimal titles or art explanations. Additionally, Zerzan describes her work as “abstract.”
“I don’t know the locations of those [posters],” Zerzan said. “I know memories, like there’s one picture, a lovely peaceful picture of a rowboat in a river. And I remember my father saying, ‘This is the Jordan river’ and ‘This is where St. John the Baptist baptized Jesus.’”
Ultimately, while Zerzan isn’t seeking any specific reaction to her work, she does hope that students walking past the exhibit on their way to class will pause to consider the art.
She says now more than ever is the time to think about what we are seeing, whether that be art or the news, and to work towards cooperative solutions.
“Right now, it is so important that people start facing each other and talking and working for mutual aid and cooperation on the problems we’re facing,” Zerzan said.
Camille Kuroiwa-Lewis is the Editor-in-Chief of The Beacon. She can be reached at kuroiwal26@up.edu.
