Muriel Hasbun: Seismic Traces - Center for Women in the Arts and Humanities

Virtual Exhibit opens Wednesday, October 27, 2021
Curated by Tatiana Flores, Professor, Latino & Caribbean Studies and Art History, Rutgers University

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Introduction

The Center for Women in the Arts and Humanities is pleased to present the virtual exhibition, Muriel Hasbun: Seismic Traces. Born in El Salvador to a Salvadoran-Palestinian-Christian father and a French-Polish-Jewish mother, artist and educator Muriel Hasbun addresses migration, cultural identity, displacement, memory and her unique family history throughout her work. Muriel Hasbun: Seismic Traces includes selections of photographs from various series which meditate on the artist’s life and that of her parents. Hasbun’s grandfather migrated from Palestine to El Salvador in the early 20th century, and her family formed part of an expatriate community seen as foreigners even after multiple generations. Her mother, Janine Janowski, was a French Jew whose family fled to Paris from Poland and during World War II, hid in the Auvergne region of France, until the end of the war. Many of her relatives died in the Holocaust and others migrated to Israel, where the family reunited almost half a century later. Janowski herself traveled to El Salvador as a young woman and there met and married Hasbun’s father. She opened a gallery—el laberinto—which was an important cultural space in San Salvador during the years of the Civil War (1980-1992), an armed conflict between a U.S.-backed military government and left-leaning guerillas.

The exhibition’s title, Seismic Traces, refers not only to Hasbun’s latest series – Pulse: New Cultural Registers / Pulso: Nuevos registros culturales (2020), but also to the turbulence of the process of migration itself and to the medium of photography. The artist’s own memories and experiences as well as her family’s and country’s histories invite reflection from the spectators on the stories that comprise their own identities.

Muriel Hasbun is a Professor Emerita of Photography at the Corcoran School of the Arts & Design at George Washington University and the 2021-2022 Estelle Lebowitz Endowed Visiting Artist at the Center for Women in the Arts and Humanities. The Lebowitz program annually brings to the University community and general public the work and ideas of exceptional women artists through solo exhibitions, lectures, and short campus residencies. Her work is represented by RoFa Projects. An online catalog featuring an essay by Dr. Erina Duganne, Professor of Art History at Texas State University, will be published in December 2021. Hasbun will be featured in Art for the Future: Artists Call and Central American Solidarities, a major exhibition curated by Erina Duganne and Abigail Satinsky for the Tufts University Art Galleries in 2022.

Muriel Hasbun’s work has been internationally exhibited and is in private and public collections: American University Museum, Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Centro de la Imagen, Civilian Art Projects, Corcoran Gallery of Art, FotoFest, Lehigh University, Light Work, Maier Museum of Art, Mexican Cultural Institute, Museo del Barrio, Museum of Photographic Art, Rencontres de la Photographie, Smithsonian American Art Museum, University of Texas-Austin, Whitney Museum, 50th Venice Biennale. Her awards and distinctions include: Trawick and Sondheim Finalist; CENTER Santa Fe’s Producer’s and Curator’s Choice, Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship, Howard Chapnick Grant; Maryland State Arts Council Individual Artist Awards in Photography and Media; U.S. Department of State/AAM Museums Connect grant; Artist in Residences at Chataqua/CU Boulder, Centro Cultural de España, El Salvador, and Escuela de Bellas Artes, Mexico; the Corcoran’s Outstanding Creative Research Faculty Award, and a Fulbright Scholar fellowship. Building upon her career as a socially engaged artist and a photography professor, Hasbun is currently the founder and director of laberinto projects, a transnational, cultural memory initiative fostering contemporary art practices, social inclusion and dialogue in El Salvador and its U.S. diaspora.

murielhasbun.com

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* Muriel Hasbun: Seismic Traces is also on view from September 1, 2021 – April 8, 2022, in the Mary H. Dana Women Artists Series Galleries, Douglass Library. The Mary H. Dana Women Artists Series is a program of CWAH in partnership with Rutgers University Libraries. It is the oldest continuous running exhibition space in the United States dedicated to making visible the work of emerging and established contemporary women artists.

VENUE INFORMATION
The Mary H. Dana Women Artists Series Galleries are located in the Mabel Smith Douglass Library (8 Chapel Drive, New Brunswick, NJ 08901). The galleries are free. Hours are Monday through Friday 9am – 6pm and are subject to the university libraries operating schedule. *Rutgers University Libraries are currently only open to the Rutgers Community. Further information about the exhibition, event, accessibility services, and parking can be found at cwah.rutgers.edu. Please direct all inquiries to: womenart@cwah.rutgers.edu.

SPONSORS
The exhibition and event are funded by the Estelle Lebowitz Memorial Fund, endowed in 1999 by Professor Joel Lebowitz, Director of the Center for Mathematical Sciences Research, Rutgers University, in honor of his late wife, artist Estelle Lebowitz.
Co-sponsors: Center for Latin American Studies, Department of Art & Design, Department of Art History, Douglass Residential College, Institute for Women’s Leadership. Part of the 2021-2022 CWAH Virtual Series.