The Collective Wonder of Being There
Painter Lauren R. Lyde on her solo exhibition and the question that guides her artistic practice.
May 3, 2021
Black Artist Research Space sat down with artist + educator Lauren R. Lyde and curator Sheena M. Morrison to discuss their practice and the exhibition, The Collective Wonder of Being There.
“The Collective Wonder of Being There features selections from Dream Chasers, an ongoing series of oil paintings and drawings by Lauren R. Lyde that are informed by one of the perennial questions that guides her artistic practice. Am I a good steward?
Lyde’s Dream Chaser series is intended to evoke an emotional response, a curiosity about and sense of connectedness with her young subjects. She asks viewers to consider the quotidian activities of a child’s day as a point of departure for a broader conversation about how we show up for the young people in our communities.” - Curator, Sheena M. Morrison
The exhibition is on view at Harmony Hall Arts Center in Fort Washington, MD from April 24, 2021 until June 5, 2021.
In observance of public health and safety precautions, the gallery is currently working towards a plan for in-person visits. Please call prior to visiting at: 301-203-6040.
Listen Above as Lauren R. Lyde and Sheena M. morrison discuss the development of the artwork for the exhibition and the intersection of Lyde’s teaching and creative practices
Lyde: Well for me, I find it really gratifying and also intriguing the way my teaching and my practice can come together and how they complement each other, in ways that sometimes I'm not really aware of. But the subjects of my pieces now being children and my life being focused for so many years on kids is just - it's wonderful. I don’t have to reach very far to find inspiration because its a part of my life every day. Some of the stories that the pieces are inspired by are drawn directly from experiences that I've had with the students that I teach. They have appeared in some of my work and their energy just really motivates me to want to create something that will be beneficial to making their lives better.
Morrison: Yeah I mean - you know since the pandemic we have so much time to sit down and and talk about what the future is going to be like and what the world would be like if we don't step up and then be there for kids in the way that they need us to be.
“I find it really gratifying and also intriguing the way my teaching and my practice can come together and how they complement each other. ”
Listen above as Lauren R. Lyde elaborates on the importance of imparting lessons and models of respect + mindfulness when engaging with young people.
Lyde: Older people want to be listened to, children want to be heard. It's important for everybody to have a voice and anyone can be a part of that conversation. And its also important to know how to talk to people. I get teased by my friends at work about the things that I decide to emphasize. With the kids we have community agreements that we all come up with at the beginning of the school year. They often develop into more specific things but for the most part it's a conversation around being respectful to each other and how we're going to treat each other. And I will, in the middle of a lesson, just redirect my attention to somebody who walks in the door and doesn't speak when they come into the classroom because when I grew up, you walk into a room and you say hello to people.
Its just important to be as mindful as you are able about other people's feelings, so that's something that I emphasized in my interactions with [my students] and they model what they receive. So however they’re treated will hopefully show up in the way that they treat other people. You know, simple things like holding doors for people [or] you see something that's on the ground [picking it up]. In the beginning of the school year, the response that you get when you ask somebody “can you pick that up please?” is “I didn’t drop that, that's not mine.” A few weeks in, you now have people competing to pick up that piece of paper that's on the floor, you know, and they want you to see that they picked it up and that they threw in the garbage can and that's great! And those things are celebrated, like that is as celebrated as you got a good grade on your spelling today, you know, that you were considerate. You had a good day because you did something for someone else and you thought about someone else, you enabled somebody else to be able to you know move forward and do something that they needed to do so I think that that's really important.
We are all stewards.
Whether the act of stewardship be demonstrated through offering a helping hand, preparing a warm meal, or simply offering a listening ear - to be a good steward means to hold in regard your fellow human being with care, compassion, and respect. By offering and teaching these virtues, Lyde’s work and practice shapes a community and inevitably a future rooted in total regard for the whole.
With The Collective Wonder of Being There, artist Lauren R. Lyde and curator Sheena M. Morrison remind viewers to recall our communal interconnectedness. In recalling this interconnectedness, viewers are reminded of the act and responsibility of being good stewards.
Image 1: The Environmentalists, 2019, 38” x 48”
Image 2: Impasse, 2021, 30” x 40”
Image 3: The Collective Wonder of Being There, 2021, 24” x 30”