Collection: "The Shape We're in Feels Like the Colors of Hope" organized by Cynthia Branvall (online exhibition)

About the Exhibition

It was a pleasure to spend time with the creative expressions of all the NIAD artists. The range of materials, methods, shapes, and colors are deeply evocative of the complexity of the times we are living in.

Many of the works I selected spoke to me of self-reflection, intuition, emotion, and possibility. Other works resonated as the shapes and paths that lead to connection, belonging, and a return to each other. Colors dance through the artworks saturating each composition with joy.

What a treat to see a paper weight of Africa rendered as the color of lemons, daffodils, corn, and sunshine.

Thank you for sharing your art and taking me on a journey of looking inward and looking out with a smile and a heart filled with gratitude and hope. The artworks selected for this exhibition remind me to look for the joy and hope will appear.

About the Organizer

Cynthia Brannvall is an art historian and a multi-media and interdisciplinary artist who teaches art history at Foothill Community College. An advocate and ally for social justice and equity, Cynthia’s artwork explores identity formation envisioned in an imagined deep time terrain of memory, reclamation, and the geographies of forced and voluntary migrations of body and spirit. Her artwork has selected for juried group exhibitions in the San Francisco Bay Area, San Luis Obispo, Los Angeles, New Orleans and Washington DC. Cynthia was selected for the 2022-2023 Emerging Artist’s Program at the Museum of African Diaspora in San Francisco where she had her first solo exhibition March 29-June 12, 2022.