The UMF Emery Community Arts Center announces a new exhibition, The Thinking Hand, from June 21 to September 7. 20

FARMINGTON – The UMF Emery Community Arts Center is excited to announce that it will kick off the summer season with a new art exhibit, “The Thinking Hand.” The exhibition will be on display from June 21 to September 20. An opening reception will be held on Friday, June 21, from 5 p.m. to 7 p.m. The exhibition is free and open to the public. “The Thinking Hand” presents a broad survey of the works of recognized local and national artists, mobilizing the heritage of craft and the poetics of technique and process as methods of material exploration and storytelling.

Celebrating the ethos of creating art “by hand,” this exhibition includes textile arts, woodcuts, artist books, ceramics, frescoes, sculptures, drawings, paintings, stained glass and even more. The selection of works features diverse representations of the body and embodiment, familiar objects presented in new contexts, and works that harness the metaphorical power of unconventional materials. Many works explore the rituals of labor-intensive processes as meditations on nature, time, domestic culture and personal narrative, while others engage new approaches to traditional techniques as the language of activism for environmental and social justice.

The exhibition takes its title from Juhani Pallasmaa’s book, The Thinking Hand: Existential and Embodied Wisdom in Architecture. Throughout this influential text, Pallasmaa analyzes “the essence of the hand and its determining role in the evolution of human skills, intelligence and conceptual abilities” and proposes that, rather than the mind being the center of solitary control of the imagination, “…. perhaps it is the hand that really imagines as it exists in the flesh of the world, the reality of space, matter and time, the very physical condition of the imagined object.

Participating Artists: Cheriese Andrea, Scott Andresen, Diana Baumbach, Layla Billings, Susie Brandt, Diane Bronstein, Kate Buehner, Kristen Case, Katie Delaney, Margarita Fainshtein, Houston Fryer, Sean Paul Gallegos, Cherie Giampietro, Daphne Giampietro, Ronald Gonzalez, Zexuan Jia, Duwenavue Santé Johnson, Juliet Karelsen, Stan Keach, Falcon Laina, Annie Lee-Zimerle, Ryan Lewis, George Lorio, Mary McFarland, Jo-Ann Morgan, Dawn Nye, Jesse Potts, Ellen Roberts, Jan Royall, Barbara Sullivan, Kitty Wales and Brian Zimerle.