This exhibition features selections from hundreds of self-taught artworks in the permanent collection of the Baron and Ellin Gordon Art Galleries. With many works made from found and repurposed materials, and with their visual commentary on communities and the hellish costs of social ills, they support the theme of sustainability—social, environmental, and economic—during ODU’s themed semester this fall. The exhibition likewise includes several candidates for future display across campus as public art.
Accompanying the 50 artworks on view are selections of folk and traditional music reflecting communities in areas where the artists have lived and worked. Social inequality and civil rights, spirituality, celebration and poverty, love and death, and longing and protest all are part of the everyday lives expressed here through sight and sound.