Photos by Sophia Kim and Angel Guo/The Choate News
The exhibition displays works by Mr. Lustenader, Ms. Sen, and Ms. Adams, respectively.
Mr. Willard Lustenader
When Mr. Willard Lustenader, an Art History Professor at Gateway Community College, sits down to paint, he doesn’t have a plan. Instead, he lets his inspiration and creativity take control of the artistic process. During his time as an artist, Mr. Lustenader has focused on both realism and abstraction. Completed between 2018 and 2019, the series that is currently on display in the PMAC, employs a type of abstraction — the color field painting. This type of art primarily focuses on the “relationship between the color and patterns and subtlety of the surface.” Color has always been an essential means of expression for Mr. Lustenader, no matter the style of art. With this project, color is particularly important because of how it appears on flat surfaces. “It hits you in a very different way than if it’s a reflective object,” he said. As a general theme for this series, Mr. Lustenader dealt with ideas of containment and the vibration between edges. He hopes that his art is interpretive and viewers will connect the pieces to their own lives. “These are subjective pictures,” he said. “You interpret in your own way, and certain pictures hit certain nerves.” Ultimately, the intentions or themes behind Mr. Lustenader’s work are separate from the viewer’s takeaway. “What the painter thinks really has nothing to do with the experience of the viewer, in this case.”
Ms. Smita Sen
Ms. Smita Sen, a Visual Arts teacher at Choate, also participated in the exhibition with her installation focused on caregiving, the body, and illness. Ms. Sen titled this collection “Manipura” after the chakra, a Hindu energy point of the same name, and has been working on these pieces for three years, with her first installation displayed in 2018. “I have a background as a dancer, so my work is always about how ephemeral the body is and how it changes,” said Ms. Sen. In this particular piece, she is exploring caregiving. “It’s about creating a healing space that cares for the people who walk into it, and also a space to acknowledge grief and loss, and the transformations that take place in those spaces.” Ms. Sen uses color to convey themes in her work. “I’ll do an entire series of works that focus on a single color,” she said. Her most recent series focuses on yellow, the color that correlates with the Manipura chakra located at the navel. “The Manipura Chakra is where a lot of your strength comes from,” she said. “This strength is necessary for the demanding task of caregiving, where one has full responsibility for another person’s physical, mental, and emotional needs.” Ms. Sen drew on her personal experience of caring for her late father when formulating this concept. On the viewer’s experience, Ms. Sen said, “I want [the viewer] to feel a sense of peace. I want them to think about something beyond the things we do every day.”
Ms. Catherine Adams
Inspired by the Covid-19 pandemic, Choate Art Teacher Ms. Catherine Adams created a series of works to explore loneliness and the sense of belonging. “This body of work has a theme that runs through it, but I didn’t have that intention going into it,” said Ms. Adams. “The theme is all about location, a sense of place, and I think it is a reaction to the isolation over the past year or so.” Ms. Adams developed her work during the pandemic, with certain periods being more productive than others. For some pieces, “I knew what I needed to do to get my message across,” she said. “Others were more laborious, where I had to spend time revisiting whether I was being effective.” Her drawings are all black and white, and the absence of color “removes the potential of getting attracted to something that doesn’t warrant the viewer’s attention,” she said. While creating these pieces, Ms. Adams had no intention of sharing them with a wide audience. “It’s definitely interpersonal work. This artwork is a vehicle for processing.” However, she enjoyed sharing work with others, especially her students. “I feel so lucky that the people I got to show this first to were my students — viewing it with them is an added bonus.”
