¹ú²úAV

January 24 - March 26, 2022

See Syd Carpenter and Jack Larimore's public art piece on campus in the Chamberland Student Center. , State of the Arts

Syd Carpenter identifies and honors African American farmers and gardeners with her new series, Farm Bowls. By integrating the universal form of a stoneware bowl with architectural and organic forms observed on farms, Carpenter creates emblems of the African American experience and their connection to the land.

The bowl is a universal form that can serve as a ritualistic object, or as a common utilitarian tool. It may rest comfortably in the palm of a hand, or extend expansively as a receptacle. Farm animals, tools, eggs, barns and fences populate the rims and inner recesses of the bowl while the color personifies the land and the skin-tone of the farmers and gardeners that she visited in the South. Several bowls include the shape of the human brain as a supporting base to represent the seed with the bowl as the fruit.

Carpenter is a gardener herself, having grown up in a family of gardeners. She pays homage to her early influences and her mother Ernestine Carpenter through her Mother Pin series. The wood clothespin resembles an idealized female form with its graceful, upright, curvilinear shape. By locating the clothespin in different environments such as swirling water, or decorated with beans or plant forms, the pins become simultaneously mythical and familiar.

Exhibition catalog

, The Philadelphia Inquirer

, Culture Type 

, Artblog

, Discover Jersey Arts

, The Whit

Honoring the Land

A special program was presented on Tuesday, February 22, 2022 featuring Syd Carpenter and South Jersey farmers and food activists of color. For more infomation: Honoring the Land