I've Learned To Hold Myself Softly: Cali M. Banks

Comprised of 30 images and one film, Banks has created an exhibition with Syracuse as her muse.

She began documenting her hometown of Syracuse in November 2022. When she traveled back to places of importance during my "coming of age" years, she realized many places of both solace and nostalgia have been demolished or abandoned. Banks started to rework this experimental, documentary project with ideas of "teardown towns" and blind tradition. She utilizes self-portraiture, still-lives, and architecture that is specific to Syracuse, and symbolism depicting bodies, ritual, and sensuality, which in turn uses nonverbal communication as a way to emphasize tradition. This project also explores the complexities of layers of existence through materialistic remnants and the essence of non-tangibility. With a rapidly changing hometown as the core of the work, Banks is capturing attention with a familiar setting to the community.

Cali M. Banks: I've Learned to Hold Myself Softly

Cali M. Banks, whose ancestors are both Munsee Lenape and Scottish, recently returned to Syracuse, where she was born and raised. As an artist, Banks has long embraced photography as her medium of choice. Rather than embracing photography’s objective or journalistic qualities, Banks seeks to personalize her work through a combination of alchemical processes and labor-intensive embellishment. The result is a body of work that balances nostalgia, loss, identity, longing, and a sense of community.

UNIQUE by ARISE

Coordinated by ARISE, a non-profit agency based in Syracuse, UNIQUE celebrates the artistic talents of Central New Yorkers living with disabilities. The works included in this exhibition eloquently speak to the myriad thoughts, ideas, and feelings that all humans share, regardless of individual ability or circumstance. The annual competition invites submissions of art and literature which are then selected for display by a panel of judges, and the works are exhibited at the Everson Museum.

Putting Art to Work: Prints of the Works Progress Administration

The Great Depression reached its peak in 1933 when the unemployment rate in the United States plummeted to 20%. The Public Works of Art Project, a relief measure to employ artists, was one of many New Deal initiatives that President Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed into law during his first year in office. In 1935, the program was replaced by the Federal Art Project, which was administered by the Works Progress Administration. Together, the two programs employed more than 10,000 artists and generated an estimated 400,000 paintings, murals, prints, and posters. The Everson Museum of Art (then the Syracuse Museum of Fine Arts) played an important role as Museum Director Anna Wetherill Olmsted oversaw the Central New York region of the Federal Art Project.