Colette Gaiter Exhibits Images from Cuba at Rose Lehrman Art Gallery

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Dec. 17, 2009

HARRISBURG – “This is not Cuba,” digital images by artist Colette Gaiter, will be on display Jan. 13-Feb. 5 at HACC’s Rose Lehrman Art Gallery on the Harrisburg Campus of HACC, Central Pennsylvania’s Community College.

Colette Gaiter, a new media artist and graphic designer, is an associate professor in the art department at the University of Delaware.

Gaiter first went to Cuba in June of 2007 through Global Exchange, which organizes legal educational delegations from the U.S. About her work, she says: “I am not a photographer. I use photography as documentation. Parallel to the way that public advertising reinforces our American values, the revolutionary slogans that proliferate in Cuba remind everyone of what should be important. In addition to public messages, I photographed objects,

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people, images, and events that made an impression on my African American female world view.” Gaiter combines and juxtaposes images within a single work in an attempt to understand a culture that is ideologically the polar opposite of her own.

Working with computers since 1982, Gaiter uses a range of digital media to create environments for exploring – and exploding – personal and collective myths. She is especially interested in the American 1960s—a time of turbulence, hope, and change played out in mass media. Her works (CD ROMs, DVDs, web sites, installations, and print works) combine images, text, sound, animation, video, and interactivity to reconsider recent history.

Gaiter has exhibited multimedia works internationally in SIGGRAPH (Association for Computing Machinery's Special Interest Group on Graphics and Interactive Techniques) and ISEA (International Symposium on Electronic Art) exhibitions. Her work has also been shown at The Studio Museum in Harlem, Contemporary Arts Museum of Houston, Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia, and in numerous galleries, museums and public institutions in the United States. Spanning multiple media, her work ranges from digital prints and artist books to web sites and interactive installations. Her essay on the work of Emory Douglas, artist for the Black Panther Party, is published in the Rizzoli monograph, Black Panther: The Revolutionary Art of Emory Douglas. (New York: Rizzoli, 2007).

Colette Gaiter has a bachelor’s degree in fine arts and graphic design from Carnegie-Mellon University in Pittsburgh and an master’s degree from Hamline University in St. Paul, Minn. She has worked as a graphic designer in Pittsburgh, Washington, DC, and New York City and taught at the Minneapolis College of Art, Columbia College in Chicago, and the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, before joining the art faculty at University of Delaware.

A lecture by Gaiter is scheduled for noon Thursday, Jan. 21, in Whitaker Hall room 214.

A reception in the Rose Lehrman Arts Center follows, 1 – 2 p.m. These events are free and open to the public.

Fall gallery hours are 11 a.m.-3 p.m. Monday-Friday, 5-7 p.m. Tuesdays and Thursdays or by appointment. For more information, call 780-2435 or e-mail Kim Banister, gallery curator, at kebanist@hacc.edu. Visit the gallery on the HACC website: www.hacc.edu under the Rose Lehrman Arts Center and on Facebook.

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